Is a Special Election Any Way to Make Significant Public Policy? : Propositions: Once again, voters are being asked to do what politicians won’t do--and they hardy know the issues.

Should contentious issues and questions of long-term policy significance be settled at a special election--when, conventional wisdom says, turnout is low and readily manipulated by the best-organized and highest bidder among clashing interests?

It should be noted that the last time a special statewide election was held, in 1979, only 37% of the electorate went to the polls--to approve overwhelmingly the “Gann limit” initiative, which capped spending by state and local governments. That decision helped put California into the fiscal straitjacket that chokes it today.

This time, three propositions--170, 172, and 174--involving significant policy choices will be on the Nov. 2 ballot. On two of them, polls indicate, voters are almost totally disengaged. On the third, a majority remain clueless. And ripe for picking by a high-powered campaign.

Proposition 170 would lower the minimum vote necessary to pass local school bonds--and raise property taxes to repay them--to a simple majority from the current two-thirds. It could provide a referendum on whether California homeowners and anti-tax voters are ready to end the Proposition 13 era of unrelenting resistance to tinkering with their property-tax “protections.” But a recent Times poll indicated that 84% of registered voters have neither heard nor read anything about the proposition. The issue is nearly invisible.

So is Proposition 172, a proposal placed on the ballot by the Legislature in an attempt to spread responsibility for another brutal budget deficit. The Local Public Safety and Improvement Act would make permanent a temporary half-cent sales tax, originally scheduled to expire last June, and dedicate its proceeds to public safety. The vote on this issue could test whether Californians are willing to increase their taxes to pay for specific and popular programs. Or whether anti-tax conservatives maintain the electoral clout to hold the line in their war to slash and burn government. But what does the vote prove if, as the Times poll indicated, 89% of registered voters haven’t read or heard anything about 172?

Proposition 174, the Parental Choice in Education Initiative, is by far the most visible and controversial of the ballot measures. It would offer parents $2,600 in state tax money to be applied to the education of each “resident school-age child” in California. These vouchers could be used at public, private or parochial schools with 25 pupils or more. Still, according to the Times poll, 52% of the registered voters said they hadn’t read or heard anything about it.

What’s at stake goes beyond the radical restructuring of a system of public education. The fate of every issue on the November ballot will depend on which Californians come out to vote on Proposition 174 and what motivates their choices.

In the few weeks before the special election, the debate over “school choice” will generate a campaign that will affect turnout and influence its size and makeup. Voters who know little about any of the issues will be pelted with targeted mailings, absentee ballots and dueling slates driven by the voucher initiative.

Conventional wisdom holds that conservative, Republican, anti-tax voters are more likely to vote in special elections. That could threaten Propositions 170 and 172, while shoring up the vote in favor of school choice. But don’t bet on it.

A more powerful political reality is that people tend to vote their gut or their pocketbook. Fear, rage and economic self-interest are powerful motivators. That’s what makes this special election so potentially volatile, dangerous and unrepresentative as a policy-making tool.

It’s too simplistic to frame the debate over school vouchers as Armageddon between the Religious Right and California’s teachers’ unions. For the teachers and their allies, defeating 174 is more than a matter of life and death; it’s jobs, turf, philosophy, money and power--everything that makes politics a blood sport and motivates people to vote.

The “yes” side doesn’t appear to have a solid base. School choice is an issue far more important to think-tank ideologues than to hard-line conservatives.

For the Religious Right, Proposition 174 is not the hot-button issue that abortion is. Accordingly, it doesn’t seem motivated enough to plunge its organizational and fund-raising energies into the pro-voucher campaign.

Affluent suburbanites, regarded as a natural constituency for 174’s “turn-the-schools-around” pitch, are divided on the proposition. They like their public schools, and some suburban voters fear that choice may bring inner-city (minority) students and the problems of their schools (gangs and crime) to their (relatively) safe educational havens.

Despite proponents’ attempts to position 174 as the next Proposition 13, many older, anti-tax voters have little interest in school issues--particularly if they can’t be persuaded that change will directly benefit their pocketbooks. These voters could come out to vote “no” on 170, to protect their tax base. But that won’t automatically lead to a “yes” on 174.

Uncertainty about the fallout from the initiative’s reforms permeates the electorate, and it is being fanned by the teachers’ ad campaign. When in doubt, voters tend to vote “no.” But there are times when voters are so angry at the status quo that the unknown becomes more appealing than the known. The narrow victory of legislative term limits is one example. This time, however, polls don’t reveal the hostility necessary to move voters to embrace radical change.

The November election has also become a preliminary salvo in the battle for the GOP nomination for President in 1996. Former Secretary of Education William J. Bennett and Jack Kemp, the GOP hopefuls most active in the pro-voucher campaign, may build fabulous Rolodexes. But what does that mean for public policy in California?

Californians have been thrown into a high-stakes game for the future of public safety and the state’s schools. And the hand has been dealt largely by individuals and groups whose self-interest and political agendas have smothered legitimate policy debate. On Nov. 2, voters have two alternatives--to play or to lose.