Election '82: Freezing Nukes, Banning Bottles

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After last week's voting, Pat McGuigan, editor of a newsletter called the Initiative and Referendum Report, had a ready explanation for the upsurge of interest in direct action by the voters. Said he: "People are dissatisfied with representative government. More and more of them feel elections don't mean anything and that interest groups dominate at the legislative level of law-making." Such groups sometimes dominate direct voting too, as evidenced by their spending to defeat bans on handguns and disposable bottles. Even so, in the years to come, those complicated and wordy measures on the nation's ballots seem likely to proliferate as voters attempt to take more matters into their own hands. —By Richard Stengel. Reported by Anne Constable/Washington and William R. Doerner/San Francisco