Pat Liberto has a sure-fire strategy for deciding who gets her votes for those obscure offices that fill out the bottom of ballots in Maryland: She selects them randomly.

"It's just 'pick 'em,'" Liberto said yesterday on her way out of the Carney Elementary School polling station with her husband, Tom, and two grandchildren. "Sometimes, I'll just take the three at the top because I don't know anything about any of them."

It doesn't make sense, she says, asking her to vote for Orphans' Court judges, register of wills or sheriff. She doesn't feel qualified to make such decisions.

She's not alone.

"Sometimes," pub owner Ron Starleper said after casting his votes, "you just go by the last name or you guess or you don't vote."

Sure, it's dispiriting that some part of the electorate makes decisions based on the sound of a name or its position on the ballot. Maybe, though, it's not their fault. In some Maryland jurisdictions this year, the ballot filled two whole pages, chock full not only of candidates for office but also an endless stream of constitutional amendments, charter amendments and bond issues.

With all these elective offices and ballot measures, maybe we should ask ourselves: Is there such a thing as too much democracy?

Some political scientists think so. "We ask people to vote too often and for too many offices," says Emory professor Alan Abramowitz. "We end up putting unrealistic demands on voters. People are deciding based on very limited information or no information at all."

Some of the choices voters face are nothing if not confounding. What, for instance, is the rationale for electing judges to the Orphans' Court? Forget identifying the hot issues (there aren't any) -- few people at the polls yesterday even knew the function of the orphans' court. (According to one voters' guide, the Orphans' Court has jurisdiction over judicial probate, administration of estates, and the conduct of personal representatives. That's clear, huh?)

It doesn't matter what the voters know. We get to choose anyway, just as we get to choose our sheriffs, our clerks of courts, and our registers of wills.

"Register of wills?" exclaims McDaniel College political scientist Herb Smith. "Why is that popularly elected?"

Actually, there is a reason, and it dates back more than a century to the Progressive Era. Reformers across the country fought for local governance that was more responsive to the needs of the citizens and free of corruption and the influence of monied interests. A key target were the political bosses and machines who exerted control of political fortunes through a vast system of patronage. The reformers tried to curtail the power of the bosses by reducing their capacity to fill public positions with loyalists, sycophants and henchmen. That meant more elective offices. The progressives "sought to undercut the power of party machines and special interests," says Donald Green, a Yale political scientist, "by throwing ever increasing numbers of decisions into the hands of voters."

The Progressive reforms led to the direct election of U.S. senators by the voters, the creation of primaries, which reduced the power of the parties, and the introduction of referenda, initiatives and recalls. All those reforms required a far greater participation by the voters. Americans, in fact, are called up to vote far more often and for more things than citizens of any other industrial democracy.

"You have more opportunities to vote here at all levels of government in a four- or five-year period than you would in your entire life in Great Britain," Green says.

Many feel that it's too much. "I think the idea of giving more people a say is admirable, but you look at the evidence -- low voter turnout and uninformed voters. Maybe you have to say that having people vote on everything is not the ideal democracy that we envisioned," says Stephen Medvic, a Franklin & Marshall College political scientist. "On the one hand, it sounds like democracy giving people a lot to say, but the question is whether democracy is served by ill-informed decisions."

Taken by surprise

For better or worse, Maryland does not have citizen-created initiatives (as opposed to referenda and constitutional amendments in which voters either retract or affirm legislative action.) Critics say that in recent times, initiatives have enabled special interest groups with money to put pet projects in front of unsuspecting voters. They give the false impression that they have risen from a grass-roots movement, a pretense critics call "astro-turfing."

"They create the appearance we have direct democracy when in fact this direct democracy is really being manipulated by special interest groups," says Lauren Cohen Bell, a political scientist at Randolph-Macon College. "Under the guise of saying the public gets to choose, the public is really the dupe."

Even if Marylanders aren't burdened by initiatives, there are plenty of other measures they might find mystifying. Yesterday, for example, voters all over the state had to decide whether to authorize the Montgomery County Council to hire real estate appraisers in certain circumstances.

"The fact that you have to have a constitutional amendment so that one can use an appraiser instead of a broker in Montgomery County illustrates the absurd level of detail that certain parts of the constitution contains," says Michael Faden, a staff lawyer for the Montgomery County Council. "It's an enormous waste of effort and attention for such a small issue."

In Baltimore County, voters found the Montgomery County item perplexing. "I didn't know if it was supposed to be on my ballot, so I left it blank," Barbara Josephsen said at the Carney school.

David Glickman, an estate attorney, also abstained. "I don't vote in another county's business," the attorney said at his polling station at Pikesville Middle School.

Happily perhaps, many voters end up abstaining on issues that catch them unawares. That is why there is a steep drop-off in voting from the top of the ballot to the bottom. For instance, in the September primary in Baltimore County, nearly 20 percent of those voting in the governor's race made no selection for clerk of court.

'A good Jewish boy'

But it's also well-known that many voters will make a choice even in the absence of knowledge. If they don't vote according to party affiliation, they may make decisions based on gender, ethnicity (often only an educated guess), position on the ballot or simply the sound of the name.

As much as anyone else, William Donald Schaefer knows how capricious voters can be. Once he had to sweat through a city council election against an opponent -- Max Schaeffer -- nominated only because his last name was similar to William Donald's. "The last part of the campaign," he recalls, "all we did was repeat, 'William Donald, William Donald, William Donald.' "

Maybe Max Schaeffer represented just desserts for Schaefer because early in his political career, his last name proved an inadvertently deceptive advantage. "When I first ran for the council," says the Episcopalian Schaefer, "a lot of people thought, 'Oh, sure, he's a good Jewish boy, Schaefer,' so I always did great up in the Jewish areas."

While decisions in the voting booth are sometimes made on flimsy grounds, that doesn't mean decisions made earlier are necessarily more reasoned. "Some voters make up their minds based on what a candidate looks like, how tall they are, whether they seem nice," says Lauren Cohen Bell of Randolph-Macon. "With that frame of reference, is it any worse to vote for a person because the person is a woman or their name begins with a 'Q'?"

Once an office is made elective, it is nearly impossible to make it appointive, not without being accused of elitism. So, it is unlikely we will see a shrinking of the ballot any time soon. But even among those who recognize the flighty decisions voters sometimes make are not terribly alarmed. So what if we continue to elect our register of wills? What's the worst that could happen?

As Matthew Crenson, a Johns Hopkins political scientist, said, "Most of those offices are not so powerful that it would represent a threat to democracy if they were occupied by extremists."