Polling Sheep

The outcome of last month’s vote on Massachusetts’ ballot initiatives has important ramifications for the future of direct democracy. Ballot initiatives represent one of the few undeniable examples of a vibrant, powerful direct democratic force in our nation. The president may be chosen by an unelected nine-person court, our candidates for senator or governor may be uninspiring lowest-common-denominator centrists, but at least we, the people, have an unimpeded say on what happens in our communities on such issues as bilingual education and medicinal marijuana.

But the voting record on one question was particularly distressing. Massachusetts’ state-wide clean-elections referendum, Question 3, was in fact a straw man. Though it appeared that, as with most ballot initiatives, a “yes” vote would signify that one supported the goals of the measure’s sponsors, Question 3 was introduced and written by state legislators who were hoping for a “no” vote. To this end, these legislators framed the question in a highly manipulative manner.

The issue up for decision in Question 3 was Massachusetts’ Clean Elections program, under which candidates receive public funding after making certain commitments regarding campaign spending and fundraising. However, Question 3 simply asks voters if they “support taxpayer money being used to fund political campaigns for public office in Massachusetts,” making no mention of the “clean” part of “clean elections”—the restraints required for any such campaign.

Few, of course, like the idea when phrased that way. After all, who would support the idea of taxpayers’ hard-earned money going to candidates who have made no special effort to reform their campaigns? It is no surprise, then, that Question 3’s “no” option won with 74 percent of the vote. But the sins of omission in Question 3’s wording, though less than thrilling to fans of open legislation, are not in themselves unacceptable or undemocratic; voters, one would hope, are intelligent and aware enough to vote for the choice they agree with, regardless of its subjectively-charged phrasing.

And it’s not as if Beacon Hill fat-cats were the only ones playing games with language. Indeed, another measure which appeared on the ballot in certain local districts could also be seen as manipulative. This measure, which appeared as Question 4, 5 or 6 in various districts stressed the “strict fundraising and spending limits” involved in the Clean Elections law while avoiding any explicit mention of taxpayer dollars.

Question 4/5/6 leaned heavily on voters to choose “yes,” and so they did, passing the local measure by comfortable margins in each of the districts on whose ballots it appeared. The problem is that every community which came down in favor of the local measure was also one which contributed to Question 3’s engineered slam-dunk loss. Question 3’s voting results as broken down by town show that there is, in fact, a very significant overlap in districts which passed Question 4/5/6 and towns which did not pass Question 3, often with similarly wide margins. The lesson is as blatant as it is worrisome: in all likelihood, voters in many communities read Question 3, were convinced by its subjective presentation to check off “no,” then moved three or two or even one step down to the local measure and were just as convinced by its wording to vote “yes.”

This kind of result plays right into the hands of those who deride ballot initiatives as worthless reflections of an uneducated public’s selfish, shortsighted urges of the moment. If voters are not, on the whole, intelligent or thoughtful enough even to retain the memory of one piece of propaganda’s message when they come across another a few minutes later, how can they be trusted with anything? These are, after all, the same people who almost passed Massachusetts’ Question 1, a binding referendum which would have eliminated all state income tax, for no apparent reason other than stinginess.

Such elitist arguments have been sadly present throughout American history. But the problem is not that Massachusetts voters are not smart enough or do not care enough to understand the issues they are voting on—or, at the very least, we cannot assume that this is the problem until we give voters the benefit of the doubt.

Voters showed that they comprehended the two sides of the debate clearly enough when they followed the respective implications of the two ballot initiatives, which did not, after all, spell out the responses they intended. Evidently the lapse came when voters couldn’t put two and two together to see that both initiatives were asking the same question, albeit in a different way. And in all fairness, this is not at all obvious until one is told it. Tuesday’s results were therefore conclusive evidence more of a failure in the system by which voters become informed than of popular incompetence. As such, the problem can easily be countered by clearer, more prominent public debate on these issues.

These results should spur us to pay more, not less, attention to ballot initiatives before the next election. Ballot initiatives are currently treated as second-class electoral issues, largely ignored in favor of headliners like gubernatorial races—headliners whose arcane differences in political philosophy are, in fact, often far less exciting than the issues at hand in ballot initiatives. The more attention they are given and the less their authors’ hidden aims remain relatively unexplored in the press, the better-poised ballot initiatives will be to fulfill their purpose as vital, direct tools for an informed public.

Simon W. Vozick-Levinson ’06 is a first-year in Grays Hall.