The system of ballot initiatives, originally intended to reduce the influence of "big business" and "big money" on politics, has become a "lucrative" industry that threatens individual rights and may eventually eliminate government as Americans know it, journalist David S. Broder warned during his visit to Yale as a Poynter Fellow in Journalism.
Broder said the increasing trend of states to use ballot initiatives -- which allow the populace to make laws or create public policy by direct popular vote -- could eventually transform the United States from a nation ruled by a government elected to create laws to a country of "laws without government."
The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and political writer for The Washington Post was invited to campus March 23 to deliver the Poynter Fellowship's Gary Fryer Memorial Lecture, which honors Yale's former director of public affairs and special assistant to the president, who died in 1997. Broder's talk was titled "Democracy Derailed: Initiative Campaigns and the Power of Money," which is also the title of his recent book.
Broder noted that the ballot initiative system was first introduced in the United States about a century ago by progressive and populist reformers to prevent special interest groups from influencing legislation and to allow voters a direct voice in public policy. The system fell into disuse after World War I and was rarely utilized for decades until 1978, when it was revived in California so the state's citizens could vote on the initiative Proposition 13, a measure to cap property taxes. Voters in 24 U.S. states and the District of Columbia have since used ballot initiatives with increasing frequency to set policy on such issues as physician-assisted suicide, the decriminalization of marijuana and state budgets, Broder said.
Although using initiatives was supposed to achieve a "perfection of democracy," the system has become "a whole new industry" in which certain companies, financed by wealthy special interest groups, run initiative campaigns, said Broder. One of those companies pays part-time workers to gather the required signatures to put initiatives on the ballot, he explained, and lawyers also "get into the act" by writing the language of the initiatives and defending them, if necessary, in court. Public relations consultants, who have the task of either making an initiative "appealing" or "frightening" to voters, also are part of the process, Broder said.
"Money is the threshold for getting into this game," stated Broder, adding that it generally costs more than $1 million just to get an initiative on the ballot. Last month, California campaign contributors spent over $80 million on two initiatives, and in 1996 at least a quarter of a billion dollars was spent on initiatives across the country, the journalist told his audience. That amount, he said, is about "$100 million more than the taxpayers of this country gave candidates to pay for presidential campaigns." Furthermore, he said, contributions to and spending for initiative campaigns are "literally unlimited by state law," meaning that "corporations, unions, businesses and individuals can put in as much as they desire."
While the ballot initiative system can sometimes serve as a "legitimate" recourse when legislators either refuse or are unable to effect laws desired by the public, concedes Broder, he believes that it is, in general, a menace to American government, particularly because it is contary to the principles upon which that government was founded.
"Our system of government was founded by men who were suspicious of simple majority rule," he said. "They believed it posed serious dangers to individual rights. So they wrote a Constitution for a republic in which power was divided through checks and balances in ways that protected some individual rights absolutely and safeguarded some minority rights generally by requiring a high degree of consensus before any law could be passed. They crafted complex institutional hurdles for the passage of any law. They created two distinct bodies in the legislative branch of national government. They gave a separately elected executive a direct role in the legislative process through veto power. And they made all of them subject to judicial review by the courts. The initiative system bypasses most of those safeguards."
Furthermore, he said, the system "demonstrably threatens individual rights." He cited as example initiatives by "an Anglo majority" in California and Washington that dismantled affirmative action; a California initiative that eliminated bilingual education "over the opposition of a Latino minority in that state"; and the rejection "by a heterosexual majority" in several states of "guarantees of rights for homosexuals."
Broder also said that in some states initiatives have "often been used to restrict revenues and mandate spending for particular purposes, thus reducing the budgetary discretion that is at the heart of government."
In spite of these problems, the initiative system is "likely to expand" throughout the country, Broder stated. In fact, he said, if American citizens were asked who they trust to make the right decisions on issues of public policy -- the government and legislature or the people through these initiatives -- there would be a four to one majority in favor of initiatives.
"I think the time is coming soon when there will be serious debate, sparked by a presidential campaign, about whether we ought to keep this antiquated, 18th-century stilted version of a republic with representative government versus the 21st-century democracy where we-the-people rule ourselves," Broder predicted.
There may even come a time, he said, when all lawmaking is done through popular vote via the Internet. Noting that the most recent Arizona Democratic presidential primary was conducted on the Internet, he said it is just "a matter of time" before voting booths are eliminated.
"At the end of the road, we may find ourselves not with the proverbial government of laws but with a country where you have laws without government," Broder speculated.
--- By Susan Gonzalez
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