Sacramento Bee
Got a ballot measure for 2016? You’re in luck.
Ballot initiatives two years from now will need about 30 percent fewer qualifying signatures than they did this year, according to the political-consulting types at Sacramento’s Redwood Pacific Public Affairs.
The reason: abysmal turnout for the Nov. 4 election. California requires valid signatures equal to 8 percent of the most recent gubernatorial vote to qualify a constitutional amendment for the ballot, 5 percent for regular laws and veto referenda.
By word and deed, the state’s politically dominant Democrats have demonstrated that they want to substantially alter California’s century-old initiative system that allows voters to legislate directly through the ballot box.
They say they want to improve the system. A few years ago, the Democratic Party’s executive board declared that it’s “being abused … to create laws and programs that benefit a very few people at the expense of the many.”
But the Democrats’ many bills have mostly tried to make it more difficult for their conservative political rivals to place measures on the ballot, while preserving the system for their allies, such as labor unions.
The path to a new downtown arena isn’t set in stone yet, with one of the biggest obstacles remaining being a campaign to put the arena on the ballot. That campaign is being pushed by Sacramento Taxpayers Opposed to Pork, otherwise known as STOP.
STOP submitted about 35,000 signatures to the county a couple weeks ago for validation and they need about 22,000 to get the measure approved.
However, new reports have surfaced today that indicate those signatures may be invalid.
Read More: here
Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed labor union-backed legislation Saturday that would have limited the use of paid signature gatherers to qualify statewide ballot initiatives in California.
Assembly Bill 857, by Assemblyman Paul Fong, D-Cupertino, would have required anyone seeking to qualify an initiative for the statewide ballot to use non-paid volunteers to collect at least 10 percent of signatures.
Read more here: here
The old argument about whether the chicken or the egg came first has a political counterpart in California:
Did the Legislature lose relevance as a policymaking institution because of the explosion of ballot measures, or did the latter occur because the Legislature had become dysfunctional?
Read More at the Sacramento Bee
The November election delivered California Democrats a coveted super-majority for governing the state.
Now the party’s leader in the Senate wants to use that political capital to give the Legislature more say in the voter initiatives that make their way to the ballot.
A proposed June ballot measure that would have prohibited the city of Sacramento from requiring labor organization agreements on publicly-funded construction projects has failed to gather enough signatures.
Sacramento County elections officials ruled today that 62 percent of the signatures it inspected from proponents of the Fair and Open Competition Sacramento measure were valid. Another 19 percent of signatures were from people not registered to vote and 7.5 percent were from voters registered outside of the city.
When a political party achieves dominance of any government, one expects that it would use its hegemony to enact its public policy agenda.
That’s the way democracy is supposed to work.
Using dominance to change the political system with the aim of perpetuating control is another matter. It fixes the game and undermines democracy.
Gov. Jerry Brown is taking a mulligan, tripped up by a typographical error and forced to re-file his ballot initiative to raise taxes.
The Democratic governor on Friday filed paperwork with the state for “The Schools and Local Public Safety Protection Act of 2012- ver. 2.” The measure is identical to one Brown filed in December, the governor said in a filing with the attorney general’s office, “except that we have corrected a typographical error that resulted in two numbers being transposed.”
Re-filing an initiative can delay the attorney general’s preparation of its title and summary, potentially condensing the period for a proponent to gather signatures and making that effort more expensive.
A group wants to ask Arizona voters to allow gambling at private casinos and racetracks. The 50-page initiative was filed with the state Friday, but a leader of the effort says a revised version will be filed Tuesday to make changes that include a new name for the group. Organizers would have to collect nearly 173,000 signatures for the measure to go on the November ballot.
The clock is running out for a pension-altering ballot initiative written by Paul McCauley. The Southern California accountant has until Oct. 15 to turn in 433,971 signatures supporting a statewide vote on his McCauley Pension Recovery Act.
A union representing 5,000 state workers is endorsing Prop 1A while its international counterpart is opposed to the measure. Prop 1A would impose both a tax increase and a spending limit. Polls indicate that the proposition and related budget measures being pushed by Governor Arnold Swarzenegger are not popular with voters.