Do I trust you?

On monday we discused some of the possible reasons for the failure of initiative 1 in this last election despite it's seemingly high support. I remember talking with some students from California about this intiatve and thought their insights were interesting. They supported the idea of preserving clean water and open space(who wouldn't), but that they were skeptical of the method. In California, intiatives, a form of direct democracy, have basicly taken over the policy forming process. Some say the problem with this is that it bypasses the checks and balance built in to the normal form of legeslation. Another problem is the sheer number of initiatives on the ballots. Voters, with all thier incentives to be uninformed, rarely know anything about the intiative untill they step into the voting booth. As a result many initiatives that pass are found to be unconstitutional by the state legislature and then dropped. For more information on California's initiative process go to http://www.cainitiative.org/pdf/initiativereportfinal07feb2002.pdf

IT is my understanding that it is much harder to get an initiative on the ballot in Utah, but the problem of uninformed voters directly passing law kind of scares me.