Molly Ivins October 13AUSTIN — Citizens in five states will get a chance to address the root of the rot in American politics this fall: They've put campaign finance reform on the ballot. Maine has a proposal to publicly finance all state elections, and four other states are looking at contribution limits between $100 and $500 a person. Missouri, Oregon and Montana have already limited political contributions to $100. But like a good news/bad news joke, just as citizens are starting to use direct democracy to curb the influence of big-money special interests in politics, big money is starting to corrupt direct democracy. Twenty-four states have some form of citizen initiatives on their ballots, but as Don Carter of Washington state told The Associated Press, the era of the "mom-'n'-pop initiative" is passing. Washington Secretary of State Ralph Munro told The Montgomery Advertiser, "It used to be the most important thing was the issue. Now, the most important thing is the money." In the same article, Oregon Secretary of State Phil Kiesling called it "cash-and-carry democracy." At least 60 percent of initiatives now depend on hired signature-getters, according to National Voter Outreach, a Nevada company in the signature-getting business. Until 1988, many states prohibited paying people to gather signatures for an initiative in order to keep the process volunteer-based and genuinely grassroots democratic. Then, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a singularly ill-advised decision, ruled that a Colorado law forbidding paid signature-gatherers violated the right to free speech. The result was to transform citizen initiatives into big business, according to the Advertiser. "What has happened is that we have all these people who buy and sell signatures like it was the commodities market, a hired-gun kind of deal," Munro told the AP. "What they do is discredit the whole process and make people more leery of it." One symptom of the corruption is an increasing number of initiatives tailored strictly for narrow special interests. Nebraska has a particularly dicey problem in that a federal judge there ruled that people who circulate petitions don't even have to be registered voters. "We have opened the doors to anybody to come in and mount a Constitution-changing campaign if they have the money to hire paid circulators," Nebraska Secretary of State Scott Moore told the AP.
Even more big money is involved when it comes to advertising and public relations campaigns to pass or defeat a given initiative. In California, a notoriously expensive state in which to campaign, anywhere between $2 million and $40 million will be spent on each of this year's ballot initiatives, according to Business Week. Big business has several standard ploys to defeat citizen-supported reforms. One is the old divide-and-conquer strategy. If a group of citizens manages to get a reform proposal on the ballot, industry will promptly hire signature-getters to push a similar-sounding proposal that actually defeats the purpose of the original on the ballot. In the ensuing confusion, voters are likely to pass the imitation rather than the original. Then there are the usual tactics of scare campaigns, promoting misinformation and generally spreading confusion. The gambling industry is working on campaigns in eight states, some to legalize casinos. Although the industry has buckets of money ($44.4 billion in gross revenues in 1995), its batting average at the ballot box is poor. According to the Gannett News Service, gambling has lost either ballot initiatives or legislative votes 24 times since 1994. Another sign of the times is the effort to control health maintenance organizations. Thirty-three states have taken some steps to impose greater controls on managed health care; the Clinton health-care proposal is starting to look simple by comparison. But California has two initiatives on the ballot this year that would really change the system. According to The Arizona Republic, both would prohibit HMOs from offering incentives to doctors to deny health care. One provision would forbid HMOs from ordering doctors not to tell patients about alternative and possibly more expensive treatments. Both initiatives would require an opinion from another doctor before a company could deny care to a patient. There seems to be an almost daily horror story out of some California HMO involving doctors pushed to sacrifice a patient's health for the organization's profit. Other parts of the initiatives would set minimum staffing levels, limit increases in premiums and require HMOs to disclose how much of their income is spent on administrative costs. As you can imagine, the HMOs are mounting quite a peppy campaign to defeat the initiatives. An old truism holds that the cure of all the ills of democracy is more democracy. But when the ills of democracy also become the ills of more democracy, when special-interest money consistently begins to defeat the interests of the great majority of the people, it's high time that we all try what some states are now trying: going after the money. *** Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. COPYRIGHT 1996 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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