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mostly I just see this as a problem with citizen's ballot initiatives, in general.
Any "citizen" can put anything they want on the ballot. All you need is signatures... a lot of signatures. 120k for a statute in Oregon, which is way more than any normal citizen can gather from their friends and family. But it's peanuts for a PAC, just pay a bunch of pros to go canvas the streets all day. They can gather that many signatures for anything, from bored/crazy people who just want to be left alone.
Once it's on the ballot... who knows? Who's got time to read that shit? Most voters are not exactly legal experts. They vote for team D/R, plus their local incumbent, and that's it. They do not weigh the fine points of "how is this thing implemented." They just take a quick look and see if it feels good.
If they vote against it... well, just reword it slightly. It'll be back on the ballot again next election. Keep trying, it will eventually pass.
Once it passes, it becomes state law. Possibly even part of the state constitution! Now the state legislature can't touch it, they have to implement it as it is. No amendments, no legal challenges. The police don't know what to do, so they just leave it be.
In this case, their was a noble idea (we should help drug addicts instead of throwing them in prison) but the ballot measure was worded in a terrible way (just let them do drugs) and that's what we got. Frankly I'm impressed Oregon was able to repeal it. We're still stuck with the fluoride ban, the arts tax, and the bottle deposit, which have also had disastrous effects, all from stupid ballot initiatives.
I was going to ask if you had evidence for the PACs farming signatures, but I realize that’s kind of why they exist. Organizations designed for collective action are doing stuff that’s too big or tedious for individuals.
So…how should it work instead? Do you rely on the legislature to do everything? What if it’s gridlocked, held up by one brinksman, or otherwise nonresponsive? The optimal amount of shitty ballot initiatives is not zero.
Why do you think that ballot initiatives are worth the costs?
Oh, I’m not sure they are. Or rather—the marginal ballot initiative probably isn’t worth it. I support them in principle.
I wrote about my experience with the Texas process here. All but one of these passed. Not surprising, as contrary to the OP, Texas requires 2/3 majorities in its legislature to put something on the ballot. In another state, all of these could have been passed outright. We just had to comply with our infamously tough constitution.
But what about that last one? Texans decided not to make a modification to judge retirement ages, even though the legislature already thought it was fine. I suspect this arose from a reflexive distaste for one-time exceptions.
So there’s the steelman for ballot initiatives. Sometimes the game of telephone results in a misalignment between people and policy. Maybe it’s from partisanship, or misinformation, or different incentives. The ballot initiative lets voters correct such an error directly. That sort of civic responsiveness is good for morale.
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I don't know, man. Political science is hard. But it seems to me that banning ballot initiatives and having all laws go through the legislature of professional lawmakers is not a bad situation.
One simple improvement might be to increase the pay of state legislators. A lot of them get paid pathetic salaries, like less than minimum wage. So either they're rich people doing this as a hobby, or they're indebted to lobby groups. Make it a full time, paying occupation.
I’m generally in favor of technocratic governance. In this case, though, I think more insulation from the voter base is a bad thing.
Yeah, sometimes voters are going to make bad or short-term decisions. Sometimes lawmakers will do that too, no matter how well you pay them. The incentives aren’t always aligned. Letting the professionals work may be more efficient, but it also errs towards regulatory burden, caution, graft.
I’d say that the ballot initiative is best suited for procedural and constitutional changes, since those are most likely to be misaligned.
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State legislators just don't do that much work for it to need to be a full-time occupation. If anything, state legislators should be doing less work less frequently and there should be enough of them that being a state legislator is a hobby for regular people, e.g., in New Hampshire there is 1 state legislator for every ~3,500 residents and they only meet intermittently for a few months every year.
If we look at federal legislators, they do make good money and command substantial office/staff budgets. Does this stop them from being indebted to lobby groups? Does it make federal law better? It doesn't look like it. Laws are still badly written with frequent intralaw contradictions.
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For additional evidence for the signature farming: the existence of companies like Fieldworks, or the fact that you can find the job "Political Canvasser" on job search engines and it pays $25/hour. Not a lot of places for that money to come from but PACs.
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In Washington we have a rich guy funding initiatives to roll back unpopular laws that there was no popular demand for. For example, a capital gains tax, or the state withholding the location of runaway children if they say they’re transgender.
Our legislature has a problem in that we’ve been colonized by Californians fleeing the results of their voting and it’s become incredibly unlikely for Democrats to ever lose control. But we do have this one check on their most outlandish ideas.
Bryan Heywood, he started Let's Go Washington: https://letsgowashington.com/
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Right. The state legislature did touch it in this case! They rolled parts of it back and re-criminalized drugs.
Initiative petitions are often a clown-show, but on the other hand, they're a good vehicle for testing risky policy that career politicians might never put their name on. If it's a huge disaster the career politicians can step in and take credit for rolling it back.
This seems good, actually!
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Was it noble?
It looks like the sort of help on offer was help to do more drugs.
Prison is a kind of help.
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