11 ms·

Direct Democracy in Switzerland

84 points by kyleblarson 8y ago

foolzcrow 8y ago
The South always had enough votes to keep slavery legal. Direct democracy is literally mob rule.
stretchwithme 8y ago
I've been a fan of the Swiss system for quite a while. The citizens don't merely get to make public comment on what the government does; they can create a referendum and overrule it. They use proportional representation too, as do many democracies. And the cantons are cool. A part of a canton can leave the canton, join another or make a new one. It rarely happens, but the fact that it can probably helps keep the canton government on its toes. And canton boundaries are probably more organic than many of the US states.
- shafyy 8y ago
  I don't know the actual laws, but I would argue that a canton leaving and joining another canton is as easy/hard as it's in the US. Source: I'm Swiss.
  - Kalium 8y ago
    Making a state from part of another state requires the consent of both state legislatures and Congress (Article IV, Section 3). Pretty much any border change of a state requires at the approval of both Congress and all affected state legislatures. Note that this leaves executive branches out entirely. Not sure how it works in Switzerland, though a quick look at Wikipedia suggests plebiscites can be involved. National plebiscites don't really exist in the US.
    - stretchwithme 8y ago
      If my reading of 1999 constitution is correct, the canton(s) involved must approve and a majority of Swiss voters and a majority of the cantons. It does not have to be approved by the Federal Assembly. "Any change in the number of Cantons requires the consent of the citizens and the Cantons concerned together with the consent of the People and the Cantons." https://www.admin.ch/opc/en/classified-compilation/19995395/index.html https://www.admin.ch/opc/en/classified-compilation/19995395/... Not sure that is any easier than getting Congress to approve such a change. But such changes have happened in Switzerland and the only one that's happened in the US was due to most of Virginia seceding at the start of the Civil War. Of course, Switzerland is much older.
      - microtherion 8y ago
        But such changes have happened in Switzerland Exactly ONE new canton got created by a referendum process. It took 30 years to get to a referendum, accompanied by everything from acts of terror to threats of foreign intervention. And today, 40 years later, we're still trying to sort out the exact boundaries. Surely, it was pretty successful by international separatist standards, but it still was a hard slog. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_separatism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_separatism
        stretchwithme 8y ago
        Not easy at all, but still beats most civil wars. Thanks for pointing this out. Is this where Jurassic Park happened :-)
        shafyy 8y ago
        Yeah exactly that's my point. The parent made it sound like it happens every other year.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- wbl 8y ago
  How did that work out for California?
- _nalply 8y ago
  There was a plebiscite for a small city in the Jura mountains whether they want to stay in the Canton of Bern or change to the Canton of Jura. The city was in favor of changing. However some irregularities were discovered and the outcome declared invalid by judge. The city has been ordered to redo the plebiscite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moutier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moutier (please read the ninth paragraph or the last one before the section Geography)
eloff 8y ago
I think you'd have to fix the educational system in the US before you could have meaningful direct democracy. Any form of democracy, be it representational or direct is only as good as the people that make it up. The more directly you empower the people, the more directly their opinions and ideas will be expressed in the country's laws. The average person is woefully prepared to judge laws on their merits, be it economic laws or otherwise. They're arguably better prepared in Switzerland, but still not great compared to experts in the field. If you look to Africa, you can see what a mess you can make when your average person is not educated well at all. Democracy is often described as the best of a lot of bad options, but there's also a big variance in how well it works.
- door5 8y ago
  Africa is a mess because of relentless Western imperialism, not because of "too much democracy". It's rather elitist to say that more educated (AKA richer) citizens make "better" political decisions than less educated (AKA poorer) citizens. They both make decisions with relatively similar amounts of clarity in their respective class interests.
  - virmundi 8y ago
    I'm sorry, but this is just foolish. It's like saying, "It's elitist to say that more educated engineers make better products than less educated one." One of the reasons the US wanted to have people read, why we made it part of public school, is to have an informed, i.e. educated, citizenry.
    - myrryr 8y ago
      I'm glad that your political system is working well, not full of corruption, and that you have bright leaders who have a deep understanding of matters of education.
