POLITICS : Italy’s Antidote for Revulsion: a Referendum : A nation exasperated with its leaders’ corruption is poised to demand a dramatic overhaul of how government is elected.

San Vittore prison has been a stern landmark of dynamo Milan since the 19th Century, but only now that it’s a star of the evening news do most people know that it is foully overcrowded and plagued by rats.

For more than a year, Italian newspapers and television stations have daily chronicled the passage of Italy’s political and business elite through San Vittore: from eminence to jail, from power to penitence.

The new designer-dressed cons are lustrous targets of a complex corruption investigation that has already ensnared high-ranking members of Prime Minister Giuliano Amato’s government and more than 2,500 Italians of a sort more accustomed to high-powered gossip over tennis than to exchanging bedbug remedies in the prison yard.

Cheered on by those Italians who are neither rich nor political, magistrates are unraveling a gigantic network of kickbacks and bribes from private and state companies compelled to reward arrogant Italian political parties in exchange for public works contracts.

If Milan’s prison has become the symbol of democratic Italy’s demoralizing national scandal, the nation’s upcoming polls are cast as the initial antidote for national revulsion that the scandal has spawned.

Exasperated Italians are poised to demand in an eight-point referendum on Sunday a dramatic overhaul of the way they elect their governments.

The referendum is seen by supporters as the launch of a democratic revolution to create a more representative and less fragmented political class in a rich, postindustrial society that has lost faith in its greedy, aloof rulers.

The most important of the proposals would require single-candidate elections for 238 of 315 Senate seats. That would reward the candidate getting the most votes in any constituency, scrapping a proportional representation that split power among myriad political parties, most of them now tainted by scandal.

“We need to change the way the political class is chosen,” said Mario Segni, reformer-architect of the referendum, which he calls Italy’s most important since a 1948 vote to replace a monarchy with the current republic. “A ‘ si ‘ is a vote for change. A ‘ no ‘ would freeze the system that has brought us 51 government crises since World War II, 14 parties in Parliament, and the people who have led us to this impasse.”

A second key provision would scrap state subsidies to political parties, worth $52 million a year. Massive illegal financing of official funds is the object of today’s remarkable judicial attention.

Under the Italian constitution, referendums can only abolish existing laws, paving the way for reformist legislation to reflect public will, notes Segni, a breakaway from the dominant Christian Democrats.

“The road to reform is just beginning,” he said this week. “We are asking for a definitive victory: 60% is the objective to give us the political force to continue the battle. If only the Senate were at issue, 50% would be enough. But there must also be reform of the Chamber of Deputies.”

If the voters order reform in the Senate, Parliament would then be obliged to extend the new rules to the Chamber of Deputies as well, say referendum supporters. The referendum does not include reform for the Chamber of Deputies because the chamber’s election law does not admit grounds for its abrogation. The Senate law does.

Major political parties, on the whole, back the electoral referendum. But it is vociferously opposed by disparate enemies, including hard-line Marxists, neo-fascists, Greens, and another reformist movement of former Christian Democrats headed by Leoluca Orlando, a onetime Palermo mayor who crusades against the Mafia.

Reform supporters say the small opponent parties fear for their survival in a new voting system.

But Orlando insists the issue is effective government. “Victory for the referendum would give us a majority system in the Senate, a proportional one in the chamber. The whole world would laugh at us. Worse, the country would be forced into immobility,” he said.

On the Ballot

Italians vote Sunday on eight referendum questions, most of which could mandate sweeping overhaul of the electoral system and streamline an inept bureaucracy. The referendum questions are:

Direct Senate elections: Abolishes the current system of proportional representation to require single-candidate elections for three-quarters of the Senate.

Public financing for political parties: Abolishes state subsidies that parties used to build costly superstructures and impose what Italians call partitocrazia , the rule by the same clique of power-mongering politicians since World War II.

Government intervention in banking: Calls for an end to the Treasury minister’s right to nominate top executives for banks and other financial institutions in which the state has participation.

Environmental protection: Strips authority for monitoring environmental laws from inefficient local health units. The goal is to transfer authority to regional governments.

Agriculture and Tourism ministries: Separate questions would abolish both ministries and decentralize their responsibilities to regional governments.

Ministry for State Participation: Abolishes the ministry that oversees state companies in line with broad, ongoing privatizations.

Drug penalties: Abolishes jail sentences for the personal use of drugs.