There may be a GQ answer to this, so go ahead and toss the this thread over the fence if there is.
There are two groups of people for the purpose of this discussion. One group manages to get an item on the ballot stating that vehicle emission regulations shall not be more strict than those provisioned by the EPA.
The other group thinks that is way too much pollution and gets enough signatures to get their solution on the ballot. That emissions be limited to half what the EPA requires.
The polls have closed and both articles have passed by a 60% margin. Voters tend to be vapid. Now what? Are there any examples of this happening in the past?
This is just a made up example, but let’s presume that both sides pass the constitutional sniff test .
And yes, this is based on a current situation. I’m just re-framing it to try to avoid the built in acrimony and knee jerk responses of the actual arguments.
In California, if conflicting propositions both pass then the one receiving the most “yes” votes takes effect, according to the state constitution (so says Wikipedia).
The potential for this came up most recently (I believe) in November 2012 with Propositions 30 and 38, which contained conflicting tax-increase proposals. As it happened, only Prop 30 passed. (38 was pretty soundly defeated.)
In June 1988, California voters apparently did, in fact, approve conflicting propositions - 68 and 73 - regarding campaign finance regulation. 73 got more “yes” votes (and thus prevailed by the rule mentioned above), but there were apparently some disagreements over how to handle 68 because only some of its provisions conflicted with 73. It wound up in the state supreme court, which (to my lay reading) essentially said that the entire “losing-by-not-winning-as-big” proposition generally gets tossed. The opinion can be viewed here.
In Ohio, at the state level, the one with the most votes takes effect if they’re both the same level of law. (If one is a constitutional amendment and the other is just a statute, the amendment wins even if the conflicting statute is more popular.)
Local tax levies can be reduced by initiatives too, but only one of these petitions is allowed every five years, so there can’t be conflicts. (If the pro-levy side hears about plans to circulate petitions to eliminate a levy, they can move faster on a .000001% “reduction” and block the issue for up to five years.)
We could be looking at this very scenario here in Washington this year - we’ve got one initiative that would mandate background checks on gun sales, and another that would prohibit any background checks not required by federal law, and last I heard they were both doing well enough in the polls to pass. I’m not sure whether our state constitution addresses the issue, so if it happens I imagine the courts will have to decide.
We almost had the same thing happen a few years ago when there were two different initiatives to privatize the state liquor monopoly that would have done so in entirely different ways, but they both ended up failing by a narrow margin anyway. (We did eventually privatize liquor sales with a third initiative the following year.)