It's interesting to precisely consider what "a voter initiative passed by Austin citizens" translates to. And to clarify the fingerprint law was not what was actually passed. That law was passed unilaterally by the city council --- whom a cynic might suggest was driven by what we'll call "lobbying", rather than necessity. The vote was a result of ride sharing services collecting the necessary tens of thousands of signatures that required the City Council to either soften the rules or bring the matter to public vote. The council chose to spend the hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars necessary to keep the ordinance intact and hold an impromptu election.

These [1] are the results of that election. Austin has a population of 950,000 residents with a voting age population of about 741,000 [2]. In total about 5% of the resident population voted to maintain the fingerprinting law and 4% to soften it. A 1% margin on a voter turnout of less than 12%.

I fully appreciate that that is a 'democratic republic in action.' I'm certain you can understand one might find it distasteful, just as one can easily understand your distaste for state level 'democratic republic in action.' I'm certain our systems made all the sense in the world hundreds of years ago. But these sort of things do not feel right today when we live in a country with counties that now have greater population than the entire country did when these laws and systems were developed.

[1] - http://traviselectionresults.com/enr/contest/display.do?crit...

[2] - https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/austincitytexas...