History
During the Progressive era, the I&R movement publication Equity
described Delaware as one of 11 states where “the initiative sentiment is
all-powerful.”
Delaware’s extraordinarily difficult procedure for amending its state
constitution stacked the deck against I&R activists from the start. Under
the leadership of Wilmington’s Francis I. DuPont (of the well-known
chemical company family), I&R advocates persuaded the legislature to
schedule a statewide advisory referendum on whether I&R should be
added to the state constitution. In the 1906 election voters approved the
idea by a landslide six to one margin.
Instead of obeying this mandate, the legislature passed a bill giving
I&R rights to the city of Wilmington only. Voters there quickly used their
new rights to put five initiatives on the city’s ballot in early 1907. According
to Equity, it was “the first use of Direct Legislation on general questions of
public policy in an eastern city, and the first among Negro voters.”
Meanwhile, the Delaware Referendum League pressed on for statewide
I&R. Twelve years later, in 1919, they still did not have the necessary twothirds
majority of both houses of the legislature.
In the 1960s State Representative John P. Ferguson of the town of
Churchman’s Road sponsored an I&R bill, which he reintroduced in every
session. By the mid-1970s, as Speaker of the House, he engineered the
amendment’s passage by a vote of 33 to 1; it then sailed through the
state senate (14 to 3). The state constitution, however, required that a
constitutional amendment be approved by two thirds of both houses a
second time after the next election. This gave opponents, led by
Governor Pierre S. DuPont IV (who did not have the reformist notions of the
earlier DuPont), a chance to organize. On March 29, 1979, the house
defeated I&R by 22 to 6, ending all hopes for its passage. Ferguson,
frustrated by this defeat after so many years of effort, retired.
In 1980 the police and firefighters’ unions collected enough signatures
to put an initiative on the ballot in Wilmington, only to be told that there
was no longer an initiative procedure. The legislature had quietly passed a
municipal charter law in 1965 that contained no I&R provision, and this
law, state courts ruled, superseded the law that had given I&R to
Wilmington in 1907!
Between 1907 and 1987, the people of Delaware voted on only one
statewide ballot question, which the legislature put on the ballot in 1984:
should the state allow charities to sponsor gambling games to raise
money? Voters said “yes” by a 72 percent majority.
Excerpted from the Initiative & Referendum Almanac by M. Dane Waters.