POT AND VOUCHERS

HOWEVER slighted Americans may have felt about the most visible bit of
the election, they got the chance to influence policy more directly at
the local level. In 42 states, 204 ballot initiatives offered voters
tough choices on a wide array of issues. In the past few years,
initiatives have become increasingly popular; but voters seem to use
them for modest experimentation, rather than anything radical.

Marijuana, a hardy perennial on the ballot, was approved for medical
use in Colorado and Nevada, but a proposal for full-scale legalisation
of pot in Alaska (where medical marijuana is already legal) fell well
short of passing. In Oregon and Utah voters approved initiatives to
reform asset-forfeiture laws, which often apply in drug cases. The new
measures require that governments prove a defendant's guilt, rather
than merely show suspicion, before confiscating his property.
Californians voted, by a large margin, to mandate treatment rather
than prison for non-violent drug offenders, but voters in
Massachusetts narrowly rejected a similar initiative.

The general success of these measures owes much to the efforts, and
cash, of George Soros, John Sperling and Peter Lewis, the well-heeled
triumvirate who are trying to suggest alternatives to America's failed
war on drugs. In the past four years, Mr Soros and friends have helped
pass medical-marijuana referendums in seven states and the District of
Columbia. America remains overwhelmingly spliff-unfriendly.

Various civil-liberties issues on the ballots also yielded mixed
results. Coloradans voted down a measure that would have required a
24-hour waiting period for abortions, but passed an initiative
requiring background checks for firearms purchases at gun shows (as
did Oregonians). By a very slim margin, Mainers rejected a proposal to
make doctor-assisted suicide legal, leaving Oregon, which passed a
similar measure in 1998, the only state in the union with a
right-to-die law on the books. Finally, in Alabama, voters got round
to doing away with their state constitution's ban on interracial
marriage (though not without reluctance; around 40% of Alabamians
voted to keep the law, which is unconstitutional under the 14th amendment).

Gay-rights advocates lost a few battles in this batch of initiatives.
Nebraskans and Nevadans voted overwhelmingly in favour of measures
banning same-sex marriage, and Mainers declined to ratify a bill that
would have granted protections against discrimination on the basis of
sexual orientation. However, in Oregon, a slim majority voted not to
prohibit schools from encouraging, promoting or sanctioning
homosexuality.

Animals seem to have fared only slightly better. Washington voters
banned the use of cruel traps and certain kinds of poisons on
wildlife, but Oregonians, despite the efforts of the Humane Society,
rejected the same measure. In Massachusetts, a proposal to ban
dog-racing died by a short head.

Education is a favourite subject for ballot measures, and two attempts
to introduce school vouchers both failed, a well-funded but
over-ambitious one in California and a less heavily promoted but more
modest one in Michigan. Plutocrats, who favoured vouchers, and the
teachers' unions, who didn't, spent more than $60m on the two
contests. Another education measure opposed by the teachers' unions
had more luck, when Ron Unz, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who two
years ago successfully persuaded Californians to reject bilingual
education, pulled off the same trick in Arizona. And Californians made
it easier to raise money for new schools by lowering the majority
required to introduce school bonds.

States addressed a hodgepodge of other issues as well. In several
states, voters gave themselves different kinds of tax relief, and
South Carolinians and South Dakotans voted against a ban on video
lotteries. Several states also voted on how precisely to divide the
spoils of tobacco settlements.

Not all the referendums that passed may seamlessly blend into the
states' laws, of course. The anti-gay-rights measures, for example,
will surely face a barrage of legal challenges, as similar laws have
done in recent years; for the time being, they heighten the
disparities in gay rights across state lines. (Since July, for
example, Vermont has recognised civil unions between same-sex couples;
nowhere else has.) And the federal government will probably find ways
to contest the Soros-sponsored drug-reform measures, as it has done
already in medical-marijuana states like California.

Yet even legally stillborn initiatives can spawn interesting policy
debates. Conflicting gay-rights laws may force decisive litigation on
the matter, for example, and a battle between the states and the
federal government over drug laws may be just the spark that is needed
for a long-overdue national dialogue on the drug war.

Many observers argue that ballot initiatives are merely a crude tool
for moneyed interests to circumvent deliberative democracy. This may
be true, but the direct referendum has become a fixture of
election-year politics nevertheless. And given voters' willingness to
experiment with novel policies, and their record of relative restraint
in doing so, that cannot be all bad. How the ballot initiatives went