Of the country's 44 referendums, only eight have succeeded.
O'Donnell said it was clear there would be reasonable debate about political legitimacy if the Tories were the largest party but did not form a government, partly due to the presence of a large Scottish Nationalist contingent, but he pointed out voters had in two referendums rejected both a shift from first past the post and Scotland leaving the union.
As for Europe, the great cause of Heath's career, Britain's place in it, in the wake of the Dutch and French referendums is still not clear.
Wood said a future Plaid Welsh government would seek an agreement with the UK government to devolve the Welsh constitution – including the right to hold binding referendums – to the Welsh assembly.
Privately, sources within the Department for Communities and Local Government said the mayoral referendums had been a "disaster" because the department had not envisaged the possiblity of rejection on such a scale.
Then there were heated national arguments about divorce – arguments as often about land as matrimony – and it took three referendums to introduce a divorce law.
Labor, exhausted by the marathon, by the perverse acceleration of time that had aged a still youthful government, fundamentally worn down by the rolling moral panics and the instant referendums of the social media age, was simply trying to move on past the debacles of the Rudd/Gillard civil war, including the debacle of an election campaign that began to make sense only in its closing week.
For the government there are a couple of problematic referendums pending, the most important of which is a potential vote to endorse the latest EU treaty hammered out (minus David Cameron) at the end of last year.
Spain, however, is not simply going to accept Britain's desire to force all of its partners to negotiate a treaty which requires parliamentary ratification or referendums across the member states.
Voting in the eastern regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, where separatists have proclaimed breakaway independent republics after a pair of hastily organised referendums earlier this month, is likely to be patchy at best, with separatists vowing to disrupt the vote.
Referendums are dangerous tools at the best of times, weakening the parliaments which have recourse to them and splitting political parties.
