One of our local county assessors was found to have been using fees paid for services in her office for such things as coffee and doughnuts for her staffers instead of properly putting the money into the county general fund.
She was just re-elected with about a 60-40 majority.
Some people in Santa Cruz, California, the retarded town where I attended college, tried to make it a hate-free zone in 2000. I graduated earlier that year and was gone by the time of the election, but for months everyone I knew couldn’t stop rolling their eyes about it. (BTW, Santa Cruz is already a nuclear-free zone. They have signs up when you enter the town.) Apparently they screwed something up and it didn’t end up on the ballot after all, but I heard that later the city council voted to make it a hate-free zone anyway. Yaaaaay.
They also raised the minimum wage to $11/hour. Not sure how that went over.
For a while in our state, certain business organizations tried to get laws passed excluding everyone outside their organization from doing business in the state. (Think of funeral homes and such.) These were considered so bad by the legislators (already about the most venal in the US) that instead of passing the bills they put them on the ballot. The logic was “Well, we tried to get them passed but the voters didn’t go for it. Where’s my [del]bribe[/del] campaign donation?”
Everybody, everywhere would tell voters not too vote for them. Newspapers, everyone on TV and radio. They were considered such poor candidates for passing that ads weren’t even made to promote them.
Yup. They all passed. The state legislature doesn’t do that anymore.