Initiatives Prove Voters Will Sign Anything; Yet Real Initiative May Get Real Action

We’ve heard so many complaints about Tuesday’s ballot--how time-consuming it will be at the polls, how the accompanying pamphlet explaining the 35 state and (in Los Angeles) local measures resembles a manual to prep us for a Bar exam, not an election. It’s enough to discourage democracy, they say.

When I hear this, I wince with a small pang of guilt, for I had been partially instrumental in the creation of this monstrosity.

For a while during the past year, I picked up some spare change--at times averaging $20 an hour--circulating the petitions that swept this tidal flow onto our ballot. As I walked my beat outside supermarkets and drugstores, I discovered something interesting about our voting public.

Eighty percent of the folks I approached were willing to sign anything, with no more than a hasty glance at a few words.

I claim no special gift of persuasion; my cohorts at petition headquarters reported the same phenomenon. For, although our job contracts stated that “under no circumstances will I purposely deceive or misrepresent the content and purpose of this petition,” we quickly mastered the fine art of simplifying without falsifying.

“Would you please sign my petition to make it a felony to donate blood and knowingly have AIDS? Remember the guy who did that recently and got off scot-free?”

Shoppers fairly fell over themselves to autograph this one, which oozed onto our ballot as the Proposition 102 that would destroy doctor-patient confidentiality and also require self-reporting. Few of my customers read this portion of the initiative; they only heard my words. After all, our contract contained no vow to tell the whole truth.

I realize that this is a weak defense, but not too many of us were fully informed, either. In brief, we were not briefed--just unleashed in our ignorance on an equally unaware populace.

“Would you like to sign the no-fault petition?”

What a scramble to scribble on this one! But there was no such thing as the “no-fault,” what with five different versions going around, three formulated by the insurers themselves.

“Have you signed the oil-drilling initiative yet?”

Again, with two conflicting petitions in circulation, many voters signed the Occidental document, thinking it was anti-oil.

I had smokers agreeing to tobacco taxes, nonsmokers willingly donating their names to the rival “Citizens Against Unfair Taxation.” The mother of an elected official cheerfully volunteered to endorse a piece of paper that might have rebounded on her son (maybe she knew that he deserved it). And would you believe attorneys signing to lower their own fees?

“I like the initiative process--it’s the only grass-roots movement left in politics,” said a citizen working her way through all six documents on display outside Ralphs. If she’d only known that the closest resemblance between grass and much of this garbage was the color of the sponsors’ profits.

Gradually, awareness of my role began to dawn, and I pulled out of the petition game before I felt doomed to eternal damnation.

But there is power in giving others the illusion of power. And I was still on this trip when I did my next marketing. I noted that my favorite pastry--large, moist, chocolate-chip muffins--had vanished from the bakery case. Instead, they sat in four-packs on a table. Since my weekly binge was one muffin, I confronted the manager. He told me that I could send a complaint to the main office, but it wouldn’t do much good. “Feel free, though,” he said, pointing to the postpaid cards at the check-stand. This man did not know what he was suggesting.

Within an hour, I had 30 complaint cards filled out at the bakery case. It was wilder than the petition-signing, with lots of controversy. “Why can’t you freeze the other three?” asked one man. “Because if I take home all four, I will eat them all at once.” The relative dangers of cholesterol, sugar and caffeine were also deftly discussed, the shoppers proving quite astute, their questions far more searching and cogent than those I’d heard in the matters of AIDS, no-fault and offshore drilling.

The upshot was the restoration of our right to purchase muffins one-at-a-time. The public had weighed the issue and the public will had prevailed.

It can also triumph on Tuesday if voters perform the act that they (and yours truly) disregarded when all those warring petitions got signed: Peruse before you choose.