California Politics - Initiatives and Special Interest Groups

California practices direct democracy. Californians have had the ability to write, amend and appeal laws bypassing the legislator. This is known as the initiative process, or as you might recognize it propositions.

It is one of many reasons our state is so dysfunctional. Anyone with the resources can get their measure on a ballot. As a result of the initiative process the Constitution of the State of California is constantly amended and rewritten; it is 95 pages long. The US Constitution in the same format is only 14 pages long.

The initiative process permits any one to write a law. The process is simple, it just requires money. The process to get your measure on a ballot is as follows:

1. Obtain an official title and summary of the initiative from the Attorney General.
2. Once you have an official initiative you have 150 days to get the required number of signatures from registered voters to sign your petition. For a statue, you need signatures equal to 5% of all the votes cast for Govenor in the last election (433,971 or 1.85% of eligible voters) . For a constitutional amendment, that percentage bumps up to 8% or 694,354 signatures or 2.96% of eligible voters.
   
3. You turn in your signed petition. It will placed on a ballot that occurs at least 131 days after the measure has qualified.

The requirement for 433,971 signatures within 150 days forces potential law makers to turn to professional services. Petition management services like National Petition Management pay petitioners to collect signatures for any particular measure. Effectively, petition management companies buy your signature by placing petitioners in public spaces.

Recall Prop 17, the Continuous Coverage Auto Insurance Discount Act, Mercury Insurance paid $2,273,745 to NPM to collect signatures to get Prop 17 on the ballot. After making the a ballot an even larger amount of money is required to advocate your law. Mercury Insurance in total paid $14.6 million on their campaign to save you money on car insurance. Prop 17 was defeated at the polls by 3% of the total vote.

The money needed to move the initiative process makes propositions available only to well-funded special interest.Special interest need only worry about passing their legislation. They only need to appeal to citizens.

Citizens who may not fully understand the impact of proposed legislation. In the ten years that I have been a voter 66 different citizen initiated propositions have appeared on 14 different ballots. The proposed laws and constitutional amendments on subjects like education, term limits, abortion, health care, crime, the environment, animal rights, eminent domain, campaign finance reform, parental consent, cigarette taxes, education taxes, transportation, law enforcement, bond issues, medical marijuana and gay marriage. I do not have the time or expertise to make informed decisions about these issues. I, like other voters, must therefore rely on 30 second television ads, newspapers and other media to make a decisions on complex legal and social issues.

Special interest using the initiative process are not accountable for the consequences of their legislation. It is the reason why so many politicians have called California "ungovernable". Any group with enough money can write a law. They are not required to have any legislative experience, nor do they need to worry about the unintended consequence.

The initiative process was created to eliminate the corruption of the political machines. Today, it has given special interest groups a method to pass laws without the accountability of the California State Legislature.