Let’s make one thing perfectly clear; if you didn’t vote on Tuesday, you don’t get to complain. If anything related to the California Governor’s office, AB 53 or AB 54 pisses you off, too bad, because unless you had a damn good reason for not voting, you gave up your right to criticize. So shut up.

Now that we’ve gotten that off our collective chests…

You just had to know this whole recall mess was going to be a bad idea from the get-go. And what a nasty precedent it has set. Now every piece of legislation and every legislator that someone with plenty of money and time on their hands doesn’t like becomes the center of an endless political tug-of-war.

What happened? Theoretically, California’s referendum process is a way of increasing individual participation in the governing process by allowing voters to put issues on the ballot and vote on them. In theory, this would allow an informed populace to take a direct role in determining the laws under which they live, with every viewpoint allowed an equal voice under the “one man (and woman), one vote system.

Doesn’t that sound nice?

Of course, it’s not what’s actually going on.

It might work if we had 100 percent voter participation, or even 90 percent, or even … you get the idea. But we don’t. What we have is a disillusioned, apathetic populace that, more often than not, doesn’t even bother to vote, or votes for people who aren’t even running for office (do the names Peter Ueberroth and Arianna Huffington ring a bell?). So we’re left with people like Darryl Issa: a rich, conservative Republican who decided he doesn’t like California’s duly-elected Democratic governor, so he spent a lot of money and time doing what he could to remove him from office — start with the referendum process, add intensive, directed marketing and 75 million taxpayer dollars and what do you get? The recall, of course, and a great big headache with the promise of many more to come.

What is wrong with us? No, life isn’t all about politics. But it certainly makes a difference in everybody’s life. Yes, it was very tempting to see the whole recall fiasco as a big joke, but look where laughing has gotten us. We’re $75 million deeper in debt, we’re a (justifiable) laughing stock, and once again, that glamorous Hollywood glitter has triumphed over substance and proven ability. Once again, California has elected a flashy actor as governor. “He seems nice enough,” people keep saying. Of course he does, he’s an actor! Do we need to remind you of what happened last time California elected a he-man Republican actor as governor? Ronald Reagan, remember? Eight years of cold war, slashed funding for social programs, big benefits for big business, and lots of people crowding into the closet as the whole country took a hard turn to the ideological right.

As if that prospect weren’t disturbing enough, now we can look forward to the possibility of repeating the recall nightmare every time someone gets their knickers in a twist over something an elected official does. And that means they will no longer start campaigning for re-election halfway through their first term. Instead, they will be campaigning continuously from the moment they are elected to office. You think you hate the flood election season rhetoric now? Just wait until you start hearing it year-round. And since it’s usually conservatives who head to the polls when they’re angry, that means we’re in for some rocky times. After all, it’s the conservative hardliners who are known for their penchant for busing hordes of little elderly ladies to the polls on election day to vote for those nice people who gave them a lift. Meanwhile, far too many liberals are off somewhere muttering about the pointlessness of it all instead of voting.

It’s time to rethink the referendum process. Too few people bother to vote at all, and of those who do, even fewer have any real idea what they’re voting for. Let’s face it; on the whole, we’re just not well enough informed to take part in setting legislation. And how could we be? The ballpark initiative alone weighed in at around 900 pages. Who has time to wade through all that and come to an informed, well-reasoned decision on it?

Oh wait, that’s right, the people we elected into office – that’s their job. That is why we elect people. Not to win a popularity contest, not to second and third guess every decision they manage to make on the off chance that someone will take issue with it and start collecting signatures for a recall referendum. We elected the members of our legislature because we expect them to be qualified to take part in the process of legislation. If they do a bad job then, when election time comes around again, we vote them out of office and give the job to someone else. We elected Christine Kehoe because we trust her to have our best interests in mind when she votes in the legislature. She hires a staff to go through the mountains of paper involved and spends her time making sure she understands every initiative and its potential ramifications before she votes on it. That’s why she’s there. We need to let Kehoe, and others like her, do their job.

It’s time to stop pretending we’re qualified to do their job for them and get rid of the referendum.