California's Ballot Initiative Explosion

Before my family and I moved to Bolivia, and my work began focusing on international issues, I was a California political junkie. For more than twenty years I was a campaign activist, an aide to the California Legislature, an advocate with Common Cause and Consumers Union, and a leader in the state’s public interest community.

For a while, I was even a pundit, due in part to the surprise popularity of a little book I wrote in 1996 about California initiative politics, The Initiative Cookbook, Recipes and Stories from California’s Ballot Wars.

This week I got to have a little punditry flashback when the San Francisco Chronicle called to do a long interview about the wild state of California initiative politics today. Here’s the article. I confess to still being a California political junkie from afar, with the help of a fine Web site on California politics, Rough & Tumble.

A century after California Progressives established the initiative process as a way to counter-balance the state’s big special interests, like the railroads, big money special interests are doing pretty well as initiative campaigners.

More than sixty different ballot measures are currently in circulation for the California ballot. Many, if not most, will probably fall thousands of signatures short of the requirements to qualify for the ballot. But even if a fraction does qualify, state voters are headed toward an initiative ballot longer than any in state history, longer than an LA traffic jam.

What is going on is easy to see, even from six thousand miles away. First, the state’s political process is grinding to a partisan standstill. The big issues just aren’t going to get addressed and the political desire to make change heads instead for the ballot. Second, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is doing what every governor for the past three decades has done – although in his case on steroids – he is taking his causes to the ballot instead of to the Legislature. Most governors have been content with one initiative. The Terminator has a handful.

Finally, it is a simple fact, as I pointed out in the Chronicle article, that for a million dollars you can put pretty much anything you want on the California ballot. Whether you are campaigning for or against something, the opportunities for return on investment are enormous for special interest groups. My favorite example is the 1990 campaign by the state’s alcohol industry against a ballot measure to boost California’s lowest-in-the-nation alcohol taxes. The initiative would have cost the industry $760 million per year. To defeat it they spent $27 million. That was a 28 to 1 return on their investment in the first year alone -- not bad.

Anytime you can buy public policy, it is usually, financially speaking, a pretty damn good deal. The initiative process is full of such opportunities.

On the other hand, this cry of, “The initiative process is out of control!” is really old news. I head it all the time when I was writing and commenting on initiative politics in California. One journalist even suggested once, in jest, that I shared some of the blame for it by writing a handbook for amateurs. That alarm sounds a little like every new generation’s warning about the music of its teenagers.

You would be surprised how clever California voters are at filtering out the bad initiatives and passing just a few measures that they like. Voters aren’t stupid. The alternative is to abolish the whole process, and California is no more likely to get rid of initiatives than it is earthquakes. After a century, the initiative process – good, bad and ugly – it is a fact of political life in my home state.

There are some reforms, however, that are badly needed. If you are interested in that, or in the initiative process in general, or like animated bears dressed as cooks, you might enjoy taking a look at The Initiative Cookbook. Meanwhile, if you are a California voter, good luck!