November 08, 2000

Over 200 Ballot Initiatives Decided Yesterday
Vouchers Dealt a Setback
Victories, Defeats in Marijuana Initiatives
"Taxachusetts" Gets a Cut, Oregon and Colorado Don't
Colorado Passes Gun Show Background Checks

Over 200 Ballot Initiatives Decided Yesterday

From approving tough new gun control laws in Colorado and Oregon to defeating major school voucher proposals in California and Michigan, U.S. voters decided key ballot initiatives yesterday to enact their will at the state and local level, according to Reuters.

In local elections across the country, voters weighed in on some 200 ballot measures ranging from tax and zoning policy to determining who can marry and when a person has the right to end his or her life.

The Washington Post's David Broder spoke at the Cato Institute forum "Ballot Initiatives: Empowering People or Derailing Democracy?" which can be viewed on the Cato Web site. Broder discussed his book, "Democracy Derailed: Initiative Campaigns and the Power of Money," arguing that America's Founders preferred a system of checks and balances to direct democracy. Other panelists argued that initiatives are in fact a way to fight big government and a cry for help by majorities that find their freedoms restricted.

Vouchers Dealt a Setback

California's universal voucher initiative suffered a decisive defeat late yesterday, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Proposition 38 sought to provide a $4,000 voucher to any student in kindergarten through 12th grade wishing to attend a private school. The hotly debated measure would have created the most sweeping voucher program in the nation. The defeat marks the second time in seven years that Californians have rejected using public funds to send children to private schools, including religious ones.

Vouchers suffered another setback in Michigan, where voters clobbered a narrower statewide program that would have provided taxpayer-funded payments for students in troubled schools.

The school voucher issue is debated in "Vouchers and Educational Freedom: A Debate," by Joseph L. Bast, David Harmer and Douglas Dewey. In "What Would a School Voucher Buy?" Executive Vice President David Boaz and R. Morris Barrett explain that $3,000 a year would go a long way toward buying a quality education.

Victories, Defeats in Marijuana Initiatives

According to the Los Angeles Times, a ballot measure requiring California to treat nonviolent drug offenders as sick rather than criminally culpable passed yesterday, suggesting that discontent with the nation's drug war is beginning to reshape criminal justice policy.

Passage of Proposition 36 would make California the second state in which voters have demanded government-funded treatment, rather than imprisonment, for low-level drug criminals.

"People finally understand that addiction is a disease -- a treatable disease -- and that the answer to this epidemic is not locking addicts up," said Gretchen Burns Bergman, chairwoman of the Yes on 36 campaign and mother of a son incarcerated three times for drug offenses.

Voters in Nevada and Colorado approved measures permitting doctors to prescribe marijuana for the seriously ill, according to the Associated Press. Alaska voters rejected legalizing the drug under a ballot initiative that would have made Alaska's marijuana laws the most liberal in the country. The measure would have done away with civil and criminal penalties for people 18 or over who use marijuana or hemp products. People previously convicted of marijuana crimes would have been granted amnesty.

The Cato Institute hosted the conference "Beyond Prohibition: An Adult Approach to Drug Policies in the 21st Century" last year, which featured legal scholars, former law enforcement officials, and political and social leaders discussing the harmful consequences of drug prohibition and assessing alternative policies. Video of the conference is available online. In testimony before Congress last year, Cato Executive Vice President David Boaz explained that the "long federal experiment in prohibition of marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other drugs has given us unprecedented crime and corruption combined with a manifest failure to stop the use of drugs or reduce their availability to children." He encouraged a policy of harm reduction and the repeal of federal drug laws, allowing states to set their own drug standards.

"Taxachusetts" Gets a Cut, Oregon and Colorado Don't

Massachusetts voters yesterday granted themselves the largest single tax cut in state history, despite an aggressive, high-visibility campaign to defeat it, according to The Boston Globe.

Question 4 on the ballot in that state, the centerpiece of Gov. Paul Cellucci's political agenda, will reduce the income tax rate from 5.85 percent to 5 percent by 2003. The $1.2 billion measure will save a family of four with a household income of $75,000 about $450 a year.

Meanwhile, tax cuts failed in Oregon and Colorado.

In "Return the Surplus to Those Who Earned It," Doug Bandow writes that the individual tax burden is huge and giving it back to workers would be a boon to the economy. "Cutting taxes would also be the right thing to do. People are paying too much for too little. The budget is larded with pork, unnecessary programs, special interest subsidies and blatant waste." In "Tax Freedom Day," Bandow shows how that day, when the average taxpayer can relax after paying off the tribute demanded by politicians from city hall to Capitol Hill, comes later each year.

Colorado Passes Gun Show Background Checks

Colorado voters yesterday overwhelmingly approved a measure requiring background checks on all sales at gun shows, according to Reuters.

In "The Facts About Gun Shows," Associate Policy Analyst and Colorado resident David B. Kopel demonstrates that there is no "gun show loophole." "Despite what some media commentators have claimed," he writes, "existing gun laws apply just as much to gun shows as they do to any other place where guns are sold." Attempts to shut down gun shows are simply further attacks on the First and Second Amendments.

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