History
It is ironic that New Jersey, the state where the national initiative and
referendum movement originated, never adopted provisions for I&R.
Certainly it was not for lack of enthusiasm among New Jersey’s I&R
supporters, including AFL founder Samuel Gompers. At that time the New
Jersey branch of the federation, which endorsed I&R, represented 20,000
workers.
In December 1900 the Direct Legislation Record published the gloomy
prediction of Clarence T. Atkinson that the reform had “no chance of
success until the evil of bribery is abolished.” By 1907, after 14 years of
effort, the New Jersey Direct Legislation League had despaired of passing
an amendment to give voters actual lawmaking power and instead
sponsored a bill allowing voters to put non-binding, advisory initiatives on
the state ballot. That proposal also failed again and again. In 1911 the I&R
movement’s journal Equity explained New Jersey’s failure in terms of its
being “the Trust State”: the nation’s biggest businesses were chartered
there, and they were the major source of opposition to I&R.
A second attempt to adopt I&R was made at the state’s 1947
constitutional convention with the strong support of organized labor, but
again without success. Interest revived, however, during the mid-1970s,
when the state chapters of Common Cause and the League of Women
Voters began supporting I&R.
In 1981 initiative advocates in won state senate approval of an I&R bill
by a 30 to 3 vote, but Democratic Party leaders in the assembly kept the
bill bottled up in committee. The same thing happened in 1983: the bill
received 32 to 4 approval in the senate but no vote at all in the assembly.
In 1986, I&R advocates, led by Republican assemblyman (and former
state Common Cause director) Richard Zimmer, pushed their bill through
the assembly for the first time, but lost in the senate.
Excerpted from the Initiative & Referendum Almanac by M. Dane Waters.