By Elaine Monaghan, CQ Staff

Ordinarily this would be a big year for ballot initiatives with the presidential campaign dominating the headlines and emotionally charged issues now convulsing our politics, from the Iraq War to gasoline prices and housing, to last week’s decision from the California Supreme Court to strike down a prior state initiative banning gay marriage.

Instead, the number of initiatives scheduled for state ballots so far this year — just 13 — is far below the count in other presidential election years and continues a downward trend from the peak of 87 in 1996.

Number of General Elction Ballot Initiatives: Click Here to View Chart

There are a number of reasons for this decline, according to political scientists and those involved in some of the initiative campaigns. Although 24 states permit initiatives, many legislatures don’t like them because they short-circuit the usual lawmaking process and can wreak havoc with state budgets if, for instance, they mandate new programs or tax cuts. Some states have imposed ever-stricter requirements for initiatives.

And thanks in part to such strictures, petition-gathering drives to get initiatives on the ballot have become a growing private-sector business. Some companies even move from state to state, gathering signatures for so much per name. That process, in turn, has further exasperated state legislatures, some of which have enacted still stricter standards to keep commercial petition carpetbaggers out of their electoral systems. Many of the states that allow ballots initiatives have stipulated that workers circulating petitions live close to their target voter populations and some have shortened the time in which petitions can be circulated.

Fred Kimball, president of Kimball Petition Management and a veteran of the business in California, says the increase in the number of people voting absentee in his state has raised the number of signatures he must gather for any given initiative. But he also complains that California, like other states, has cut back on the number of places where his signature gatherers are allowed to solicit. By concentrating signature drives into a smaller geographic compass, he argues, the legislature increases the odds that they will yield multiple signatures from the same voters, thereby courting potential disqualification.

Industry insiders also complain that states are truncating deadlines, making their work harder, and more expensive, to carry out. Florida, for example, recently amended its constitution to move up the deadline for signature verification to February 1 rather than 90 days before the general election.

Some interest groups and individuals have turned the initiative process into national campaigns. Ward Connerly is a former University of California Regent who is trying to eliminate affirmative action programs in five states — Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma — with what he calls civil rights initiatives. In Colorado, groups supporting affirmative action are challenging nearly 69,000 of the 129,000 signatures gathered on his behalf. “Jesus signed the petition twice,” says Craig Hughes, spokesman for one such group. “We had Jesus, and then we had The Lord Jesus, who was from Golden, Colorado.”

Some of those in the petition industry, like Andrew Chavez, the owner of Petitions Partners in Scottsdale, Ariz., have called for self-policing, though that sometimes comes with a hint of self-interest. Chavez says the problems come mostly from national companies: “The national approach does invite fraud. People move in and move out and don’t care what kind of stir it makes, because they’re not going to be there in three months.”

Some states have tried more regulation. In Colorado, House Majority Leader Alice Madden, a Democrat, has introduced legislation to require more disclosure from those gathering signatures and bar certain felons from participating, notably sex criminals and people with past fraud convictions.

But the larger private companies in the petition business are happy to see such crackdowns, since they will likely stimulate demand for their services. "Make it harder, please," says Kimball. "It's already impossible to get grass-roots issues on the ballot. The harder it gets, the more people have to turn to us."