    - door5 8y ago
      Here you assume that both engineering and politics are purely objective sciences, where one's cultural background is irrelevant, but that is true in neither case. The fact that silicon valley is mostly white men of a certain age and economic status has a big effect on what gets built, and what doesn't get built -- think about elon musk's obsession with tunnels and car transportation and disdain for public transit. Regardless how you feel, tht isn't just an objective rational problem, the fact that Elon isn't someone who has ever taken or relied upon public transit matters. The same is true if social policy -- it's easy to look at the voting decisions of people without college degrees as "stupid" and "uninformed", but I would challenge you to think about how their actions are just as informed and reasoned as people in your demographic, they just come to a different conclusion because of their economic and cultural background. "Education" is often a proxy for race or class in political discussions. I would argue that policy (and engineering) is much more about values than knowledge -- is housing a human right? Is healthcare a human right? Should the United States acknowledge and repair the damages of slavery and systemic racism? Should we accept asylum seekers? Everyone may have compelling, reasoned arguments to these questions, but it is naive to say only college educated specialists have the correct ones.
csours 8y ago
Change my view: This only works with small, homogenous populations.
- intellectronica 8y ago
  Homogeneous?! Switzerland is a confederacy and home to three distinct linguistic/cultural populations.
  - cyann 8y ago
    4 official languages: German, French, Italian and Romansh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romansh_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romansh_language
  - labster 8y ago
    Compared to the United States, this is very homogeneous.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - buboard 8y ago
      US people seem to underestimate how homogeneous the US is. It's quite a thing to know that you won t have to change habits when you travel across.
      - toasterlovin 8y ago
        I guess you haven't visited the East or West Coasts of the U.S.?
        projektir 8y ago
        I've moved from the East coast to the West coast and there's basically no difference in my view.
        8y ago
virmundi 8y ago
To repeat: The South always had enough votes to keep slavery legal. Direct democracy is literally mob rule. The reason the Constitution had the 3/5 phrasing for slaves is not that the ciswhite males thought blacks were less than people, they didn't want the South to get even more votes through their slaves than they already had. They knew the only way to get rid of the peculiar institution was to vote it out (or go to war, but they didn't want that). This is this the reason that the Founders didn't pick it. It is mob rule. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-friedman/the-founding-fathers-never-meant-to-create_b_13051196.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-friedman/the-founding-... The general concept of the Republic is that it balances the terrors that all other governments impose. Through the representatives, the people trained in statecraft, the passions of the masses should be calmed. It's the hardest to corrupt. It's the most likely to survive deaths. If you had a perfect king, giving him absolute power is a no-brainer. The trouble is a) that's near impossible, and b) when he dies how do prevent a non-perfect king from ruling absolutely? We see this with budget deficits in California. Direct democracy allows ballot initiatives without the need to secure funding. The masses vote for wonderful, expensive things, but they don't say how to pay. The leaves the general budget scrambling for scraps to cover the cost.
- jrobn 8y ago
  Except when the voting mechanisms that elect those representatives is badly broken and easily gamed, i.e. gerrymandering districts in the US. There are a lot of things that are a problem with the way the US government is set up. 1) The Senate is a questionable insitution born out of a bad compromise with the size of colonies at the time. 2) Our average House Representive is representing 375,000 people. It should be much, much lower than that. 3) There are NO spending limits on political campaigns and that the US considers corporations as “people”. 4) Supreme Court judges have life terms. They should have longer terms than senators but not for life (15 years?). The people of a nation change, yet parties can push through politcally motivated or judges that strike down or uphold laws that maybe the population doesn’t want anymore! 5) It’s become almost impossible to change the constitution with Amendments due to only having two parties and the fall of bi-partisanship.
  - 8y ago
buboard 8y ago
I like that they also vote whether they want taxes: https://lenews.ch/2018/03/02/switzerland-votes-this-weekend-on-federal-tax-and-broadcasting-fee/ https://lenews.ch/2018/03/02/switzerland-votes-this-weekend-...
swissthrowaway 8y ago
