Word: balloting
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Ohio, after a long and bitter fight, voters decided, 63% to 37%, to kill a proposal that would have banned steel-jawed leg-hold animal traps. The legislature had bottled up the measure, but antitrappers gathered enough signatures to place the measure on the ballot. The proposal was defeated by voters in the state's rural areas. In the end, voters were swayed by the argument that the ban would cripple Ohio's $10 million-a-year fur industry (mostly muskrat...
...margin of 700 votes out of nearly 60,000 cast to buy five ambulances and train paramedics in the fire department. The department had earlier refused an order by the city council to pay for the training of the paramedics, so the council put the isssue on the ballot...
...California has long led the nation in going to the people, and San Francisco voters last week sampled referendums as varied and exotic as a Chinese menu. Many of the 22 items on the ballot could have been handled by a gutsy city council on a Wednesday evening. The electorate even had to pass judgment on whether each city supervisor could hire one aide who would be exempt from civil service requirements. The people said...
Trivial as some of these matters may seem, Ruth Clusen, president of the League of Women Voters (which often rallies its troops in local battles over ballot issues), declares that the referendum "is the ultimate tool in the hands of the people." Says Fred Button, an expert on voter attitudes: "It's healthy when the public thinks it has a piece of the action. It's a safety valve. The people don't do any better and they don't do any worse than the legislators." Washington-based officials of the U.S. Conference of Mayors tend...
Liberals find it ironic that referendums, propositions and local initiatives are being used effectively by conservatives who want to get their pet causes onto the ballot without a party label. The conservatives have an additional advantage, argues M.I.T. Political Science Professor Walter Dean Burnham: "Voters today are not interested in changing anything because they've been traumatized by too much change." In this view, what started more than 60 years ago as a movement for change has evolved into a force for stability, and thus for conservatism. "The Progressives," says Burnham wryly, "must be turning over in their graves...