Election Results Leave Many Puzzled

by Brian Leubitz

Yesterday was the election, but I’m not going to give you the typical wrap up of last night’s election. There are many good places for that, the LA Times, the SF Chronicle, the Sacramento Bee, all the usual suspects. I also highly recommend Josh Richman’s Political Blotter. But today, I’m on a bit of a mission/rant, one that I started last night on twitter. And it really can’t be fully fleshed out in 140 character chunks.

This is our first real statewide primary with the so-called “jungle primary” aka Top 2. We saw same strange outcomes in 2012 with legislative and Congressional races, but those could be shrugged off as local anomalies. The 31st Congressional District is usually cited as the worst case scenario, with Pete Aguilar, the top Democratic vote getter falling two points short of making the top 2.  But in that race, Democrats only received 48.5% of the vote. Not having a Democrat was a bit silly, and could have been avoided (with a back room deal). However, the general election would still have been a tough race.

But take a look at the following scenario: Democrats split 48.4% of the vote, with a left-leaning third party candidate getting another 5.7%. In this scenario, Republicans garner only 46%. However, two Republicans move on to the general election.

Supporters of Top 2 often claim that June shouldn’t be determinative. It is a low-turnout election, so the two most popular candidates should move on. Or that the Democrats should have done a better job in organizing, or choosing candidates. They should have split that 48.4% better, or one candidate should have been stronger. But isn’t that essentially encouraging back-room deals? That is not what democracy should look like. If the good government groups that were behind the measure along with Gov. Schwarzenegger hoped they were enpowering the people, they should have known better.

This of course brings us to the Controller’s race (updated results here). Right now, the case isn’t as grim as my scenario just listed. Ashley Swearingen, the Republican Mayor of Fresno, leads all candidates with 24.4%. Former Speaker John Pérez is currently in second place with 21.7%, leading Republican David Evans by 2,436 votes and Democratic Member of the BOE Betty Yee by 5,643 votes. If those numbers hold up, Pérez would be the favorite to win in the fall.

But just who is this David Evans? He filed no campaign finance report with the Secretary of State, or at least nothing has yet appeared on Cal-Access. His website is vague and very 1998. He does have that video I posted, but there is otherwise very little information to go on. He is apparently a CPA, which I suppose is a reasonable qualification, especially when voters are none too pleased with their politicians. And his ballot designation of “Chief Financial Officer” and first ballot position are quite valuable when voters are coming into the ballot booth with very little information. But even with a good ballot designation, how exactly did he get 636,109 votes?

Because there is no campaign finance report, we don’t know how he used whatever small amount of money he had. Maybe he bought a few slate cards and hoped that his ballot designation would bring him luck. Apparently it did, although the legality of “Chief Financial Officer” seems somewhat questionable, considering adjectives aren’t normally allowed. Maybe there were some IEs for him, whether out of gamesmanship or sincere support for Mr. Evans, but I wasn’t able to track down on Cal-Access, but who knows with that website.

That being said, how could it truly be said that if Evans picks up 3,000 votes, that he and Swearingen are the strongest two candidates? Or the candidates that the voters of California want to see on the ballot. Not only does Top 2 disenfranchise lesser parties, in this case it could possibly disenfranchise the majority of the voters in the race between the two left-leaning parties.

Top 2 is fatally flawed. It is riddled with problems that promote the worst kind of gamesmanship and do nothing to promote democracy. Maybe somebody could dream up a more workable system, but it is a solution in search of a problem. And now it is a problem in search of a solution: the easiest being the complete repeal of Top-2 voting.

Primary election will bring very limited answers

by Brian Leubitz

Voters across the state are heading to the polls today. Or, at least a few of them will head to the polls today, as we will see a high vote by mail total in addition to a low total turnout. But, there are precincts open across the state just waiting for some voters.

The big question today is just how many Dem-on-Dem races will we see in November. In the statewide races, Ashley Swearingen looks to be set for the Top2, but which Democrat will join her in the Controller general election is anybody’s guess. Former Speaker Perez has ramped up spending these past few weeks and is coming on strong. BOE Member Betty Yee had an early lead, and if the traditional voting patterns hold up, could maintain it. Tom Torlakson and Marshall Tuck look set for another round in November. And the race for #2 is getting interesting as Neel Kashkari and Tim Donnelly fight it out. The other races are a little bit less exciting.

But the Democratic Party is where the action is. While there aren’t party primaries per se, several legislative and Congressional races are being fought for the Democratic base. A few districts will likely feature a rematch in November: San Francisco Assembly and Ted Lieu’s Senate District. Others could very well land in that category: Sbranti v Glazer, Honda v Khanna, and a few others.

Propositions 41&42 look to be headed for victory, but you never really can tell until you get that first batch of vote totals after the polls close at 8. Most important of all is that we remind our friends and family to vote. This is going to be a low turnout election, every vote is that much more important.

