Pollution standards, one of Schwarzenegger's key accomplishments, are being challenged. | AP Photo High hopes fade for Prop. 19

In a contest that pitted the legal establishment against activists that have long sought the measure’s approval, California voters snuffed out a proposal that would have legalized recreational marijuana for adults over age 21 and permit the state to tax commercial sale of the drug.

Projections in California and by the National Council of State Legislatures show the measure has gone down to defeat by a significant margin, with 54 percent voting no compared with a 46 percent yes vote with most precincts reporting – rejecting a low-budget but high-profile campaign that could have set a groundbreaking trend for the rest of the nation. Advocates had argued that the proposal, known as Proposition 19, would have provided the cash-strapped state with a significant revenue stream and helped ease the overburdened court system, while opponents contended the measure’s approval would have created legal and social chaos.


Proposition 19, which had drawn the attention of the country and the world, was perhaps the highest-profile of 160 ballot measures in 37 states – a host of initiatives on a range of issues, including taxes, government spending and social concerns. The results largely reflected the restless, fiscally anxious mood of the electorate.

Voters rejected a sales tax cut in Massachusetts, blocked a property tax cut in Colorado and turned back an upper income tax in Washington. But voters also delivered several strong, socially conservative messages, including in Oklahoma – where ban Islamic Sharia law is now banned, English is the state’s “common and unifying language,” and citizens must show a government-issued photo ID before casting a ballot – and in Rhode Island, which chose not to drop the word “plantation” from the state’s official name.

President Barack Obama’s signature health care initiative was also on the ballot in several states.

By far, the pot legalization initiative drew worldwide attention, but support for the measure had been sinking leading up to Tuesday’s ballot, according to recent polls. As late as Tuesday, Oakland City Attorney John Russo – a leading proponent of the pot plan – signaled its fading prospects during a Bay Area press conference.

“Even if we are cheated out of a win today, we have changed the debate from licentious hippies-versus-straight-arrow cops to one that recognizes this issue in all of its complexity," Russo said, according to the Los Angeles Times.

At the pro-legalization National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, also known as NORML, Deputy Director Paul Armentano took the long view in a statement on the group’s web site Wednesday, declaring that legal pot in America “is no longer a matter of ‘if,’ but a matter of ‘when.’” Societal change, he noted, “doesn’t happen overnight, and in this case we are advocating for the repeal of a criminal policy that has existed for over 70 years federally and for nearly 100 years in California.”

California already has a bustling, prescription-based medical marijuana industry, and outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican, last month signed a new law that essentially lowered the penalty for possession of less than an ounce of pot.

Jennie Drage Bowser, an expert on ballot initiatives at the National Council of State Legislators, said the pot legalization debate is far from over, despite Proposition 19’s decisive defeat: similar measures are likely to appear on state ballots in 2010, including Colorado and Nevada. Some analysts predict it could become a mobilizing issue for the youth vote, which in turn could help Obama's reelection prospects, but California results show young voters weren’t all that energized by the issue.

Besides the marijuana initiative, California voters by a wide margin defeated a proposal that would have effectively killed the state’s climate change law, one of Schwarzenegger’s marquee legislative accomplishments. Though Texas-based oil giants Tesoro Corp. and Velero helped bankroll the campaign to repeal the standards, they were outspent nearly three to one by Silicon Valley venture capitalists, Hollywood celebrities and environmentalists from across the country.

“Today, literally less than 24 hours later, we are beating Texas again,” Schwarzenegger boasted during a victory celebration at AT&T Park, the home of the World Series champion San Francisco Giants, who defeated the Texas Rangers for the baseball title. Schwarzenegger said vote represented an important signal on climate policy absent action from Washington, and the former action film star unveiled one of his signature lines to underscore the point.

"To anyone trying to take out our environmental laws, we say, 'Hasta la vista, baby,'" he said.

In the Southwest, voters in Arizona approved a measure rejecting the individual mandate provisions in the new federal health care law, Obama’s signature initiative. The outcome of a similar item in Colorado, however, went down to defeat, garnering 47.1 percent of the vote, with about 85 percent of precincts reporting Wednesday, according to the National Council of State Legislatures.

Rocky Mountain voters, however, rejected three spending-related measures: Amendment 60, which would have cut property taxes; Amendment 61, which would have prohibited all new state borrowing and limited local government borrowing; and Proposition 101, which would have reduced the state income tax rate and slapped restrictions on new taxes for cell phones and motor vehicles. And the electorate was on track to reject a vaguely worded proposal that would have extended constitutional rights "to every human being” starting at the moment of conception.

In Rhode Island, voters decisively agreed to continue to keep the official name, “State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantation,” which dates back to 1663 and references its central role in the slave trade – an offense to some who live in the state. And next door in Massachusetts, a provision to slash the state sales tax in half to three percent – a move that would have cost the cash-strapped state billions in revenue – was soundly defeated.

Carla Howell, who helped lead the campaign for a sales tax cut, said the initiative would be a "modest first step toward cleaning out billions and billions and billions of dollars in government waste." But during better economic times, voters overwhelmingly defeated similar measures in 2002 and 2008.

In the state of Washington, the measure to impose an income tax on people making $200,000 or $400,000 together managed to get only 34.4 percent of the vote, but voters approved an initiative to re-impose a two-thirds requirement in the legislature for tax increases, and nixed a tax hike on soda and junk food. In Missouri voters approved a version of their own tax question with Proposition A, which blocks any city from taxing the incomes of people who work within its jurisdictions. Both Kansas City and St. Louis rely on the tax for about a third of their revenue, but anti-tax advocates wanted it eliminated.

Besides rejecting Sharia law and making English the official language, Oklahoma voters turned back an initiative advanced by teachers’ unions that would have required the state to fund K-12 education based on an average of how much is spent in bordering states. Estimates show the proposal would increase spending between $900 million to $1.7 billion, but the initiative doesn't come with any guaranteed revenue stream.