In a state dominated by one-party politics, that's not a good thing.

The initiative power, enshrined in the Utah Constitution, is a check on the Legislature, because it reserves the right of the people to make law directly. To put it bluntly, if elected lawmakers refuse to listen to a group's pleas, the folks who have been spurned can take their proposal directly to the people.

But there's a catch. The Legislature gets to make the rules about how to get an initiative petition on the ballot. In 2003, in an obvious effort to keep upstarts in their place and their initiatives off the ballot, the lawmakers made those rules a lot tougher.

Petition sponsors must gather signatures equal to 10 percent of the statewide vote for all candidates for governor in the previous general election. In addition, that 10 percent standard must be met in 26 of the state's 29 Senate districts.

The backers of the open-space initiative are the first to try to cross these high hurdles. After this year's Legislature turned a deaf ear to their plan to create a new statewide sales tax of .05 percent to support a $150 million bond to preserve open space, the proponents started collecting petition signatures. They needed about 76,000, and they gathered about 130,000.

But they fell short of the distribution threshold by a few hundred votes in two senate districts. According to county clerks, who certify signatures of registered voters, the petitioners succeeded in only 24 districts instead of the required 26.

The petitioners argue that, in fact, they met the requirement in 26 districts, but county clerks mistakenly failed to certify some valid signatures in the disputed two districts. That issue now is before the Utah Supreme Court, which is expected to rule any day.

It was difficult for petition sponsors to estimate whether they had enough signatures in each district because the Legislature deliberately designed the system that way. In urban counties, Senate districts sometimes take up part of just one city; in rural Utah, they can span several vast counties.

Of course, even if the open-space backers win their day in court, even if the measure appears on the November ballot, and even if the voters pass it, the Legislature could gut the resulting law in a subsequent session. That's what it did to the asset forfeiture initiative that won at the polls in 2000.

So much for the will of the people.