Direct democracy in Switzerland is a good way to distract the population with futile issues ( https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/24/europe/cow-horn-referendum-scli-intl/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/24/europe/cow-horn-referendu... ) while the oligarchy does its dirty business ( https://www.reuters.com/article/us-swiss-grenades/swiss-set-to-ease-arms-export-rules-despite-syria-grenades-report-idUSKCN1LJ1I9 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-swiss-grenades/swiss-set-... ), and - at the same time - giving the impression that the people are actually in control, but they're not. The parliament can and will interpret people's will ( https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/switzerland-immigration-referendum-result-reduce-water-down-protect-eu-relationship-migrant-a7476801.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/switzerland-... ).
- Leherenn 8y ago
  On the last issue, the problem is that it's pretty much impossible to enact the exact people's will because it is not consistent. Just have a look at the latest vote on EU ties. They want to keep the economic benefits but to restrict foreign workers, except the EU is never going to accept that. It's like the British, they want the cake and eat it too. The people can have their dream and vote on whatever they want and express themselves, and that's great, but at some point someone has to go back to reality and make compromises. I would argue it is the parliament job to transform the people's will into realistic laws. At this point, the parliament could either water it down or go full Brexit. The latest vote just confirmed it took the "correct" decision by watering it down.
  - repolfx 8y ago
    The Swiss people's will is entirely consistent. There is nothing strange or unusual about having both immigration controls and trade. That is in fact entirely normal anywhere outside of Europe. The EU bureaucracy's near-fanatical, unbending approach to what it wants doesn't make anything different "inconsistent", "a dream", "unrealistic" or "not reality". That's the sort of attitude that is inflaming serious anti-EU tensions across all of Europe and will eventually cause either the EU to crush European democracy itself, or the EU to collapse chaotically. Indeed, the "watering down" you mention was a violation of the Swiss constitution and has led to quite serious political tensions, including a new referendum that's trying again to force the political class to actually implement referendums the EU doesn't like.
sischoel 8y ago
One should also consider that the Swiss people refused to grant women voting rights on a federal level in 1959 and only did so in 1971. One region in Switzerland still refused to grant them this right until they where corrected by the Swiss supreme court in 1991. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_Switzerland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_Switzerl...
- swissthrowaway 8y ago
  In Switzerland, women are still second-class citizens. They're supposed to stay home and raise the kids. Day cares are full with the kids of expats, Swiss kids to the playground with their mothers.
  - detcader 8y ago
    That's really sad to hear. Any pointers to English-speaking and/or prominent Swiss women's rights voices would be appreciated!
    - solemsigne 8y ago
      I assume this phenomenon has more to do with the fact that it is not required for two people to work in a household to comfortably sustain it in Switzerland, which allows the women the option to stay at home with adolescents. Maybe they in fact have more rights.
      - izacus 8y ago
        No they don't, there's just a lot of systemic issues that discourage mothers from working - from the insane costs of daycare, increased tax burden for working couples, school system which sends children home during the day and a complete lack of motherhood leave and job guarantees m
  - cylinder 8y ago
    Ah yes poor women spending time with their children rather than slaving away pushing meaningless paper for MegaCorp. Shit life eh?
namlem 8y ago
Not really the best way of going about this sort of thing. Voting in elections and referendums is fraught problems and unhealthy incentive structures. Sortition, via the formation of citizens' assemblies, is a superior model of democracy. Leaving decisions up to a representative random sample of the population allows the assembly to carefully consider and debate issues and form a consensus. Whereas elected officials are incentivized not to compromise or plan for the long term and voters are usually poorly informed.
somada141 8y ago
I lived in Zurich, Switzerland for ca. 5 years and I am a huge fan of their system. One may argue that the very same system allowed for seemingly ‘insensitive’ or ‘misguided’ legislation. In my time there (2009-2014) a referendum allowed the Swiss to preclude minarets from being erected, while another referendum was voted against allowing the Swiss to freely smoke in public areas such as train stations (last I checked you can still smoke in the Zurich Hauptbahnhof platforms right up to entering your train). Nonetheless, while I don't agree with some of the decisions made, democracy is literally about granting the citizenry the ability to rule themselves and IMHO this is how it should be. Granted, such a system may lead to bigoted decision-making but if that's what the people want it should be what they get.

