Nashville voters rejected an "English only" ballot initiative, according to returns Thursday night. A second measure, Proposition 2, which would have made it much easier to qualify initiatives for the city ballot (the current signature requirement is 10 percent of voters; this would have dropped that to 1 percent), also went down to defeat.

Who is the next victim of the ugly campaign for and against Prop 8? Perhaps immigrants who don't speak English and live in middle Tennessee.

Backers of Prop 8 have gone to court, saying that public finance disclosure rules was a threat to the security of their financial supporters. The same argument has now surfaced in Nashville, which is in the middle of a campaign over a citywide English-only ballot initiative. Backers of the initiative have refused to comply with financial disclosure rules, saying that such disclosure would subject backers to intimidation. This is nonsense, and shows a lack of respect for the law that the courts must stop--now-- and that the voters should punish.

The New York Times looks in on the campaign for an English-only ballot initiative in Nashville. The coalition against the measure is a broad one.

One lesson from earlier efforts at English-only. States and cities that have passed such measures have found them awfully difficult to enforce, as courts overturn such initiatives and politicians ignore them. That seems likely to happen in Nashville, where the mayor and much of the civic leadership opposes the English-only initiative.