We’re Taking Way Too Much Initiative

The wonder and marvel of the California ballot initiative is that it operates by the 5-year-old’s reality playbook: If you don’t like the way something turns out the first time, just forget it ever happened and do it over.

Californians passed the three-strikes law a decade ago; next week, we’re voting on the “Hmm, maybe that wasn’t such a good idea after all” law. We voted to let the Indians run freewheeling casinos; now we’re thinking of becoming white-man givers. And in a novel timesaving move, the people behind two measures on next week’s ballot (Propositions 68 and 65) have already decided that they don’t like their own propositions anymore and aren’t bothering to support them.

If only life and football worked like this.

Next Tuesday, we’ll find 16 statewide measures on the ballot. We must be getting soft. In 1926, Los Angeles voters confronted 96 measures, and that was back when you were hustled out of the voting booth after 10 minutes of communing with a paper ballot -- or two minutes with a voting machine. Ninety years ago, November 1914, California voters faced 48 measures, among them: whether to make the Golden State a “dry” state, and if so, whether Californians would be doomed to eight years of sobriety before they could vote to allow drinking again. Were voters for or against a minimum wage for women and children? An eight-hour workday? “Moral boxing” or “irreligious prize fights”?

Since California’s plunge into exuberant democracy in 1911, voters have been asked hundreds of times to amend the state Constitution, pass bonds and rule on such questions as whether blind people can become chiropractors; whether the Bible may be read in public schools; whether coastal oil drilling, labor picketing and daylight saving time should be banned; and whether to prohibit the dissection or torture of living animals in the name of research.

All but the most screamingly unconstitutional measures can make the cut, leaving the legality of any measure to be determined after the fact, on the public’s legal nickel.

Sometimes we even get to vote our gut, knowing in the back of our minds that the courts will play Mom and Dad and keep us from making unconstitutional fools of ourselves, as on the “Say AAAAAh-nold” Proposition 69 ordering up DNA-record oral swabs for anyone arrested for a felony -- not tried, not convicted, just arrested. Open wide.

Yet every election day, we page through the props and wonder, why? Why do we have to do all this? What are our legislators doing up there -- plucking the rubber poultry for their fundraising dinners? Are they just too intimidated or too divided or too mau-maued by the Marlboro lobby or the big, scary shade of Howard Jarvis to act?

Here’s my proposed ballot initiative: Every time voters have to vote on something the Legislature should have handled itself, each legislator’s $140 daily living allowance goes into his opponent’s campaign fund. Nifty, no?

Other questions are easier to answer. How do the propositions get those numbers? Why did Proposition 13 wind up as 13 and not Proposition 1,048? Because the state resets the numbers clock every 10 years, most recently in November 1998. And unlike the Lakers, the state doesn’t ever retire a proposition number. Thus it is likely that in the average Californian’s lifetime there will be four or five Proposition 13s and at least one other Proposition 187, spelling failure as surely as would assigning Shaquille O’Neal’s number to Robert Reich.

And who writes the pro-and-con ballot arguments that land in our mailboxes? I love reading the hysterical ones with lots of exclamation marks and capital letters, like a Mary Worth comic strip!!!!

Sometimes they’re signed by meaningless, ginned-up names for front groups that may exist only as long as it takes to count the votes. This time we get Proposition 63’s Citizens for a Healthy California -- sworn enemies, no doubt, of Citizens in Favor of Bipolar Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior and Delirium Tremens California. Proposition 66’s Californians United for Public Safety must be ready to go mano a mano with Californians United to Encourage Purse Snatchings, Muggings and Glue Sniffing. And Proposition 72’s Californians Against Government Run Healthcare can take it outside with Californians Who Think Wal-Mart Should Pay Its Flipping Employees Enough to Afford Healthcare So They Don’t Have to Get Cared For by the Taxpayer.

But nothing will ever top the measure proposed in 1915. It pledged to “authorize the Legislature to protect the initiative from fraud and representation.” Isn’t that touching?

Too bad it didn’t stand a chance against Californians United for Silly and Meaningless but Lavishly Endowed by Special-Interest Front Group Organizations to Confuse and Deceive.