84 points by kyleblarson 8y ago

The South always had enough votes to keep slavery legal. Direct democracy is literally mob rule.

I've been a fan of the Swiss system for quite a while. The citizens don't merely get to make public comment on what the government does; they can create a referendum and overrule it. They use proportional representation too, as do many democracies. And the cantons are cool. A part of a canton can leave the canton, join another or make a new one. It rarely happens, but the fact that it can probably helps keep the canton government on its toes. And canton boundaries are probably more organic than many of the US states.

shafyy 8y ago
I don't know the actual laws, but I would argue that a canton leaving and joining another canton is as easy/hard as it's in the US. Source: I'm Swiss.
- Kalium 8y ago
  Making a state from part of another state requires the consent of both state legislatures and Congress (Article IV, Section 3). Pretty much any border change of a state requires at the approval of both Congress and all affected state legislatures. Note that this leaves executive branches out entirely. Not sure how it works in Switzerland, though a quick look at Wikipedia suggests plebiscites can be involved. National plebiscites don't really exist in the US.
  - stretchwithme 8y ago
    If my reading of 1999 constitution is correct, the canton(s) involved must approve and a majority of Swiss voters and a majority of the cantons. It does not have to be approved by the Federal Assembly. "Any change in the number of Cantons requires the consent of the citizens and the Cantons concerned together with the consent of the People and the Cantons." https://www.admin.ch/opc/en/classified-compilation/19995395/index.html https://www.admin.ch/opc/en/classified-compilation/19995395/... Not sure that is any easier than getting Congress to approve such a change. But such changes have happened in Switzerland and the only one that's happened in the US was due to most of Virginia seceding at the start of the Civil War. Of course, Switzerland is much older.
    - microtherion 8y ago
      But such changes have happened in Switzerland Exactly ONE new canton got created by a referendum process. It took 30 years to get to a referendum, accompanied by everything from acts of terror to threats of foreign intervention. And today, 40 years later, we're still trying to sort out the exact boundaries. Surely, it was pretty successful by international separatist standards, but it still was a hard slog. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_separatism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurassic_separatism
      - stretchwithme 8y ago
        Not easy at all, but still beats most civil wars. Thanks for pointing this out. Is this where Jurassic Park happened :-)
      - shafyy 8y ago
        Yeah exactly that's my point. The parent made it sound like it happens every other year.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
wbl 8y ago
How did that work out for California?
_nalply 8y ago
There was a plebiscite for a small city in the Jura mountains whether they want to stay in the Canton of Bern or change to the Canton of Jura. The city was in favor of changing. However some irregularities were discovered and the outcome declared invalid by judge. The city has been ordered to redo the plebiscite. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moutier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moutier (please read the ninth paragraph or the last one before the section Geography)

eloff 8y ago

I think you'd have to fix the educational system in the US before you could have meaningful direct democracy. Any form of democracy, be it representational or direct is only as good as the people that make it up. The more directly you empower the people, the more directly their opinions and ideas will be expressed in the country's laws. The average person is woefully prepared to judge laws on their merits, be it economic laws or otherwise. They're arguably better prepared in Switzerland, but still not great compared to experts in the field. If you look to Africa, you can see what a mess you can make when your average person is not educated well at all. Democracy is often described as the best of a lot of bad options, but there's also a big variance in how well it works.

