News
Government
Jul. 26, 2002
State Lawmakers Panel Calls Citizen Initiatives Outmoded
DENVER - The 24 states in the nation that allow citizen initiatives should take steps to limit their use or, at the very least, make it harder to get them on the ballot, according to a national report released Thursday by a panel of state lawmakers.
A task force of the National Conference of State Legislatures, which is holding its annual meeting in Denver this week, made 34 recommendations to the two dozen states that have an initiative process.
The task force, however, is not recommending that states lacking such a process adopt one.
"The task force believes that representative democracy is more desirable than the initiative," according to the report, Initiative and Referendum in the 21st Century.
"The disadvantages of the initiative as a tool for policy-making are many, and the opportunities for abuse of the process outweigh its advantages," the report says.
For those states that allow them anyway, the task force recommends first starting with advisory or general policy initiatives and trying to avoid permitting constitutional amendments by citizen initiative, preferring a statutory initiative process instead, said Nebraska Sen. DiAnna Schimek, chairwoman of the task force.
Schimek said that the laws allowing citizen initiatives - including those in California - are outmoded and need reforming.
"Initiatives boil down complex issues into yes or no questions," she said. "They lead people to believe that there are quick fixes to complicated issues."
Other recommendations include requiring more signatures on ballot initiative petitions and requiring higher voter percentages, such as a two-thirds vote, on them before they can become law.
Though citizen initiatives have been in use in some states for more than a century, their use has picked up in the past two decades. Since the 1970s, when 183 initiatives were placed on ballots nationwide, their use has nearly doubled.
As a result, some states have tried to limit their use, including prohibiting petition signature-collectors from being paid workers or requiring them to be residents of the state where the initiative would be enacted. Most of those restrictions have been struck down by the courts, said Frederick Boehmke, political science professor at the University of Iowa.
Boehmke, who previously taught at the California Technical Institute, where he wrote extensively on the use of initiatives, said the crux of the problem is that legislators generally don't like initiatives but voters love them. As a result, neither side trusts the other to reform initiatives properly, he said.
"Initiative processes that involve legislatures to deliberate the issues sounds like a good idea, a good compromise, but the problem is legislators don't take advantage of them," he said. "Consequently, voters have nowhere else to turn."
The report also recommends that states adopt stricter financial disclosure laws on advocates and opponents of ballot questions, restrict initiatives to general election ballots and enforce strict single-subject rules on the measures' language.
Dane Waters, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Initiative & Referendum Institute, said that while many of the report's recommendations are good ones, its underlying message is that states should rid themselves of the process.
"I had trouble getting past that sentence in the first paragraph of the report that recommended states that don't have initiatives not to approve them," Waters said. "Anyone reading the rest of the report who favors the initiative process is going to view it skeptically after that point."
Waters said that recommendations in the report that center on efforts to educate voters on what effects an initiative would have and on improving the wording of measures' descriptions on ballots are laudable. But ideas such as higher signature requirements and signature-gathering restrictions will make it nearly impossible for grassroots groups to get questions on a ballot, he said.
Waters also said that any efforts aimed at restricting special-interest groups from placing issues on the ballot are only going to hurt those grassroots efforts.
"The bottom line is, no matter how many regulations you put on the process, those people with money are going to have an easier time," Waters said.
The task force - which is made up of legislators, legislative staff workers and industry lobbyists - also recommended that states that have the direct initiative process - one that allows citizens to put issues directly on a ballot - change it into one that inserts the legislature between the voters and the ballot.
Already practiced in some states, this indirect process is designed to allow legislators to discuss and flesh out an issues long before they reach the ballot, said Oregon Rep. Lane Shetterly, who also served on the panel.
Shetterly, an attorney, said that initiatives initially were intended to enhance representative government by giving voters a "check and balance" over legislatures.
"But as it exists today, the initiative process is lacking," he said. "The initiative process can affect a state's ability to effect policy in a deliberative manner."
Indirect initiative processes not only give all sides of any issue a chance to hammer out a compromise but also give voters time to be educated about what they would really do, he said.
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Charles Asbhy
Daily Journal Staff Writer
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