Article IV, Sections 1 and 1b of the Oregon State Constitution

Article IV of the Oregon State Constitution deals with the legislative branch of the state government.

Section 1 has a number of subsections.  (1) defines that only the legislature, or the people through ballot initiatives, may make laws.  (2) gives some specifics with regards to the process for ballot initiatives.  It should be noted that the difference between proposing a law through an initiative vs. proposing a constitutional amendment is just an additional 2% more signatures.  As such if you have a good organization for collecting signatures, then it would make sense to always go for the constitutional amendment.  (3) defines that the people can overrule an act of the legislative assembly through petitioning for a referendum.  The number of signatures for a referendum is less that that for proposing a new law.  Also the legislature can call for a referendum on a law.  If a referendum upholds a law, the governor cannot veto it.  (4) provides some procedural detail on what the timings of the initiatives are.  (5) extends this to municipalities and allows municipalities to change some of the requirements as they wish.

This is written in the spirit of direct action by the people to govern themselves.  It is a good idea, but there can be a lot of political mischief wrecked with these provisions, if one were to so choose.  In an ideal world, representatives would never be unresponsive.  But this mechanism, though imperfect, does allow the people to exercise direct action on the law.

Here is some information about Oregon initiatives.

Section 1b (note yet another document control issue here), provides a rule, something which belongs in either a statute or a regulation, not the constitution, that prohibits someone for paying people by the signature for collecting signatures for these kinds of initiatives discussed in section 1 above.  I agree as there is a really high level of temptation to forgery when payment is per signature.