Jeremy Cormack, age 15, of Dubuque, Iowa, for his question:
CAN YOU EXPLAIN A REFERENDUM?
A referendum is the practice of referring measures proposed or passed by a legislative body to the electorate for approval or rejection. The issue or proposal itself is sometimes called a referendum.
A petition referendum starts with the voters and says that a planned law must be put to a popular vote before it can go into effect. Signatures of from five to 10 percent of the registered voters are required in the United States to validate such a petition and assure that the referendum will be presented on an early ballot.
An optional referendum originates with a legislative body that wants to require a specific majority of the voters to accept a measure before it can become official.
Some governmental units also require so called statutory and constitutional referendums as part of the procedures through which some measures become valid. In this class are bond issues, constitutional amendments and taxes.
The movement toward direct legislation in the early 20th century reflected a popular disfavor against legislation corruption and also a distrust of representative democracy.
Twenty one of the states had adopted the referendum as a check on their state legislatures prior to 1920. Here are those states, listed in the order of their acceptance:
South Dakota, Utah, Oregon, Nevada, Montana, Oklahoma, Maine, Michigan, Missouri, Arkansas, Colorado, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Idaho, Nebraska, Ohio, Washington, North Dakota, Maryland and Massachusetts.
Since then, only Alaska has adopted such legislation.
Hundreds of American cities made provisions for direct legislation in municipal affairs after the 1898 San Francisco home rule charter authorized initiative and referendum.
The constitutionality of direct legislation was challenged in Oregon in 1912 where opponents held that it was an abridgement of the representative form of government.
Voting on the 1912 Oregon case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that initiative and referendum do not deny legislative bodies their proper functions.
Antecedents for referendum have been found in the democratic institutions of ancient Greece in the practices of Germanic tribes, in the town meetings of colonial New England and in the democracy of modern Switzerland.
The U.S. Constitution was referred to state conventions for approval and was thus ratified by a form of referendum.
State constitutions and their various amendments have generally been ratified by popular referendum. In 1825 the legislature of Maryland referred the question of a public school system to the voters and since then many similar questions have been so referred.
In 1898 South Dakota became the first state to amend its constitution to provide for optional and petition referendums.