Pubdate: Sat, 11 Nov 2000 Source: Economist, The (UK) Edition: U.S. Edition Copyright: 2000 The Economist Newspaper Limited Contact: 111 West 57th Street, New York NY 10019 (US office) Fax: (212) 541 9378 Website: http://www.economist.com/ 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 - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake