The Jersey City news. (Jersey City [N.J.]) 1889-1906, 1894-03-13
The Preposterous Referendum Scheme.

Inc Pr6pOStcrOuS ft~clSrcuuuth CChChhC'
One of tine absurdest proposals
ever made by the crank element is
that of legislation by the people at
large, known as the referendum. The
cranks who advocate this monstrosity
want to embody it as a section of the
Constitution. The principle is that
all laws passed by the Senate and AS
sembly are to be submitted to the
people, those which affect the whole
State, to all the voters; those which
affect only a locality, to the people
resident therein. After stating this
highly humorous idea, the draft OF
the proposed article goes on to direct
that the Senate and Assembly shall
at once pass laws to render the idea
operative.
You see these cranks and fools nev
look further ahead than their noses.
A crochet seizes their added brains,
and they 90 about bowling and
shrieking for it without ever stopping
to consider whether the thing is pos
sible. In the present case, it is about
as possible to submit the legislation
necessary for this State to a vote OF
the people, as it would be to hold a,
National convention of doctors on
every case of grip that turned up.
In this State, we pass, on an aver
age, three hundred statutes a year.
Let as grant that some of these are
unnecessary, it a hardly be ques-
toned that still the ~exigencies of the
State would call for a couple of hun
dred new laws every year. Further,
as the members of the Senate and As
sembly would no longer be under the
least responsibility for legislation,
they would probably pass a vastly
greater number of laws than they do
now, and leave the people to deter
mine whether they wanted them or
not. Thus we are compelled to esti-
mate that, under the referendum sys-
TEN, a minimum of two hundred laws
with an indefinite maximum would
have to be submitted to popular vote
every year; say a minimum of one
hundred and fifty in any given To-
calitv.
Now, how would you do itf Would
you hold from a hundred and fifty
separate elections up to say four hum
dred3 Or would you have a couple
of hundred separate ballots and a
similar number of boxes, one for each
law. OF would you sprint all on n
blanket ballot2 How long would you
allow a man to prepare his ballot,
and what means would you allow him
of hastily Identifying the laws he
wished to vote afirmatively, and those
he wished to vote negatively upon.
The collected laws OF any year make
volumes offrom five to v hundred
pages. They make from 100 to $50
columns of a newspaper such as this,
printed in the finest type. Some of
the most important laws are very
long, exceedingly complex and clothed
in verbiage which conveys no idea TO
the average unframed mind. How
would you propose to insure any sort
of intelligent voting on the statutes?
How, for instance, would you settle
the case of a man who can't read at
all, or the case of the man who is too
lazy or too busy to read six hundred
pages of a law book? How many of
the cranks themselves, by the way,
ever read the statutes of a session
through from end to end9
The thing is almost as absolute,
dire humbug as the scheme for nomi-
mating candidates by popular vote at
primary elections, and that is stating
its nonsensicality in the superlative
degree.