DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

Last week there was an election in California and no one seemed to find it strange.

This was a statewide election, not scattered municipal elections. And it was an odd-numbered year.

In other words, it's not an election year. Yet no one seemed to find it remarkable that California was holding a statewide election. What are they teaching in government classes these days? Even national political journalists took no notice of this odd happening. What are they teaching in journalism schools these days?

I sent a message to a friend, a former Nevada state legislator who is a community leader in California, asking him why the election.

"Yes, it is an emergency election because of the huge budget deficit," he replied. "The state has passed so many constitutional amendments that to do almost anything unusual they need to get voter approval. It's nuts but that is what ballot box politics gets you. When these fail after a very, very low voter turnout, then the state will go back to arguing in the legislature. And more ballot measures may emerge."

He called the election right. The ballot measures failed. California voters defeated efforts by elected officials to patch the state budget with ballot measures to borrow money, extend taxes, and put in place a reserve fund and a spending cap.

"It was a rejection of California's out-of-control ballot initiative process, designed to address problems the state Legislature has repeatedly failed to deal with over the years," said commentator William Pfaff.

The defeat created a budget crisis in California. It will, of course, be solved somehow, but the more important issue is the way initiative petitions and referenda have helped paint the state into a corner. The state has a national reputation for letting its "direct democracy" ballot process destroy the state, yet instead of that reputation preventing the spread of those governing techniques, other states are using them more than ever. In Cincinnati, where there is a ballot petition to prevent the city from considering or planning any "passenger rail" or streetcar system, city councilmember Chris Bortz said, "You only need to look to California to see what happens when the referendum rules. Real chaos ensues."

Initiatives, referenda and recall were first developed in the Progressive Era to give the public a voice against power and money. Today they have become the tools of the rich and powerful, often used by special interests but rarely by ordinary folks. Populations and sometimes signature requirements have made the process too burdensome and expensive for those the petitions were originally supposed to help.

One former California legislator, Hannah Beth Jackson, writes that she wishes Californians could start getting to call their own shots in their state instead of, say, a Libertarian millionaire from New York breezing into the Golden State to use the ballot petition process to repeal zoning and land use practices.

Nevada has no reason to feel superior to California. Gov. Jim Gibbons last week vetoed a transportation tax bill in the legislature after it was endorsed by Washoe voters in the 2008 election. His faith in voters seems to have declined since he proposed a 1992/1994 ballot measure that gave a minority of either house of the legislature the power to stop any tax increase. Gibbons says the public didn't know what they were doing when they voted on the Washoe measure, which may be true.

But then, in his 1992 initiative petition, Gibbons forgot to designate which language he was removing and which he was adding, giving voters an equally hard time figuring out what he was proposing.