Voters in New Jersey and Utah defeated historic ballot issues dealing with stem cell research and school vouchers in early November.
New Jersey citizens delivered a blow to embryonic stem cell research when pro-lifers teamed up with anti-debt and anti-tax voters to defeat a $450 million bond proposal that would have borrowed money to fund the controversial research.
It was a surprising outcome for the ballot question, which led in pre-election polls but lost on election night, 53–47 percent. New Jersey became the first state to defeat an embryonic stem cell proposal at the ballot box, after California voters in 2004 passed a $3 billion research initiative and Missouri voters in 2006 OK’d a constitutional amendment protecting embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning. Those votes also were close.
Democratic Gov. Jon Corzine had promoted the proposal heavily, even spending $150,000 to $200,000 of his own money to help fund ads featuring Michael J. Fox, an embryonic stem cell research supporter.
But opponents fought back, with the New Jersey Right to Life recording a commercial featuring a paralyzed man in a wheelchair urging a vote against the proposal, saying such research had yet to produce any cures and that borrowing money was irresponsible, especially since private enterprise has not seen the research worthy to fund to such a degree. Pro-lifers said they supported stem cell research as long as it didn’t involve embryos.
The fact that the state already has $30 billion in debt no doubt led thousands of voters to oppose the proposal, known as Question 2. The fine print stated that sales and property taxes could have been used to pay off the bonds.
Although the initiative would have banned reproductive cloning, it apparently would have allowed funding for therapeutic cloning — that is, so-called “clone-and-kill” research that clones embryos simply to destroy them and harvest the stem cells.
In Utah, voters killed the nation’s first statewide school voucher program that promised tax dollars for private tuition — no matter how much a family earned or whether children were in bad schools. According to The Associated Press (AP), this was the first vote on vouchers in the United States since 2000, when voters in Michigan and California rejected efforts to subsidize private schools.
Experts had said a green light in Utah could have led to similar programs in Texas, Arizona, Louisiana and elsewhere, the AP reported. However, no voucher program has ever passed in a public vote. According to the National School Boards Association, there have been 10 referendums on voucher programs since 1972, and each time, the vouchers were voted down by an average of 68.6 percent.
The program would have granted $500 to $3,000, depending on family income, for each child sent to private school. The voucher law won approval by one vote in the Republican-controlled Legislature in February. Before it could take effect, opponents gathered more than 120,000 signatures to force a referendum. With millions of dollars from a national teachers union, they were able to persuade residents to say no with 62 percent voting against the measure. (Compiled from wire services)
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