THE BALLOT BATTLE INITIATIVES BYPASS TRADITIONAL LAWMAKING

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 4—From Hawaii to Maine, in hundreds of local and state
ballot initiatives, on death and taxes, gays and gambling, on marijuana,
abortion, smoking, campaigning and the right of muskrats to die humanely,
voters made the tough calls Tuesday.

In a process that is circumventing the traditional power of elected
officials, thus spoke the electorate in 1998:

Many like the idea of letting physicians prescribe marijuana to the infirm,
which voters approved in Nevada, Washington and Arizona. But they don't
want doctors to help patients commit suicide in Michigan, even in the land
of Jack Kevorkian. In a snub to the Christian Coalition, the voters told
the government not to interfere with even late-term abortions in Washington
and Colorado.

On the emotional question of fairness, the people in Washington state don't
think women or minorities should be given "preferential treatment" in
hiring and contracts for state jobs, another strike against affirmative
action programs after the passage of a similar measure in California two
years ago.

Americans again showed their environmental bent. Corporate hog farmers were
ordered to clean up their stink in South Dakota and Colorado, while in
Montana, the people told mining companies they cannot use cyanide in gold
mines, thereby halting new projects on the Blackfoot River, famed as a
fly-fishing mecca. Oregon bucked the trend. There, voters rejected limits
on forest clear-cutting.

In California, people believe Indians should be able to run casinos on
tribal lands; that smokers ought to cough up 50 cents a pack in new taxes
to support early childhood development programs; and that using steel-jawed
leg traps to kill muskrats and other varmints is inhumane.

On the political front, the electorates in Massachusetts and Arizona want
to give public money to candidates who agree to limit their campaign
spending and refuse big-money donations. In Oregon, they want to do away
with the ballot box and mail in all the votes. The people asked for term
limits in Idaho and Colorado.

And finally, people in Alaska and Hawaii are not crazy about sanctioning
gay marriages. The Denver Broncos get a new taxpayer-financed stadium. It
will be all right to keep "boats in moats" as floating casinos in Missouri.
And the days of fighting roosters and baiting bears are over in,
respectively, Arizona and Missouri.

This is the new reality of politics and policy in America, where
increasingly the nation's hottest topics are going directly before voters,
whose decisions at the ballot box circumvent the traditional way that laws
get made by elected officials.

There were 61 major statewide initiatives in 16 states, plus hundreds more
referendums and propositions. It appears as if six of every 10 measures
passed, the first time a majority of the initiatives were approved.

"The voters addressed the tough issues that elected officials have been
unwilling to deal with as well as voted down those they weren't quite ready
for," said M. Dane Water, president of the nonpartisan Initiative and
Referendum Institute in Washington. "The people spoke on Election Day and
made it clear they were hungry for true reform."

Proponents of many measures saw in their passing clear signs that voters
wanted to send a message to statehouses and Washington.

Ethan Nadelman, director of the Lindesmith Center, a drug policy group in
New York, pointed to nine measures around the country that either supported
the use of medical marijuana or rejected efforts to recriminalize marijuana
possession, as was the case in Oregon.

"Yesterday's clean sweep of victories for medical marijuana and drug policy
reform herald a new era in the electoral politics of the drug war," said
Nadelman, who also works closely with billionaire George Soros, who has
bankrolled initiatives supporting medical marijuana. "These results
represent a wake-up call to politicians, both those accustomed to engaging
in drug war demagoguery and those who have so far been fearful of proposing
pragmatic alternatives to the war on drugs."

But if the experiment in California is any indication, a vote for medical
marijuana does not mean it will become widely available. Over the past two
years, most of the "healing centers" that sold "prescriptions" of marijuana
to ailing patients and others in California have been closed by federal law
enforcement officials, who maintain that the drug is still illegal and
cannot be distributed. The measures' opponents assert that they are Trojan
horse initiatives designed to loosen the nation's drug laws.

