Sad orphans and deprived puppies coming out of my arse

Having just experienced the ol' Scottish referendum back in blighty I've been asking about the voting rights over here in Cali. Well, it turns out that asking the people to vote on decisions is rather popular out here. Sure, citizens get to vote people into power, but locally we also get to suggest stuff and have all our fellow Californian Raisins vote on it too. For example, Proposition 41, which was voted on over the summer, is designed to support veterans through better housing provision. It kinda defeats the object of having voted representatives into power if you're going to let every pleb make a proposition and ask everyone else to vote on it, but it does feel like a more transparent way to manage the state. I appreciate the drawbacks (there are often lots of propositions on the ballot paper, and its hard enough to get people to vote normally, let alone when they've got to read a shit-ton of extra blurb, aside from the fact that people are dumb, so giving them the opportunity to make decisions that affect us all when you KNOW they haven't actually researched each proposition before ticking the box. I would imagine the winner is whoever uses the most puppies and sad orphans in their tv advertising campaigns. I've also been told that sometime propositions can contradict each other, so voting for both effectively means they cancel each other out), and if the voters believe they are getting a say in all the important governance details then they won't be too hot on picking up the bigger, shadier deals going on, but the 'matrix management' style feels quite nice - like the local political leaders actually respect the opinions of the local population and trust us to make well-informed and intelligent decisions. Thats a very naive idea, but making your plebs feel important is a smart move if you want to be reelected.

If you're interested, here is a summary of the current propositions on the ballot paper (its very interesting to actually read the details, especially once you've been bombarded with the tv adverts for a couple of weeks. I've got sad orphans and deprived puppies coming out of my arse, and I'm still none-the-wiser which way I should vote. If I could vote. Wait...I can't vote? Why the hell am I wasting my time with this shit. Days of our Lives is on.)