Unintended consequences

Activists shut out of the political process are increasingly turning to the ballot initiative for reform. Is it undermining democracy?

by Dorie Clark

Political gridlock is nothing new, but activists like Ann Eldridge, a nurse from Jamaica Plain who supports health-care reform, are starting to get frustrated by it. "There are so many special interests with deep pockets lined up against changes in the system," she says. "It's become unpopular for politicians to expend their political capital on health care. . . . There's a kind of political paralysis, which is why the people themselves have taken it on."

Eldridge is talking about Question 5, an upcoming ballot initiative on a measure mandating universal health coverage in Massachusetts. And she's just one of a growing number of activists who are using such initiatives to take democracy into their own hands. Next month, Massachusetts voters will weigh in on eight hot-button issues, including not just health care but also prisoners' voting rights, drug-treatment policy, a variety of tax-cut proposals, and the future of greyhound racing. As a refuge for interest groups whose needs aren't being met by the legislature, ballot initiatives are becoming increasingly popular, says Howard Ernst, a visiting scholar at the Center for Governmental Studies at the University of Virginia and co-editor of Dangerous Democracy? (Rowman and Littlefield), a study of the initiative process that will be released next year.

But with an average-Joe electorate claiming more decision-making power, there's a growing risk that simple solutions will be approved for complex problems. And the stakes -- billions of dollars spent or saved, massive social-policy changes swept into place -- could be enormous.

If, for example, voters in the Commonwealth end up casting ballots in their own selfish best interests, the state could be looking at a $7.2 billion Election Day hangover. Question 4, which would roll back the state's income tax to five percent, would cost just over $1 billion. The health-care measure, Question 5, could cost anywhere from $2.8 billion to $5.6 billion, according to a report released last week by the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, although proponents argue that, because of greater efficiency, costs to the state will not increase. Question 6, which involves a tax rebate for highway and tunnel tolls, would cost an estimated $623 million. All told, that's 30 percent of the state budget.

Can we really afford that? Probably not. But we'll have only ourselves to blame. Which raises the question: how did we get into this mess in the first place?

Born in the Western states at the turn of the century, the ballot initiative scored wins for old-time Progressive causes like women's suffrage and the eight-hour workday, which half the states ultimately voted to allow. The modern-day revival hit in 1978, when California voters passed Proposition 13, which capped their skyrocketing property taxes. Activists suddenly found a way around legislative lack of will. Darlene Grover, for example, is working with an advocacy group, Mainers for Death with Dignity, to push through a physician-assisted-suicide measure as a ballot question this November; previosuly, she brought the bill to the Maine state legislature four times without success. "I think politically they were too afraid they wouldn't get re-elected, that this was too emotional of an issue," she says.

Sixteen states, including Maine and Massachusetts, will field ballot initiatives this year. On the surface, it might seem to be a good deal for everyone: the voters get the laws passed that are important to them, and politicians get to avoid controversy. But there are serious downsides when the public takes democracy into its own hands. Washington Post columnist David Broder charges in his new book, Democracy Derailed: Initiative Campaigns and the Power of Money (Harcourt, 2000), that "[t]he initiative process, an import now just over one hundred years old, threatens to challenge or even subvert the American system of government in the next few decades."

Broder and others are concerned with the massive amounts of money being infused into the system. There are no caps on donations to ballot-measure campaigns, unlike campaigns for individual candidates. Wealthy activists can, if they choose, single-handedly bankroll a campaign -- indeed, Massachusetts's Question 8, which would liberalize penalties for drug offenders, is the brainchild of three million- or billionaires, including hedge-fund magnate George Soros (see "Reform Movement," News and Features, May 5). Churches can dip their toes into politics by supporting or fighting initiatives. Says Grover of Mainers for Death with Dignity, "The biggest opponent, and the one that's funding everything, is the Catholic Church. Their ads are six or eight for every one that we have; we simply can't afford the same exposure they can. They have videos in all their churches, and they've been doing sermons about it."

But the real threat, according to State Representative Jim Marzilli (D-Arlington), is from corporate dollars. "I was a big fan of the initiative process," he says, "but I'm afraid that in the past decade, it's ceased to become a tool for democracy and has become a means for the wealthy and big business to carve out laws that benefit themselves." The executive director of the Tax Equity Alliance for Massachusetts, Jim St. George, couldn't agree more. His organization is spearheading the campaign to defeat Questions 4 and 6, the state income-tax reduction and toll-rebate measures. "It used to be you'd get volunteers to gather signatures and you'd run a grassroots campaign," he says, "but increasingly the wealthy interests are discovering that all you have to do is hire a firm, like Cellucci [who supports Question 4] did -- he hired a firm out of Nevada -- to gather signatures, and they find you can buy policy wholesale. . . . It's allowing the wealthy to almost buy their own tax cut." Indeed, the Boston Globe reports that Question 4's corporate friends include such Bay State fixtures as EMC Corporation, which kicked in $100,000 plus another $51,000 from the chairman, and John Hancock Insurance, which donated $50,000. But then again, the Campaign for Massachusetts' Future, the arm of St. George's organization responsible for fighting 4 and 6, has its own sugar daddy in organized labor, which has provided more than $900,000.

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Dorie Clark can be reached at dclark[a]phx.com.