Reject effort to raise bar on initiative ballots

By Michael Markarian

The Missouri Legislature is considering whether voters should decide to make it more difficult for citizens to protect wildlife within the borders of the Show Me State.

The resolution under debate is strikingly similar to a number of bills that have popped up in legislatures around the country, each bill designed to do the same thing: make it all but impossible for ordinary people to exercise their right to give animals a more humane life.

Introduced by state Rep. Mike Dethrow, House Joint Resolution 43 would, if passed by the legislature, ask Missouri voters this fall whether they want to require a supermajority to enact any future ballot initiative relating to the "harvesting [of] bird, fish, wildlife, or forestry resources." By contrast, a ballot initiative on health care, education, taxes or the environment would still require a simple majority, which is already difficult to reach.

Of 70 initiatives put before the state's voters, only 28 have passed by a simple majority. If HJR 43 passes, a wildlife initiative could be defeated by just slightly more than one-third of the voting public.

In 1998, Missouri residents voted to ban cockfighting with a 63 percent majority. If a two-thirds majority requirement had been in place, an important animal welfare reform would have failed, and the gruesome and barbaric practice of cockfighting would still be legal. In essence, HJR 43 would make any initiative involving wildlife nearly impossible to pass.

Ballot initiatives are a valuable tool for citizens to stand up to a legislature that may have turned a deaf ear to an important issue. Even bills with massive public support can be quashed by a few powerful people in statehouses, including committee chairmen and others in leadership.

When legislatures and governors prove unresponsive to residents' concerns, the people in 24 states, including Missouri, can turn to the initiative process to have their say.

The process brings issues directly to the people to overcome the stranglehold that special interest groups can have on legislatures.

Used as a last resort when voters become frustrated by ineffective or hostile forces in the legislature, the initiative process is the closest we come to true democracy. Yet achieving even a simple majority vote is difficult, ensuring that only measures that enjoy strong public support become the law of the land.

In the last decade, The Humane Society of the United States has worked with citizen groups and volunteers in qualifying several ballot measures. In every case the issues have garnered widespread support for modest improvements in animal welfare, such as banning animal fighting, providing more humane treatment for farm animals, and ending certain inhumane trophy-hunting practices that most responsible hunters find unethical and unsportsmanlike.

The requirement of majority approval is a check and balance on any reform that does not have popular support. There has never to our knowledge been any attempt to ban hunting or fishing, and to believe that is even in the cards is to fall prey to the worst sort of fearmongering.

Our mainstream approach, however, has not stopped counterattacks from lobbyists who want to curb the public's ability to restrict the practices of their wealthy clients.

The lobbyists can bend the ears of state legislators who often have the ability to put ballot questions before the voters. In Florida, for example, the legislature has put a measure on the fall ballot that would require a supermajority -- 60 percent of those who cast ballots in this case -- to pass any ballot initiative, including ones for animal welfare.

Other state legislatures have also attempted to impose a two-thirds majority vote on animal initiatives, but so far, only Utah has enacted such a measure. Most recently, the Arizona state Senate struck down a bill that would have asked voters to amend the constitution in a way that would limit regulations on local agriculture.

Missouri is also quite familiar with legislative attempts to manipulate the initiative process. Measures similar to HJR 43 have been introduced in the Missouri Legislature since 1999, but none has yet made it before the voters. The Senate should reject this latest effort, too, and get back to the issues that Missourians elected them to address.

Michael Markarian is executive vice president of The Humane Society of the United States in Washington, D.C.