State Of The Union: California's five-page ballot

By Geoff Nunberg
In San Francisco

As the presidential election approaches, the BBC is broadcasting the reflections of commentators around the US, offering a range of different viewpoints.

This week, Geoff Nunberg, a frequent contributor to the New York Times, says voters in California have more than just the choice of future president to consider.

San Francisco issues its own voter information guide

A couple of weeks ago I got my voter information guides from the state of California and the city of San Francisco.

The first runs to 168 pages and the second tops out at 196.

Of course for most people around here, like just about everybody else in the world, the election is about just one thing - Bush versus Kerry.

And everybody is feeling pretty intense about it.

You call a friend and say "How's everything going with you?" and he starts asking if you've seen the latest Zogby poll results from Ohio.

The voter turnout in this neighbourhood is likely to be even bigger than it was in 2000, when it was 20 points higher than the national average.

And that's despite the fact that our votes won't have the slightest effect on the presidential race.

Kerry is a lock to win the state of California.

And, given the winner-takes-all electoral system, that means that he'll get all of the state's 55 electoral votes whether his margin is two points or 20.

But after the voters tick off Bush or Kerry's name, their work will barely have begun.

Referenda

The presidential race only accounts for one line out of the 364 pages in those two voter guides. Most of the rest is given over to listing the 30 state and local referenda that will be on the five-page ballot.

If you're bent on being a conscientious voter, that could make for a long weekend before election day.

Voting out here is a much more exhausting civic exercise than elsewhere. We've got a lot more to make up our minds about.

In theory anybody can put a referendum before the people but it can cost a pretty penny

The state initiatives include one that requires that the proceeds from the sale of surplus property be used to repay state debt, and another requires the state to reimburse cities for any reduction in motor vehicle licence fees.

And, at the local level, we'll be deciding whether the city should spin off health services as a separate department and whether we should award retirement benefits to the spouses of police officers and fire-fighters killed in the line of duty.

That seems like a good idea but I'm not clear why they needed my okay.

Initiative

True, there are also some referenda on the ballot about questions that people have strong opinions about.

There's a state initiative that would set aside money for the kind of stem cell research that the Bush administration has refused to fund.

The football stadium's name is among the referendum subjects

And the city's voters are going to be deciding on whether to return the football stadium to the old name of Candlestick Park and block the team from selling the naming rights to some corporation, the way a lot of other teams have done.

I'm not sure why that issue needed to be on the ballot either but, as long as it's there, I'm going to take the opportunity to get my two cents in.

For the most part, though, the ballot reads like a final exam for a class you didn't even know you were taking.

I feel the way I do when my mechanic calls and asks if I think he should replace the head gasket on my car: "I thought I was paying you to take care of that."

I recall my introduction to this process shortly after I moved to San Francisco.

Water politics

In 1982 the big referendum was an initiative that would authorise building a canal that would bring water from the north of the state down to the Los Angeles area.

Water politics has always been a big deal in this state, as you'll recall if you saw the movie Chinatown.

Water is a major political issue in California

Both sides were running multimillion dollar TV campaigns. The opponents' ads kept saying, "This scheme will cost nine billion dollars of your money. NINE BILLION DOLLARS."

I didn't really know what to do with that number. I mean, I had never priced a canal - maybe nine billion was a stone bargain.

So I called a friend of mine who's a water engineer and asked him how I should vote.

"You're for it," he said. "Trust me on this one."

I did as he told me. But in the end the measure was failed by about two to one, owing to adamant opposition by voters in the northern part of the state.

In fact in some towns near San Francisco the "no" vote ran as high as 94%, which is probably a higher percentage than you could get to affirm that Elvis is dead.

I asked one San Francisco neighbour who had voted no what he based his decision on.

He told me, "Hey, if you give those people in Los Angeles our water, they're just going to use it to hose the leaves off their driveways on Saturday mornings. Let 'em all get brooms."

