It’s a little bit of a truism really, but what’s good in theory, even in complicated and brilliant theories, not always works in practice.

The latest of such failures sits right here on my desk and has the shape of three large pieces of paper, with three various colors, that the Repubblica Italiana (aka the government of my country of citizenship) delivered to my house. They are ballots. I’m asked to make a decision on a ‘abrogative referendum‘, which is a complicated way to say that they want me to say yes or no to a patch that the people of Italy want to apply to the law of the Republic.

The Italian constitution provides these powers: the Italian people are allowed to prepare a patch for the law, collect a number of signatures (don’t remember the actual number but it has to be 250k or so) and then ask the rest of the population how they feel about it.

Only two limitations: the patch can only be removing (which is why it’s called ‘abrogative’) and it can’t touch taxes.

On paper, the idea is great: if congress goes too far and comes up with a law that goes against the people, the people can bypass congress and remove it themselves. It was meant as a last resort, a safegard… and after an empire, 1200 years of invasions, a pope-powered state built right inside the capital, one Mussolini and a civil war, it is very much understandable that the post-WWII constitutional engineers built a pretty considerable set of checks and balances (and sometimes even went too far, but that’s another story).

So here I am, with these three ballots, each with two big boxes, yes and no and an even bigger box, a *huge* box, that contains, I’m not kidding, probably 4000 words that read like this: remove word ‘in’ at paragraph 3, comma 23 of Legislative Decree #533 of December 23, 1993… remove ‘of coalition’ paragraph 2, comma 12….

You get the idea.

This means that, basically, I’m asking to evaluate the effects of this patch. The title of the patch is “removing the possibility of linking electoral lists and the attribution of a majority bonus for an electoral coalition”…. which, if I understand it right, is supposed to avoid small parties from linking up together to form a bigger party and get a ‘majority bonus’, which later turns out to be toxic because as soon as they get their seats in congress, these coalitions fragment in a bunch of shards (in the best case) or they hold the majority hostage of their will (as it happens regularly).

Ideally, one would think that voting yes (remember, yes here means ‘go head, apply the patch and remove’) would imply that less electoral coalitions get formed, which hopefully would mean that small political parties get less representation in congress, which would lead to a less unstable political system (even if less representative of minorities).

So, in theory, we have this awesome constitutional power to ‘stick it to the man’ and we have this set of patches that, in theory, would enable a more stable political system (which is something Italy seriously needs).

Yet, in practice, this means reading a title and hoping that what the patch actually does is in line with what the title of the patch says. In another country, you might take this for granted, in Italy not so much: knee-jerk distrust for everything governmental goes so deep that even when I’m asked to stick it to the man, I’m wondering if there isn’t one of those men using me as a tool to stick it to some other men. Actually, no, you can count that’s the case.

So, ideally, one should ignore the patch titles and just read what they say… but this is a patch and it looks like a patch… it only has deltas and differences, it doesn’t tell me how the law works, it doesn’t show me where to find the law (best I can do is to get here… then what?) … and I’m no lawyer and I’m no jurist and I’m nowhere near capable of understanding the far-reaching dynamic implications of patching anything of any law.

What in theory is a ‘stick it to the man’ power, in practice turns me into a political sock puppet. What in theory was designed as a tool to empower ends up increasing distrust and amplifying fear of action.

I have a few days to vote (Italians that live abroad vote by mail earlier) but I have no idea what I’ll vote… and not because I don’t know where I stand on the issue (I do: I want more stable Italian governments even if this means less minority representation), but because I don’t know what I’m voting on is actually going to do what I’m being told it’s going to do.

Oh, and if you think this ‘referendum’ thing is weird and not that significant, it is worth mentioning that the Italian people change their form of government from monarchy to a republic with it in 1946, decided to allow women to divorce in 1974 and to abort in 1981 and to stop the use of nuclear power in 1987 (if you’re curious, check out the full list of Italian referendums).

Anyway, this might look like democracy and walk like democracy, but ultimately it doesn’t feel like one to me at all.