door5 8y ago
Africa is a mess because of relentless Western imperialism, not because of "too much democracy". It's rather elitist to say that more educated (AKA richer) citizens make "better" political decisions than less educated (AKA poorer) citizens. They both make decisions with relatively similar amounts of clarity in their respective class interests.
- virmundi 8y ago
  I'm sorry, but this is just foolish. It's like saying, "It's elitist to say that more educated engineers make better products than less educated one." One of the reasons the US wanted to have people read, why we made it part of public school, is to have an informed, i.e. educated, citizenry.
  - myrryr 8y ago
    I'm glad that your political system is working well, not full of corruption, and that you have bright leaders who have a deep understanding of matters of education.
  - door5 8y ago
    Here you assume that both engineering and politics are purely objective sciences, where one's cultural background is irrelevant, but that is true in neither case. The fact that silicon valley is mostly white men of a certain age and economic status has a big effect on what gets built, and what doesn't get built -- think about elon musk's obsession with tunnels and car transportation and disdain for public transit. Regardless how you feel, tht isn't just an objective rational problem, the fact that Elon isn't someone who has ever taken or relied upon public transit matters. The same is true if social policy -- it's easy to look at the voting decisions of people without college degrees as "stupid" and "uninformed", but I would challenge you to think about how their actions are just as informed and reasoned as people in your demographic, they just come to a different conclusion because of their economic and cultural background. "Education" is often a proxy for race or class in political discussions. I would argue that policy (and engineering) is much more about values than knowledge -- is housing a human right? Is healthcare a human right? Should the United States acknowledge and repair the damages of slavery and systemic racism? Should we accept asylum seekers? Everyone may have compelling, reasoned arguments to these questions, but it is naive to say only college educated specialists have the correct ones.

csours 8y ago

Change my view: This only works with small, homogenous populations.

intellectronica 8y ago
Homogeneous?! Switzerland is a confederacy and home to three distinct linguistic/cultural populations.
- cyann 8y ago
  4 official languages: German, French, Italian and Romansh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romansh_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romansh_language
- labster 8y ago
  Compared to the United States, this is very homogeneous.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - buboard 8y ago
    US people seem to underestimate how homogeneous the US is. It's quite a thing to know that you won t have to change habits when you travel across.
    - toasterlovin 8y ago
      I guess you haven't visited the East or West Coasts of the U.S.?
      - projektir 8y ago
        I've moved from the East coast to the West coast and there's basically no difference in my view.
      - 8y ago

virmundi 8y ago

To repeat: The South always had enough votes to keep slavery legal. Direct democracy is literally mob rule. The reason the Constitution had the 3/5 phrasing for slaves is not that the ciswhite males thought blacks were less than people, they didn't want the South to get even more votes through their slaves than they already had. They knew the only way to get rid of the peculiar institution was to vote it out (or go to war, but they didn't want that). This is this the reason that the Founders didn't pick it. It is mob rule. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-friedman/the-founding-fathers-never-meant-to-create_b_13051196.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-friedman/the-founding-... The general concept of the Republic is that it balances the terrors that all other governments impose. Through the representatives, the people trained in statecraft, the passions of the masses should be calmed. It's the hardest to corrupt. It's the most likely to survive deaths. If you had a perfect king, giving him absolute power is a no-brainer. The trouble is a) that's near impossible, and b) when he dies how do prevent a non-perfect king from ruling absolutely? We see this with budget deficits in California. Direct democracy allows ballot initiatives without the need to secure funding. The masses vote for wonderful, expensive things, but they don't say how to pay. The leaves the general budget scrambling for scraps to cover the cost.

jrobn 8y ago
Except when the voting mechanisms that elect those representatives is badly broken and easily gamed, i.e. gerrymandering districts in the US. There are a lot of things that are a problem with the way the US government is set up. 1) The Senate is a questionable insitution born out of a bad compromise with the size of colonies at the time. 2) Our average House Representive is representing 375,000 people. It should be much, much lower than that. 3) There are NO spending limits on political campaigns and that the US considers corporations as “people”. 4) Supreme Court judges have life terms. They should have longer terms than senators but not for life (15 years?). The people of a nation change, yet parties can push through politcally motivated or judges that strike down or uphold laws that maybe the population doesn’t want anymore! 5) It’s become almost impossible to change the constitution with Amendments due to only having two parties and the fall of bi-partisanship.
- 8y ago

buboard 8y ago

I like that they also vote whether they want taxes: https://lenews.ch/2018/03/02/switzerland-votes-this-weekend-on-federal-tax-and-broadcasting-fee/ https://lenews.ch/2018/03/02/switzerland-votes-this-weekend-...

swissthrowaway 8y ago

Direct democracy in Switzerland is a good way to distract the population with futile issues ( https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/24/europe/cow-horn-referendum-scli-intl/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/24/europe/cow-horn-referendu... ) while the oligarchy does its dirty business ( https://www.reuters.com/article/us-swiss-grenades/swiss-set-to-ease-arms-export-rules-despite-syria-grenades-report-idUSKCN1LJ1I9 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-swiss-grenades/swiss-set-... ), and - at the same time - giving the impression that the people are actually in control, but they're not. The parliament can and will interpret people's will ( https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/switzerland-immigration-referendum-result-reduce-water-down-protect-eu-relationship-migrant-a7476801.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/switzerland-... ).

