Amendment 2: Assault on right to vote

October 7, 2004

This article was published in the Miami Herald on Oct. 7.

By: Daniel A. Smith
Daniel A. Smith teaches political science at the University of Florida.

Residents of Florida, beware. Your rights are under attack.

Amendment 2, a referendum on the November statewide ballot, is a misguided effort to ”reform” the state’s initiative process. The ballot measure, the brainchild of special interests in Tallahassee, is really an all-out assault on our rights as Floridians.

While the Legislature placed Amendment 2 on the ballot, the measure is the handiwork of the Florida Chamber of Commerce and other special interests. It is motivated by fear that voters might diminish these special interests’ stranglehold over the Legislature.

The Chamber and its allies have made numerous misleading statements about the initiative process in Florida. For example, they’ve said that the initiative process in Florida is ”out of control.” This is just plain wrong.

As I testified this past year before special legislative committees in both the House and the Senate, compared with the other 23 states that permit the initiative process, Florida’s initiative process is not reaching ”epidemic” levels. Between 1976 and 2002, only 21 initiatives qualified for the ballot, an average of 1.5 per general election.

While six measures are on the 2004 statewide ballot, there is no upward trend in the use of ballot initiatives in Florida. In 1998, no initiatives qualified for the ballot; in 2000, citizens voted on only one initiative. Indeed, across the country, the number of initiatives on the ballot has been steadily dropping since 1996.

Gathering the nearly half a million valid signatures of registered voters needed to qualify a ballot initiative is no easy task. Just ask Gov. Jeb Bush and Chief Financial Officer Tom Gallagher, who want to kill the citizen-approved bullet train (Amendment 6 on the November ballot). They had to rely on corporate sponsors, including Anheuser-Busch, Universal City, The Villages, St. Joe Company and the Florida Trucking Association, to pay petition gatherers more than $1 million to qualify their amendment.

If Floridians really want to reform the initiative process, they should vote No on Amendment 2. Instead, they should push the Legislature to create a statuary initiative process that allows residents to propose and vote on ordinary laws, in addition to constitutional amendments. Unlike people in 21 other states, Floridians don’t have that option because the Legislature killed this proposal during the last session.

It’s understandable that some Floridians are concerned about the initiative process. Money plays a major role in most ballot campaigns, and special interests do, at times, try to use the process to their advantage. But the process is no worse than the backdoor shenanigans that go on Tallahassee during the legislative session.

The initiative process, as Woodrow Wilson referred to it in 1912, can serve as a ”gun behind the door.” It can help to ensure that legislatures remain responsive to public opinion by providing a check on the dominance of special interests.

The initiative can bring about substantive reforms otherwise crushed or ignored by our elected officials. For example, the statewide ban on smoking in public places, which voters approved with 71 percent of the vote in 2002, was repeatedly killed by the tobacco lobby in Tallahassee. Furthermore, the process itself has many indirect ”educative effects” on civic participation, including increasing citizens’ political awareness and knowledge about politics and engendering trust in government.

Direct democracy is not perfect, but it does allow citizens to voice their concerns when their representatives choose to ignore or contravene their wishes. Don’t be fooled by Amendment 2; it is a Trojan Horse. It is bad for Floridians, and I’m confident that they will see through the Chamber’s disingenuous and brazen attempt to limit the rights of Floridians come Election Day.