ELECTION 2000 MARKED SHIFT TO PLEBISCITE DEMOCRACY

KENNETT, Mo. -- After the U.S. Supreme Court decided who would be next president and voters placed an almost even number of Republicans and Democrats in Congress and the Missouri General Assembly, it doesn't take any special insight to conclude that nobody got a mandate and that voters were too split to send any clear signal.

But, like many election returns, on some major issues presented to voters Nov. 7 the electorate spoke with total clarity. A closer look is informative.

One issue decided with an unusual degree of finality was public education. Voters overwhelmingly rejected voucher initiatives in Michigan and California, approved a measure to make it easier to pass local school bonds in California and supported proposals to increase funding, raise teacher salaries and reduce class sizes in Colorado, Oregon and Washington.

Following closely was the nearly overwhelming vote of no confidence in the nation's drug laws. Of the seven major drug-law-reform initiatives on state ballots, five passed. Easily the largest was California's Proposition 36, which requires that virtually all persons convicted of non-violent possession be sent for treatment rather than jail or prison. Voters endorsed this plan by a surprisingly large margin: 61 percent to 39 percent. This measure appears to have won by a larger spread than any other seriously contested issue or candidate in the United States.

In addition, voters in Colorado and Nevada approved initiatives legalizing the medical use of marijuana, while citizens in Utah and Oregon elected to liberalize asset forfeiture laws.

Yet another big winner, for better or worse, is likely to be the initiative process itself. Ever since Vietnam and Watergate, voters in Missouri and almost every other state have been ever more distrustful of politicians and conventional politics. Increasingly, in the two dozen states that have it, they are inclined to use the initiative to make major policy decisions. On tax policies, legislative term limits and criminal sentencing. On affirmative action, immigration, wildlife protection, tougher gun controls and increases in the minimum wage -- the center of gravity in policy making is shifting to plebiscite democracy.

If one is looking for a voter shift to either the conservative or liberal wings in these plebiscitary exercises, the evidence is hardly conclusive. It's true some liberal causes, such as gun control, racked up surprising pluralities, as did opposition to a fair number of conservative proposals that called for large tax cuts in Alaska, Colorado and Oregon; these outcomes challenge the widespread belief that direct democracy is almost entirely an instrument of the right.

Looking at the issues, surely the election's biggest losers were the billionaire sponsors of school voucher plans. Tim Draper, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist who almost single-handedly funded California's Proposition 38, was buried by an avalanche of no votes (71 percent to 29 percent), despite the $30 billion he spent on the campaign. In addition to Draper's loss, there were the two-to-one defeats of the Michigan voucher initiative funded by Amway founders Betsy and Dick DeVos and the rejection of a broad charter school measure in Washington State, sponsored by yet another billionaire, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

These returns may not have driven a stake through the heart of the voucher movement, but it made clear that any future attempt to secure voters' approval to use public tax funds for private-school tuition would have to be much more limited and finely tuned. The only vouchers now in place, all of them approved by elected officials and none by initiative, are targeted to low-income students (as in Cleveland and Milwaukee) or to students in failing schools (as in Florida).

If the balloting on vouchers and school funding can be read as a vote for confidence for the nation's traditional system of public education, although I'm not sure this is precisely the case, the voters' message on drug policy reform was most assuredly a vote for change.

It is not clear where these steps toward reversing incarceration of nonviolent drug offenders are taking us, but surely it means the average citizen is more sympathetic to increasing the number of drug clinics and treatment centers than the number of years nonviolent offenders spend behind bars.

In the face of the presidential election mess and the seeming unwillingness of the public to buy into so-called public issue reforms, it is quite possible that traditional politics and partisan remedies could end up the biggest casualties of Election 2000. In Missouri, voters' 59-41 percent approval of another budget reserve fund points to a concern over how well prepared the state is for the next revenue downturn and a desire by taxpayers to see their money go as far as possible when times are tough. Voters' ballots indicate most prefer minimal salary increases for public officials and an end to seemingly constant exemptions in Missouri's gaming laws. The distortions created by opponents of the billboard and campaign finance propositions created enough voter confusions to preclude even a scintilla of reform in either area.

In an era when distrust of government is substantial and when polls show that voters have far more confidence in citizen initiatives than in governors and elected legislators, the behavior of candidates and the lack of public understanding of the issues can only reinforce widespread voter disenchantment. That's almost certainly a gain for the initiative process which, in the long run, may be able to resolve some of the more important and controversial issues facing us as a state and nation that have gone unresolved due to partisan dogma and bias.

~Jack Stapleton is editor of Missouri News and Editorial Service.