Leherenn 8y ago
On the last issue, the problem is that it's pretty much impossible to enact the exact people's will because it is not consistent. Just have a look at the latest vote on EU ties. They want to keep the economic benefits but to restrict foreign workers, except the EU is never going to accept that. It's like the British, they want the cake and eat it too. The people can have their dream and vote on whatever they want and express themselves, and that's great, but at some point someone has to go back to reality and make compromises. I would argue it is the parliament job to transform the people's will into realistic laws. At this point, the parliament could either water it down or go full Brexit. The latest vote just confirmed it took the "correct" decision by watering it down.
- repolfx 8y ago
  The Swiss people's will is entirely consistent. There is nothing strange or unusual about having both immigration controls and trade. That is in fact entirely normal anywhere outside of Europe. The EU bureaucracy's near-fanatical, unbending approach to what it wants doesn't make anything different "inconsistent", "a dream", "unrealistic" or "not reality". That's the sort of attitude that is inflaming serious anti-EU tensions across all of Europe and will eventually cause either the EU to crush European democracy itself, or the EU to collapse chaotically. Indeed, the "watering down" you mention was a violation of the Swiss constitution and has led to quite serious political tensions, including a new referendum that's trying again to force the political class to actually implement referendums the EU doesn't like.

sischoel 8y ago

One should also consider that the Swiss people refused to grant women voting rights on a federal level in 1959 and only did so in 1971. One region in Switzerland still refused to grant them this right until they where corrected by the Swiss supreme court in 1991. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_Switzerland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_suffrage_in_Switzerl...

swissthrowaway 8y ago
In Switzerland, women are still second-class citizens. They're supposed to stay home and raise the kids. Day cares are full with the kids of expats, Swiss kids to the playground with their mothers.
- detcader 8y ago
  That's really sad to hear. Any pointers to English-speaking and/or prominent Swiss women's rights voices would be appreciated!
  - solemsigne 8y ago
    I assume this phenomenon has more to do with the fact that it is not required for two people to work in a household to comfortably sustain it in Switzerland, which allows the women the option to stay at home with adolescents. Maybe they in fact have more rights.
    - izacus 8y ago
      No they don't, there's just a lot of systemic issues that discourage mothers from working - from the insane costs of daycare, increased tax burden for working couples, school system which sends children home during the day and a complete lack of motherhood leave and job guarantees m
- cylinder 8y ago
  Ah yes poor women spending time with their children rather than slaving away pushing meaningless paper for MegaCorp. Shit life eh?

namlem 8y ago

Not really the best way of going about this sort of thing. Voting in elections and referendums is fraught problems and unhealthy incentive structures. Sortition, via the formation of citizens' assemblies, is a superior model of democracy. Leaving decisions up to a representative random sample of the population allows the assembly to carefully consider and debate issues and form a consensus. Whereas elected officials are incentivized not to compromise or plan for the long term and voters are usually poorly informed.

somada141 8y ago

I lived in Zurich, Switzerland for ca. 5 years and I am a huge fan of their system. One may argue that the very same system allowed for seemingly ‘insensitive’ or ‘misguided’ legislation. In my time there (2009-2014) a referendum allowed the Swiss to preclude minarets from being erected, while another referendum was voted against allowing the Swiss to freely smoke in public areas such as train stations (last I checked you can still smoke in the Zurich Hauptbahnhof platforms right up to entering your train). Nonetheless, while I don't agree with some of the decisions made, democracy is literally about granting the citizenry the ability to rule themselves and IMHO this is how it should be. Granted, such a system may lead to bigoted decision-making but if that's what the people want it should be what they get.