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THE mourning dove may be protected in Ohio and cockfighting banned in Missouri after Tuesday's mid-term elections.
Some late-term abortions may be outlawed in Washington State and physician-assisted suicide may be legalised in Michigan. Sick people in four States may be able to smoke marijuana for medical purposes.
If these things, among others, happen, it will have nothing to do with the nervous and self-important candidates for State and federal office. It will be the work of ordinary American voters (along with a range of special-interest and lobby groups).
As the great carnival of representative democracy reaches a conclusion in the mid-term elections, citizens in some States will be making their own laws in what are touted as exercises in direct democracy.
For politicians and political parties, the stakes are high in the elections. Starting at the top, President Bill Clinton's chances of avoiding impeachment could depend on whether Democrats hold their ground or are routed in the House of Representatives.
There was good news for the White House yesterday, with a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showing 46 per cent of those most likely to vote saying they would support Democrats and 43 per cent Republicans.
However, polls here have a margin of error of around plus or minus 4 per cent, contests will be localised and the impact of the Republicans' $10 million anti-Clinton advertising blitz is impossible to calculate.
Like Australians, Americans are not fond of their politicians and people living beyond Washington DC are not fond of the power that resides in the national capital.
Washington is remote; politicians are out of touch with the people and too often in close touch with gun or tobacco or a plethora of other lobbies. So the system of "initiatives", of people voting into law (so long as proposals survive constitutional and legal challenges) something that has gained enough signatures to be put on the ballot paper, is very attractive, at first glance.
The lives of many people and those or their furry or feathered animal friends can be affected by a process that is the descendant of town meetings and the distant heir of Athenian democracy.
But nothing is perfect.
Money politics infects direct democracy just as it infects representative government.
Last year, the noble folk of the National Rifle Association rode into Washington State with saddlebags of money to defeat a responsible hand-gun safety initiative.
This year in California, Indian tribes spent $9 million to get the signatures necessary to qualify Proposition 5 for the ballot. Proposition 5 defends their right to run casinos on reservations.
Dispossessed and ravaged by disease and massacres, they were given about one-tenth of promised lands as reservations in remote and arid areas. Sound familiar?
But Indian casinos last year generated $1.4 billion in income and $632 million in profits which, under federal law, must be spent on housing, healthcare and tribal administration. Proposition 5 requires tribes with casinos to share revenue with tribes that do not have them.
Opposing Proposition 5 is a holy and unholy coalition church groups, politicians and labour unions, headed and bankrolled by Nevada casinos. The estimate is that supporters (mainly the tribes) and opponents (mainly casinos) will have spent $35 million and $25 million respectively on the Proposition 5 campaign.
In Washington State, Oregon, Nebraska, Nevada and the District of Columbia, voters will decide whether marijuana should be legal for medical uses. The argument in favour is that it helps ease the symptoms of sufferers of serious diseases, such as AIDS, cancer and multiple sclerosis. But this battle will not end with the ballot. Californian voters said yes in 1996; Washington has fought back in the courts. Barry McCaffery, in charge of the US administration's drug policy said: "Let's have none of this malarkey on marijuana smoking by cunning groups working to legalise drugs."
But supporters are now fighting on new ground, helped by funding from mega-rich George Soros and two philanthropic multi-millionaires.
Propositions can also set well-meaning groups in opposition. Proposition 4 in California, supported by a coalition of humane societies, seeks to ban steel-jawed traps used to capture muskrat, coyote and non-native fox. Trapping this way can be nasty.
But the Audubon Society argues that the traps are needed to control coyotes and foxes as predators that can decimate endangered populations of shore-nesting birds.
Direct democracy is not as simple as it seems.