Aren’t you a little ashamed? I am. I didn’t think much of the racetrack slot machine idea, but I thought I understood the issue when I voted last month. Now, with the malodorous information about the organization behind of the racino, the penurious cut going to the state and the way-off-track deal among the horse set to make it happen, all of which has emerged since Nov. 4, I know that I didn’t know. And I’ll bet you didn’t know, either.

But had we been able to set our own schedule for considering racino, had Capital Seven’s colorful legal history come out and its double-crossing of a secret agreement among racing officials to work together been revealed, had we all known that Maine would be getting one of the lowest profit percentages of any state from racino, the outcome of the vote very likely would have been different.

And had you and I really wanted to understand what racino would mean for Maine, we would have had legal analysts review the language of the bill, brought in experts to testify for and against it, had staff research what other states had done, asked various agencies how they would be affected, debated the issue among ourselves then gotten more information from the public before, finally, voting. Yes, I’m describing the legislative process, that unlovely, imperfect mechanism we use for proposed laws when we are not subjecting them to popularity contests.

Concerns about racino will be answered at least in part – Gov. Baldacci has a bill he’ll submit to the Legislature that makes some significant improvements, especially in oversight of the industry, and the Harness Racing Commission will vote carefully on licenses. A lot of additional work will be done for an issue that likely would be dead if what is known about it now were known six weeks ago. It’s too late to lament this but not too late to observe that the faulty and deceptive initiative process that made racino not only legal but legal in a sloppy, exploitative way remains to be used again and again.

Look over the major initiatives on the ballot for the last decade: forestry, term limits, gay rights, pub-lic financing of campaigns, abortion, physician-assisted suicide, tax reform and gambling. With the single exception of the suicide question, none of these issues was settled through the vote. Forestry practices continued to be fought over until millions of acres were sold to investors. Term-limit bills keep coming back in the Legislature because the citizen-initiated limits are such a flop. Both major-party gubernatorial candidates skipped public campaign financing last year. Abortion and gay rights still divide Maine as they divide the nation. Tax reform will be considered again next year (and likely the year after that). As for gambling – what is the message behind no to casinos, yes to racinos anyway? That gambling is okay only in proximity to manure?

This record of barely mitigated failure, of course, raises the question of jelly doughnuts and the governor’s strong conviction that bears may be shot while eating them. (It’s a dietary thing for him, I think.) The governor doesn’t know anything about the best way to shoot a bear; he relies on Inland, Fisheries and Wildlife for his information. In this, he is like most people – almost none of us know about bear hunting. But we don’t have the same sort of access to IF&W and won’t know much more about the topic by next November when we are likely to be voting on the subject, thanks to yet another proposed initiative.

What I know about bears is that Maine has about 23,000 of them and about 15,000 licensed bear hunters – including 7,500 Mainers -who kill about 3,700 bears annually. Eighty percent of the 3,700 are killed at bait sites, 10 percent are hunted by hounds and 2 percent are caught in snares or traps. Eight percent are killed by “other” means: stalked or the method was unreported. Maine had a bear bounty until 1957, which in that year was $15 a bear.

These numbers come courtesy of Jennifer Vashon, a black bear biologist at IF&W, and they will be accompanied by dozens more bits of information as the vote nears, but if you know only the numbers in the sentences above you will simultaneously know more than most voters and not nearly enough to decide the issue. I know one other thing concerning bears: The reason there are black bear biologists such as Ms. Vashon is because the workings of nature’s infinite number of moving parts are extraordinarily complex and not something to be understood through a vote. Certainly, IF&W’s record isn’t perfect, but it is better than the referendum record. (As for whether a bear is best shot while eating a doughnut or strolling toward a trout stream: Does a bear care? Bears might, however, have a lot to say about whether they prefer to be caught in a trap before being, as the euphemism goes, harvested.)

In the 60 years from 1910, when the first citizen initiative was placed on the ballot, until 1970, Maine voters were asked six times to decide initiatives. In the 33 years since then, they have been asked 34 times. So much of the initiative process has changed, from the ease and skill with which qualifying signatures are collected to the unwillingness of the Legislature to decide issues, that there isn’t a single reason for this increase. But the result, far from satisfying a public desire for political involvement, is a huge expenditure of time, goodwill, money and effort for the near-certain inability to resolve the question at hand.

Call me a sentimental Madisonian, but I like representative government, and think the initiative process should be reformed to reflect the ease with which signatures are now gathered. More, the idea of writing specific bills for ballot question, rather than just legislative direction, should be tossed out. The legislative process has an abundance of faults, but it’s what Maine will turn to now to solve the small disaster created by the racino vote.

Todd Benoit is the BDN editorial page editor.