WRONG WAY: BALLOT INITIATIVES GENERALLY AREN'T HELPFUL

In the world of legislating and governing, plenty of ideas sound good at
first only to show up as flawed upon closer inspection. Take ballot
initiatives. At first blush, the idea of citizens coming together to script
and pass initiatives that address perceived social problems looks like a
winner. The argument goes that city councils, state legislatures and
Congress are so busy playing politics that the resulting gridlock ensures
that nothing gets done. So it falls to average citizens to take the
lawmaking into their own hands.

Unfortunately, it is not that simple. And for a glimpse at how complicated
- - and messy - the act of legislating at the ballot box can be, one need
only look at the experience of states that have gone down that road.
Twenty-seven states allow voter-proposed ballot initiatives, and the
process has been used by both right and left to address all manner of
causes from instituting "official English" to expanding Indian gaming to
legalizing medical marijuana. About half of all ballot initiatives fail,
and even some of those approved are invalidated by the courts or
implemented differently from what voters had in mind.

Exhibit A: California, the state most often credited with starting the
ballot initiative craze. It was Californians who, on June 6, 1978, fired
the first shot in the revolution. That is when over two-thirds of
California voters supported Proposition 13, which lowered the state's
property taxes by over 50 percent. The debate still is raging over whether
Proposition 13 - and its effect on funding public schools - was good or bad
for the state. The verdict is more definitive for what is perhaps the
second most well-known ballot initiative in California history. Proposition
187, passed by voters in 1994, intended to deny social services to illegal
immigrants, but - struck down by the courts - all it did was divide the
population and set race relations back a decade or so.

Texas has resisted jumping on the initiative bandwagon, allowing only
referendums proposed by the Legislature or other elected bodies. But
democracy has not waned. Witness the recent referendum to boost police and
fire pay in Dallas, on which voters had the final say.

There is no shortcut to good government. If voters don't approve of how
representatives advance their concerns, then they have the right to vote
those officials out of office. But what's the point of having those
representatives in place if voters continually try to usurp their
authority? Rather than trying to make an end-run around the process, making
the system work is the wiser course.