I was in Sacramento for some meetings this week, and have a few thoughts and observations.
The first is the most important. The people in and around our government are good, dedicated people who are doing those jobs because they care and want to do the right thing. You don’t make big money in public service. In the last few decades a government job meant less pay than a comparable “private” sector job and a number of working-environment hassles, like the extra procedures (paperwork and bureaucracy) that are required in public positions to involve transparency and accountability. And, of course, they have to put up with the Republican-inspired abuse of people who work for the government. So give these people a break and assume good faith.
After decades of budget cutting our government is universally strapped for resources and it makes for a difficult workday. The things people went into public service to accomplish are being stripped out from under them by the state’s structured-to-fail system (see below). I hope the Bush years trigger some serious thinking about what things would be like without a government, because we are getting close to that possibility.
The state government is now structurally designed to fail — and this latest budget deal compounds the problem. This situation was created on purpose by anti-government ideologues, usually corporate-funded. Thus really is a choice between government by the people or government by a wealthy few who happen to be in control of large corporations. To them government is “in the way” of making money. Government means food and safety inspectors so people don’t get sick and workers don’t get hurt, and protecting workers and the public costs them profits. Government means regulations stopping them from dumping stuff in the water or air and properly disposing of waste costs them money. Government means regulations that make them pay back customers who are overcharges. Government means regulations requiring delivering goods and services that were promised. SO you can see why the hate government and regulation — they keep them from just taking your money and giving nothing back!
So they have used the power that comes from their access to corporate resources to set up a state system that is giving them what they want. They pay petition-gatherers to get anti-government initiatives on the ballot, and then they flood the TV and radio with lying ads that trick people into voting against their own interests — and here we are.
Here are just a few of our designed-to-fail structural problems:
Term limits mean that thinking must be short term, and encourages passing problems along instead of solving them, because then the problems will be “not on my watch.” People who are effective in their jobs are forced out, and voters who want to keep them there are prevented from doing so.
The campaign-finance system puts corporate-backed candidates in office by necessitating big money to win elections. And corporations, designed to amass resources, are perfect vehicles for pushing the interests of the few who control them.
The two-thirds budget requirement means that a few anti-government extremists are able to sabotage the process, keeping any budget from passing and shutting down the state.
The disappearance of political reporting in California media means the state’s citizens are uninformed about what is going on. The corporate-owned media concentrates on sitcoms and what Britney is wearing, and does not let the people find out what government is about.
These are just some of the structural problems, and the system is. of course, structurally designed to keep us from fixing them. The only way we are going to address this is to get lots and lots of people involved. The election of Barack Obama tells us this is possible but I despair at amount of work that will have to be done to accomplish it.
Congratulations to those brave souls who managed to win Assembly delegate elections over the weekend. Your first state Convention, scheduled for Sacramento in April, should coincide nicely with the mass protests from folks who got IOUs instead of their expected tax refunds, the first double-digit employment numbers in the state in a generation, and essentially the near-total shutdown of state government, by design, from a working conservative majority that uses outdated and anti-majoritarian rules to destroy the state for their own ends.
I have a hard time arguing with the deep pessimism from Dan Walters today.
What, if anything, will come next to pull us out of recession and return California to prosperity? Some think it will be biotechnology, services to baby boomer retirees or solving global warming.
Lurking in the background, however, is a nagging worry that there won’t be anything, that the state’s endemically high costs, political dysfunction and long list of unresolved dilemmas, from transportation to water to education, have made us uncompetitive in a global economy. Just last week, a new federal survey found that California has the nation’s highest adult illiteracy rate.
We have tended to take the future for granted. No matter how moribund the economy may be at the moment, we think, we have the weather, the entrepreneurial spirit and the strategic location to regroup and prosper.
We may have. But then again, maybe we aren’t so special. Maybe we’re not immune to the societal afflictions that have beset other states. Maybe we are a rust-belt-to-be on the left coast, a Michigan with winter sunshine.
This is not a failure of entrepreneurship or a lack of a desirable consumer base. It’s quite simply a failure of politics, a series of compromises and capitulations that have led the state into a blind alley. Because legislative Democrats have never effectively rid the process of the constraints of the past, they have made the future impossible.
