GUNS AND GRASS VIE FOR VOTERS' APPROVAL

LOS ANGELES - What's an American election if dope isn't on the
ballot? Or guns? Or race?
In addition to choosing a new president, assorted legislators and a
host of public officials, many Americans on Tuesday will be asked to
vote on a range of questions from government spending to neighbours'
lifestyles.

The list of choices far outnumbers anything Canadians will see at the
ballot booth Nov. 27.

There are more than 200 of these mini-referendums on ballots in 42
states.

Some are fun: Measure G (for good stuff?) in Mendocino County, north
of Los Angeles, would let adults grow marijuana for personal use.

Some tap gamblers: Massachusetts considers a ban on greyhound racing;
South Dakotans weigh a ban on video lotteries. Five states vote on
expanding gambling.

Some are life and death: Maine votes on doctor-assisted suicide
(rejected in Michigan in 1998 but approved in Oregon in 1994 and
reaffirmed in 1997).

In the aftermath of the Columbine massacre, Colorado voters are asked
to support tougher controls on gun shows. In North Dakota, a
constitutional amendment would affirm hunting as part of that state's
heritage.

In Alabama, voters are asked to remove the section of the state
constitution that since 1901 has banned intermarriage between whites
and "a descendant of a Negro." (When South Carolina trashed a similar
ban in 1998, 40 per cent of voters wanted to keep it even though the
U.S. Supreme Court has ruled such bans illegal.)

Thirty-five per cent of the questions on ballots are placed there by
citizens' initiatives the "most democratic measure of democracy," as
some call it. The practice started in South Dakota in 1898 and has
spread to half the states.

"It has given the United States something that seems unthinkable-not a
government of laws but laws without government," journalist David Broder
writes in his new book, Democracy Derailed: Initiative Campaigns And The
Power Of Money.

While some initiatives are truly citizen-inspired Alaskans will decide
Tuesday whether marijuana should be legalized and regulated like
alcohol few spring from the grassroots any more. It's too expensive.

Initiatives are a multi-million-dollar business, mostly because states
won't put a question on the ballot without petitions signed by a large
number of voters.

Here in California, the queen of the initiative process, it takes
500,000 to 1 million signatures to get on the ballot.

Because there's usually a time limit of five months to collect those
names, anyone promoting a ballot initiative usually hires professional
signature-seekers. And none of these firms will accept a contract for
less than $1 million.

This year, special-interest groups and two Silicon Valley
multi-millionaires have spent $120 million on just eight state-wide
ballot questions in California, according to the California Voters
Foundation, a non-profit group that tracks initiatives.

Millions more have been spent in Oregon, where there are 26 questions
on the ballot and the 438-page voter guide outlining pros and cons of
each citizens' initiative and state-sponsored referendum-was so fat
it had to be printed in two volumes.

The California guide is as thick as a magazine. "It's more non-fiction
that the average person reads in an entire year," says Kim Alexander,
who heads the California Voters Foundation. The group's online guide
explains issues more clearly than the state-produced ballot books.

"Californians have a love-hate relationship with initiative
proposals," she says. They are hated because they are often so complex
as to be indecipherable and they are loved because Americans generally
distrust government.

Initiatives often aim not only to change a state's constitution, laws
or fiscal policy (most cut or limit taxes), but also to initiate
reforms (especially in education) and social engineering that
legislators are unwilling to tackle.

A ban on same-sex marriage, for example, is a new ballot trend. Voters
approved bans in California in March and in Alaska and Hawaii in 1998,
and a ban is on the ballot Tuesday in Nebraska and Nevada.

Checking suburban sprawl is a hot topic this year. In San Francisco, a
ballot question would dampen the dot-com explosion that has sent rents
soaring.

While entertaining, those dope questions are a serious attempt to
change national legislation by three rich men who favour treatment
instead of jail for users, and other decriminalization measures.

New York financier George Soros, Arizona philanthropist John Sperling
and Cleveland insurance tycoon Peter Lewis are sponsoring drug-related
initiatives in six states. They won marijuana-as-medicine initiatives
in seven states in the 1990s.

Only about one-third of ballot initiatives pass, Alexander says. Many
fail because they are too complicated or offbeat or because voters
refuse to let a particular interest group dictate public policy.

"You can't get an initiative without money," she says, "but you can't
win an initiative contest only on money."