When looking at the Oklahoma ballot measures for this year, it’s interesting to see which ones were added through citizen petitions and which ones were dumped into a referendum by the legislature.
Citizens have asked to:
- Increase the sales tax to pay for education
- Make various minor crimes not be felonies
- Use the money saved by that to fund rehab programs
Meanwhile, the legislature has demanded that the plebs:
- Make sure the state can kill people as easily as possible
- Prevent anything that might interfere with the God-given right of factory farms to waterboard their animals
- Remove a prohibition on giving state money to churches
- Allow supermarkets to sell more liquor
I guess the people of Oklahoma will show us which things they actually care about tomorrow. There are a lot of bad things to be said about referendums, but at least they’re harder to gerrymander than a legislature.