oters across the country ruled on a range of weighty issues yesterday, rejecting school vouchers in Michigan, requiring background checks for buyers at Colorado gun shows, launching a lottery in South Carolina, and striking down a 99-year-old Alabama law against interracial marriage.
Taxes, education, and ideological issues dominated the 204 ballot questions in 42 states, though some proposals dealt with topics as small-bore as adding fluoride to San Antonio's water or allowing Mendocino County, Calif., residents to own up to 25 marijuana plants for personal use.
Early returns showed Michigan voters rejecting a proposal that would have given vouchers worth $3,300 to children in school districts where less than two-thirds of students graduate. The defeat had national significance, said Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol, because the vouchers were aimed at poor children ''to reassure middle class people who are happy with their schools.''
Voucher supporters ''had been very much hoping that that kind of cautious wording would garner a majority,'' Skocpol said. California voters weighed a measure giving $4,000 vouchers to every student, regardless of income.
In Colorado, 69 percent of voters supported the gun-control measure with 20 percent of votes counted. Skocpol called it an indication of suburbanization and the state's strong reaction to the Columbine school massacre in April 1999.
Early returns showed 55 percent of South Carolinians approving the proposed state lottery to fund education.
Massachusetts handily passed a $1.5 billion income tax cut, and voters in Alaska, Colorado, Washington, and Oregon also considered various tax-slashing measures. Proponents argued that, after years of surpluses, citizens deserved a share of the spoils, while skeptics complained that the measures could be fiscally disastrous.
Political analysts said ballot proposals are ill-suited to deciding complex economic issues, because they isolate a single issue from the policy-making process and pose a simple yes or no question.
''What is the government not going to be able to do because it's reducing taxes?'' asked Steven Teles, an assistant professor of political science at Brandeis University. ''We expect politicians to set priorities, figure out not just whether something is a good idea, but whether it's a good idea compared to all the other things government could do. That's not something a ballot question can do.''
He said ballot questions are better suited to relatively simple declarations of moral principle - such as Massachusetts' proposal to strip the right to vote from convicted felons.
In Arizona, a measure to eliminate bilingual education was leading with 68 percent of the vote and 39 percent counted. It was funded by Ron Unz - the same man who spearheaded a similar proposition that passed in California in 1998.
Unz's repeat performance shows that ballot questions in many cases have become a vehicle for special interests, said Thomas Patterson, who heads the Vanishing Voter project at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.
''They've found that sometimes the initiative is a nice alternative to trying to lobby a legislature,'' he said.
Several states drafted ballot questions in response to Vermont's recent decision to legalize same-sex civil unions. Early returns showed Nevada and Nebraska easily passing measures amending their constitutions to define matrimony as the union of a man and a woman only. In Maine, with half the votes counted early today, voters appeared evenly divided on an attempt to support civil rights protections for gays and lesbians, a measure rejected three years ago.
In Alabama, early returns showed the measure allowing interracial marriage passing with 54 percent of the vote.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.
