> Can you realistically have a vote to stop paying taxes or to smoke weed?
This is inevitably going to turn into a quibble about whether representation and/or the electoral college constitutes "true" democracy, so I'm going to head that off by amending my previous comment to be at the state level (rather than the federal level). There's several states that had ballot measures on tax increases and/or marijuana legalization, and failed, for example:
This is inevitably going to turn into a quibble about whether representation and/or the electoral college constitutes "true" democracy, so I'm going to head that off by amending my previous comment to be at the state level (rather than the federal level). There's several states that had ballot measures on tax increases and/or marijuana legalization, and failed, for example:
https://ballotpedia.org/Arizona_Marijuana_Legalization,_Prop...
https://ballotpedia.org/Missouri_Proposition_C,_Medical_Mari...
https://ballotpedia.org/Nevada_Marijuana_Initiative,_Questio...
In those cases it would be strange to characterize the dissenters as not being "forced" into anything, even if it was a collective decision.