Another measure with potential national repercussions is the decision by
Washington state voters Tuesday to ban racial or gender preferences by the
state. Ward Connerly, a black businessman who led the drive to pass a
similar measure in California in 1996 and championed the Washington
proposition, said he hopes the vote in Washington will push GOP leaders to
embrace the issue.

"With this election, Washingtonians have signaled to the country that the
principle of fairness and equality for all, not just a chosen few, is not
just a California idea -- it's an American value that we can all embrace,"
Connerly said. "The Washington . . . vote demonstrates that the national
movement to end racial and gender preferences has universal appeal."

The measure to effectively end affirmative action in state hiring and
contracts, as well as university enrollment, passed in Washington 58
percent to 42 percent, in a state that is almost 90 percent white. It
passed in much more racially and ethnically diverse California two years
ago 54 percent to 46 percent.

The measure was emotional and hard-fought. National civil rights leaders
Jesse L. Jackson and Julian Bond came to the state to urge voters to keep
affirmative action in place. The state's most popular politician, Gov. Gary
Locke (D), a Chinese American, warned voters that the measure would "hurt
real people." Opponents of the measure pointed out that most of the
beneficiaries were not minorities, but women. Opponents also argued that
when voters were surveyed, they said they'd like to keep affirmative action
outreach programs. However, the way the measure was written, it simply
asked voters to reject "preferences" based on race or gender, the opponents
argued.

After success in Washington state, Connerly plans to push a similar ban in
Michigan, Arizona or Nebraska.

But as is often the case in voter initiatives, the opponents of ending
affirmative action in Washington threatened yesterday to take the issue
before the courts.

California experienced one of the most expensive ballot campaigns in the
nation. Combined, opponents and proponents of Indian gambling spent as much
as $100 million, most of it poured into television ads that were rerun
relentlessly.

The Indian tribes, some of which are transforming their reservations into
glitzy Las Vegas-style casinos, complete with video slot and poker
machines, won handily with 63 percent of the vote. The issue was on the
ballot because Gov. Pete Wilson (R) has maintained that the Las Vegas-style
gambling halls are illegal. But the voters seem to say that gambling is all
right in California, as long as it is restricted to the Indian reservations.

The victory "is the first time that wealthy business interests have not
been allowed to sacrifice the lives of Indians and future Indians to
satisfy their greed," said Anthony Pico, chairman of the Viejas tribe in
San Diego County.

The Indians, however, were not exactly poor themselves. They outspent their
opponent, the Nevada gaming industry, which feared that an increase in
casinos in the Golden State would mean fewer Californians would be willing
to make the trek to Vegas or Reno to lose their money.

Opponents of Indian gambling said today that they also would challenge the
proposition and seek to have it overturned on constitutional grounds. "The
handful of very wealthy gambling tribes that back [the proposition] spent
$70 million to convince voters that they are poor Indians," said Cheryl
Schmit of the citizens' group Stand Up for California. "They cynically
played to the emotions of voters and led them down the path to approving an
initiative they have known for months is blatantly illegal."

In another measure that could spread from California to other states,
Hollywood film maker Rob Reiner and his coalition of movie stars and health
activists appeared ready to declare the narrowest of victories over the
tobacco industry. Californians voted 50.1 percent to 49.9 percent to
support Reiner's measure, which would tax a pack of cigarettes by 50 cents
and use the estimated $750 million annual revenue to fund early childhood
development programs. With about 7 million ballots cast, the measure
appears to have won by 13,214 votes.

The initiative was ravaged for weeks on the airwaves by television
commercials paid for by the tobacco industry, which spent more than $30
million to Reiner and company's $7 million. The industry alleged that the
measure was a regressive tax that would create a huge bureaucracy to spend
the windfall. Many observers of the long-running tobacco wars in the most
anti-nicotine state were surprised at the vote's closeness.

And finally, Newport, Maine sought to outlaw the display of "female breasts
. . . visible from a public way," in a local initiative prompted after a
woman was seen mowing her lawn topless. The voters rejected the
bare-breasted ban. As Maine goes, so goes the nation?