Printer-friendly version Reader Comments

Elections should be about candidates, not complex issues reduced to sound bites and TV ads.

GREG KESICH November 4, 2009

I have nothing against voting. I voted Tuesday and I found it to be an overwhelmingly satisfying experience.

I liked everything from coloring in the ovals, to feeding my ballot into the machine, to the molasses cookie I got at the PTO bake sale.

But I don't want to vote in another election like we had Tuesday.

My problem is seven questions and no candidates. The citizen initiative process is getting out of control, and it's not good for Maine.

Maine has had a law that lets people petition to put issues on the state ballot since 1911, when the law to create primary elections passed in a three-to-one landslide. But the process has been used sparingly for most of the years since then.

There were only two citizen-initiated questions on ballots in the 1920s, three in the '30s, one in the '40s and none in the '50s and '60s. The people's veto, which has been around for a full century, has only put questions before the voters 27 times.

This week there were four citizen-initiated bills, plus the people's veto on same-sex marriage, a bond issue and a constitutional amendment. The issues ranged from the nuts and bolts of state spending to the pharmacological benefits of marijuana and the legal relationship between consenting adults – which should not be anyone's business.

The argument in favor of citizen-intiated bills and people's vetoes is that they provide another check on government excess or incompetence. Sure, people can come up with some crazy ideas, but so can elected officials, and the people generally come up with the right answers on Election Day.

But if you want to know what's wrong with this way of thinking, you only need look across the country to California, which is handcuffed by a referendum process that is easily manipulated by moneyed interests and results in contradictory laws that prevent elected officials from dealing with real problems.

It is a situation that, in the opinion of Ronald George, the chief justice of the California Supreme Court, has "rendered our state government dysfunctional."

The voters approve spending on programs and the voters put a tight lid on taxes, requiring a two-thirds vote to raise them.

The voters are asked to weigh in on everything from same-sex marriage to technical matters of tax policy, usually basing their decisions on the sound-bite war of television ads. (Sound familiar?)

Maine is not as wide-open as California in this regard: The Maine Constitution can't be amended by citizen-initiative, but you can see our state going too far down this road.

It's easy to say nice things about the referendum process because it is so democratic. But really it's not.

A fired-up minority or a group with a lot of money can easily get on the ballot. Turnout in off-year elections, when these questions tend to be addressed, is about a third of eligible voters, or half of the number that show up in gubernatorial years. So, on a closely divided issue, just about half of a third of Maine's voters get to make the laws for everyone.

And there are some things that "the people" are not qualified to be voting on, and I include myself.

I don't want to keep voting on other people's civil rights. I am a strong supporter of an inclusive reading of the Constitution's promise of equal protection, but I wouldn't want my neighbors to get to decide whether I deserve to be protected under those laws and I don't think I should be asked to vote on their rights.

I am comfortable with questions of constitutional interpretation being decided by judges, who are influenced by public opinion but not controlled by it.

I don't want to vote on tax policy any more. I want those decisions to be made by the governor and the Legislature – that's what we pay them to do. These issues are too complicated and nuanced to be reduced to 30-second television ads which is all that comes through these campaigns...