Friday, Nov. 10, 2006 | 6:54 a.m.
If Tuesday's election proved anything, it's that Nevada voters are being asked to make increasingly complex and important policy decisions with a simple yes-or-no vote on ballot questions, which is a terrible way to run a state.
It's also not the way the state, or the country, was set up. The United States is a representative democracy, meaning we vote for the people who make the decisions and we trust them to deliberate and do what's best. If we don't like what they do, we can vote them out at the next election.
The initiative process came to life nearly a century ago as a way to break special-interest controls over state legislatures. Now, ironically, the special interests too often have captured the initiative process. They've taken unpopular or controversial measures, dressed them up in pleasant petition and ballot descriptions and backed them with plenty of cash. Their hope is that voters are blinded by the sweet-sounding platitudes and catch phrases that often are misleading and false.
The problem is that once an initiative makes the ballot, after being circulated through the state to receive the required percentage of voter signatures, it can't be changed. It's a yes-or-no vote, and that's what the monied types who push these proposals want. They can't find a forum in the regular process, so they hijack the initiative process and try to deceive voters.
Take, for instance, Question 2, the initiative deceptively billed as the "Property Owner's Bill of Rights," which won easy voter approval Tuesday . The measure, which, if it passes again in 2008, will become a constitutional amendment, innocently suggested it would mandate fair eminent domain deals. Unfortunately, the issue is much more complex than that and would cost taxpayers billions of dollars and delay important transportation projects. Like many of the initiatives on Tuesday's ballot, it instead should be worked out in the Legislature, where a proposal can be fully vetted.
The initiative process makes sense when it's used for an appropriate issue, such as a constitutional amendment that changes the structure of government, but unfortunately, the process has been used to clutter the Constitution with special-interest protections.
This needs to change. Officials shouldn't obstruct the constitutionally protected right to petition the government, but they also have an obligation to ensure that the initiative process doesn't spin so far out of control that it undermines our representative democracy.
Secretary of State-elect Ross Miller has proposed an overhaul of the initiative process that would make it tougher to put an initiative on the ballot by increasing the number of signatures required, require two-thirds of the voters to approve a constitutional amendment, keep failed initiatives off the ballot for six years and have his office write the captions for the initiative petition and the ballot.
We encourage a full discussion of his ideas and would support change that puts the initiative process back in the hands of the people, not the special interests.
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