Progressives

California's referendum process dates from the early years of the 20th Century, when the reform movement called the progressives came to power in the state under Governor Hiram Johnson.

Politicians realised that illegal immigration aroused a lot of voter anger and it has been a major national issue ever since

Johnson is remembered now only for a remark he made a few years later when he was serving in the US Senate: "The first casualty when war comes is truth."

But his lasting legacy to California is the ballot processes that he instituted in the hope of breaking the stranglehold on state politics held by the Southern Pacific Railroad.

The idea behind the popular referenda, Johnson said, was to "place in the hands of the people the means by which they may protect themselves".

In the event, though, the process wasn't much used until the late 1970s, when a popular tax revolt resulted in a measure that put a cap on the property taxes that fund local schools and services.

That wound up causing a series of budget crises for the state, which finally came to a head last year.

Revolt

The result was another popular revolt aimed at recalling the governor, via another of the democratic processes that Johnson and the progressives had introduced.

Schwarzenegger was a beneficiary of early 20th-Century measures

After a campaign that entertained the entire nation, the Democrat Gray Davis was replaced by an Austrian bodybuilder who had made good in Hollywood.

A number of other states have been permitting ballot referenda but nobody makes as extensive use of them as California does.

In the last 25 years, there have been more than 100 of them on the state ballot. A lot of these dealt with questions that you'd figure the legislature would be up to handling on its own.

One of them eliminated rent control on mobile homes and another increased the penalties for unlicensed chiropractors.

But some of the initiatives have had important national implications.

Illegal immigration

In 1994, the voters passed a proposition aimed at discouraging illegal immigration.

It denied education and health benefits to illegals and required teachers and medical workers to report suspected illegals to the authorities.

That law was ultimately thrown out by a federal court but not before politicians all over the nation realised that illegal immigration was a topic that roused a lot of voter anger.

It has been a major national issue ever since.

The same year, voters passed a "three strikes" referendum that mandated sentences of 25 years to life for repeat felony offenders.

It had the support of most of the state's politicians, who weren't about to be caught being soft on crime.

But it wound up crowding the prisons with small-time drug dealers and burglars, which contributed to the state's financial woes.

So this year there's another initiative on the ballot that amends that law so it applies only to violent offences. The polls show it's likely to pass, but it's a clumsy way of fine-tuning the penal code.

Signatures

In theory anybody can put a referendum before the people, but it can cost a pretty penny to get their attention.

For one thing, you need about half a million signatures to get a measure on the ballot.

That means you have to pound a lot of pavements and do a huge direct mailing, usually with the help of consultants who charge anywhere from $2 to $10 a name.

And, in a state with 15 million registered voters spread out over 700 miles, it takes a major media campaign to get your point across.

In last year's recall election, the various candidates wound up spending a total of almost $90 million.

So it isn't surprising that a lot of these measures are funded by industry groups.

There's one on the ballot this year that restricts the right to file legal actions against business for violating environmental and consumer protection laws.

The major backers of that one include Wal-Mart, Phillip Morris and the auto industry but it isn't easy to tell that from the ads, which are all run under the name of Californians Against Shakedown Lawsuits.

The ballot measure that provides for expanded mental health programmes pits Californians For Mental Health against Citizens For A Healthy California.

Rhetoric

That's what these campaigns always seem to come down to - Californians against such-and-such versus Citizens for thus-and-so.

The rhetoric hasn't much changed since the days of the progressives. It's still the people against the special interests.

But it has become a lot harder to tell which is which.

I'll be showing up at the polls but I don't think I'll get around to reading the voter guides beforehand.

I'll wind up doing what most people do, tearing the voting recommendations out of a newspaper I find politically congenial and hoping they've done their homework.

Direct democracy may be fine for the Swiss but they're a lot better than the rest of us at managing their time.

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The State Of The Union is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Fridays at 2050 BST and repeated on Sundays at 0850 BST.