Billionaire venture capitalist wants to block public from accessing Martins Beach in Half Moon Bay

If you’ve ever been to Half Moon Bay, you know just how beautiful that coast is. And you probably understand how important it is that our beaches and coastline are shared by all, especially since the voters of California created the Coastal Commission to ensure just that. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla disagrees in a letter to legislators:

“Martin’s beach is private property, including the sandy beach and the submerged tidelands seaward of the mean high tide,”  argued lobbyists hired by Khosla in a letter to state lawmakers. “There are no existing ‘public’ lands to which access is needed.”

The techie tycoon’s hired guns were trying to convince lawmakers to vote against a bill by Sen. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo requiring the State Lands Commission to buy the road or obtain access rights to Martins Beach, 6 miles south of Half Moon Bay. The Senate passed the bill 22 to 11 Wednesday. It will now be taken up by the Assembly. (SF Gate)

Do some googling for additional photos of the beach, it is really extraordinarily beautiful and deserves to be open to the public.

Moratorium was killed by moderate democrats and “jobs” talk

by Brian Leubitz

Despite the lack of actually attainable oil, the oil industry is still protecting its right to pump vast amounts of water into the ground to try to get at what little is available. In an all out press this week, the oil lobby killed the moratorium:

Sen. Holly Mitchell, D-Los Angeles, argued that her measure amounted to hitting “pause” on an oil extraction method that has raised concerns among environmentalists as it’s become more common in California and across the nation. …

Mitchell’s bill failed when four business-friendly Democrats voted against it and three more Democrats withheld their votes. Its defeat illustrates the influence big business has on moderate Democrats in the California Legislature. Some of the same lawmakers also cast swing votes in the Senate Wednesday that killed bills to limit evictions in San Francisco and require the labeling of genetically-modified foods.(SacBee CapAlert)

In a state where Democrats are increasingly ascendant, the fight ends up within the party. The state party is officially on the record supporting a moratorium, but the legislators (and the little well-heeled birdies whispering in their ears) haven’t quite gotten the memo.

Father wants actions, not words

by Brian Leubitz

The tragedy in Isla Vista is just a few days old, and the emotions are still very raw. But one victim’s father has some direct words for politicians calling with their condolences:

“I don’t care about your sympathy. I don’t give a s— that you feel sorry for me,” Richard Martinez said during an extensive interview, his face flushed as tears rolled down. “Get to work and do something. I’ll tell the president the same thing if he calls me. Getting a call from a politician doesn’t impress me.”

Saying that “we are all to blame” for the death of his 20-year-old son, Martinez urged the public to join him in demanding “immediate action” from members of Congress and President Obama to curb gun violence by passing stricter gun-control laws.

“Today, I’m going to ask every person I can find to send a postcard to every politician they can think of with three words on it: ‘Not one more,’ ” he said Tuesday. “People are looking for something to do. I’m asking people to stand up for something. Enough is enough.” (Washington Post / Kimberly Kindy)

The retort from the NRA, if they had deigned to comment about yet another gun-powered rampage, is the tried and true “guns don’t kill people…”. But the fact remains that while there was a dangerously sick person behind this crime, guns made it far more lethal. Cliff Shecter has a great story up on the Daily Beast about this twisted line of thinking:

Cars also have a purpose other than killing. As do knives. And although, tragically, three young men were killed after being stabbed by the killer in Santa Barbara, perhaps the clearest comparison between gun violence and knife violence is provided by looking at the attack that occurred at a Chinese school in Henen Province the very same day as the Newtown Massacre. Twenty-three students were attacked in Henen and none died-as opposed to 20 murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary. Or how about the 22 injured in a knife attack at a school in Pittsburgh this past April? Nobody died there, either.

Read both stories quoted above, they are worth a few minutes to digest. How many more children must die for the NRA to be satisfied that we need real gun control? We can certainly do a better job treating mental illness, though I haven’t seen the NRA-backed politicians really rallying for that cause, but we will never truly reach everybody who needs help. However, we can make it harder to attain the guns and ammunition that turn an incident into a nationwide tragedy.

Buggy system stuck in the 1990s needs an overhaul

by Brian Leubitz

Sometimes California Forward hits on some solid ground, like on open government and transparency. Yesterday, they joined up with Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, the Sunlight Foundation, the California Newspapers Association and  a few others to push out a letter calling for greater support for the Cal-Access website and other transparency measures.

This week a broad coalition consisting of good government groups, newspaper publishers, and lobbyists came together for one goal: fix our disclosure systems.

The thrust of the effort, led by CA Fwd, is a joint letter submitted to Governor Jerry Brown and legislators urging them to prioritize funding for modernized campaign finance (Cal-Access) and conflict of interest (Form 700) systems. In addition to accelerated funding, the letter calls for oversight of the projects to ensure milestones are met on-time and within budget or be left with projects that, as currently structured, could take years to develop at huge costs to the taxpayer.(CA FWD)

Since it crashed a few years ago right in the heart of election season, it is functional but still very janky. It needs to be brought into this decade. This isn’t a ton of data, Silicon Valley operations deal with far more data in a lot prettier way. We can do this, it isn’t rocket science. Heck, I bet you put a few computer nerds in a room with some cash for servers and a few cases of Red Bull and you would have a system that would make any activist happy.

We can do this, and it is about time it happens.