Wow. Nice work Grant.

I find grant's work to be shoddy and poorly researched.

Sincerely,

Dennis Falk

Initiatives are primarily a western state phenomena initially conceived as a way to prevent large corporations, trusts and well financed special interests from owning the early "wild west" governments.

Ah yes, the law of unintended consequences. The special interests have grabbed hold of the initiatives process and are using it for their own benefit.

In a world without initiatives, legislation is vetted, both sides negotiate, and a decent (but usually not perfect) piece of legislation is produced. If the voters feel they are consistently getting a raw deal, they simply vote out their representatives and put in place new ones. Legislators have some accountability in this whole process. The school board in PA voted out over their intelligent design decisions is a great example of this.

Many states in the western half of the US (as well as a couple eastern states) have decided they want to frequently exercise the option of direct democracy. Unfortunately, this means special interests don’t have to go through the legislative process. If they aren’t getting 100% their way, they simple invoke the initiative process. The public gets to vote on a single side’s version of the bill, with only a yes or no choice. No other input or considerations are involved. Lawmakers are no longer held accountable.

Now, the average person on the street may argue that the initiative process is too valuable to give up. They like that they perceive a direct say in the process. They say that the local and state governments aren’t effective so they need to be overruled on occasion.

I don’t buy any of those arguments. If you don’t like what your state or local governments are doing, replace them. Don’t allow special interests to do a run around the negotiation process by paying a bunch of signature gathers to get an initiative on the ballot.

At a minimum, much heavier burdens need to be placed on the initiative system.

Here is a change that would address his concerns but still preserve the ability of the people to force an issue: instead of being voted on by the people, an initiative would place bill before the legislature on which they must take a vote within 30 days. This would force politicians to take a stand on issues that are important to the people, but allow them the possibility of tweaking the bill, if they thought the tweak important enough that they were willing to take the rap for messing with the language proposed by the people.