Best of N referenda

Here's something that bothers me: various states and countries hold referenda for political decisions.

If the change-attempters win on the first try, a massive and permanent decision can get made based on a single specific moment in time. (Think Britain voting on whether to leave the European Union, for example).

If change-attempters lose, they can try to hold a second referendum later: if "yes" wins the second time the previous "no" vote counts for nothing, while if "yes" had won the first time there wouldn't have been a second chance to say "no". (Think Ireland's referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, or various other parts of the European Constitutional Treaty process)

Both of these outcomes seem weird to me, and it feels like they would be solved by making referenda "best of N" votes. For a sufficiently large issue, perhaps there should be multiple votes over multiple years, and the winner is the one that gets chosen at least 2 out of 3 times, or at least 3 out of 5, or whathaveyou.

I realise this would have downsides – it could be expensive and complex, there would be debates about whether two referenda were on exactly the same topic or a different one that requires a new set of votes, etc.

But for a sufficiently important topic – or in a place like California, with regular referenda ballots anyway – I think it might be worth trying, and I've never heard of it tried (I asked our somewhat-trusty LLM friends and they said it hadn't – if you know of somewhere that does it, please shout).