Voters do not like long ballots. Initiatives benefit one philosophy. People vote selfishly. Many initiatives are bad ideas. Initiatives place extraneous material in the constitution.
Initiatives create tyranny of the majority.
Initiatives make the legislature unnecessary. For various reasons, Polhill finds none of these allegations against the initiative process persuasive. He notes that the number of initiatives rarely reaches one percent of the number of bills considered by a legislature. Still, criticism persists, sometimes from surprising quarters. On October 7, for instance, when a federal appellate court struck down California s term limits law, using the reasoning that voters did not realize the 1990 initiative barred legislators for life from seeking their old offices once they were forced out, strong language about the initiative process was used in the decision.