The biggest burst of meaningful political activism in recent history was the crusade to defeat Arnold’s special election in 2005. That happened outside the party structure because labor felt threatened and needed to lead an effort, working together with the grassroots and the party establishment to fight back. There was a singular mission and nobody brought their own single-issue buckets to the table. Their public relations strategy and the activism they encouraged was nothing short of brilliant. But it was primarily a defensive maneuver. Now the CTA is trying to add a penny to the sales tax in a more offensive maneuver to secure funding for schools. This is precisely the wrong way to go. It carves out another dedicated funding source for one area while imposing a regressive tax on the state’s most burdened citizens. Single-issue money grabs will not do the job. Unity is the great need of the hour.
At one of the AD meetings I attended this weekend, my Assemblywoman, Julia Brownley, got up to speak. I would call her a pretty mild-mannered woman. She practically pleaded with everyone in attendance, saying “We need your help… the Governor is breaking this state… we need you to throw your shoes at Arnold.” She was sending out an urgent call for the kind of unified activism that broke Arnold’s back in 2005. It’s a heavier lift because it requires something proactive rather than reactive. But without labor, grassroots activists and the party establishment working in concert, this is going to be the worst 2 years of all these newly-elected delegates’ lives.
There are going to be two Democratic legislative initiatives this week: a request for a federal government loan to ensure our unemployment insurance fund doesn’t go broke, and legislation putting a moratorium on foreclosures, which cost roughly $250,000 each to the greater economy in opportunity costs and property value reductions. There is help coming in the form of hopefully $5-7 billion dollars from the federal recovery package, earmarked for state and local government relief. But eventually, we’re going to turn to the ballot. In June of this year, there’s going to be a host of initiatives, and we need there to be more than simply signing off on the bad budget of last year, but real structural reform, whether to do with 2/3 or expanding the budget cycle to 2 years or even the tax increases in the Democratic budget (The LAO thinks that election should happen earlier to relieve this crisis of confusion). These MUST get on the ballot, and they MUST pass, with a coalition of every progressive in the state working toward that passage. The survival of the state hangs in the balance.
So good for you, winners. Now make sure you don’t get picketed during your first convention. Because if you don’t, I’ll be the first one out there with a sign.
I’ll have a much larger roundup later. But it looks to me like there was a significant undervote in the election. So far, 10.04 million votes have been counted in the Presidential race. Yet on Prop. 8 we have about 9.9 million votes counted. The difference there is 79,000 votes. But that’s the smallest discrepancy. Most of the other statewide ballot measures had undervotes of around 600,000-800,000 votes. And there are maybe 1 million votes yet to be counted, so this spread could be much higher.
And if you look at the Congressional and state legislature ballots, the spread is just as high.
A lot of people stopped at the top, probably because they didn’t have enough information and didn’t feel comfortable about voting.
Five days to go, and while initiatives are notoriously hard to figure, here’s what I’m seeing with five days to go. Below are my projections.
• Prop. 1A: I have been hearing some local radio spots for 1A, so they are trying to get the message out. While the Governor has endorsed he won’t be much help, however. And unfortunately, there are some zombie lies out there that are making false claims about the high-speed rail project, particularly focusing in on ridership projections and length of travel. The Christian Science Monitor, in its endorsement of 1A, shoots down these claims.
Yearly ridership is predicted at 88 million to 117 million passengers by 2030.
How can that be if last year only 26 million people rode the national rail network, Amtrak? Part of the answer lies in the state’s expected population boom. But also, travelers gravitate to high-quality, affordable transport. Last year, ridership jumped 20 percent for the Acela, Amtrak’s only fast train (but not as fast as trains around the world).
Opponents also say the north-south ride will take more like 3-1/2 hours, because no bullet trains operate at the plan’s projected speed of up to 220 m.p.h. But Japan and France are testing prototypes capable of such speeds. And so what if the estimate is off? Downtown-to-downtown transport that’s also independent of much bad weather and gate delays has its advantages.
Although it’s wrong to punish infrastructure in a downturn, given the economic times this is not as safe a bet as before. SLIGHT LEAN YES.
• Prop. 2: Despite the opposition throwing the kitchen sink at the measure (“You’d have to buy eggs from illegal immigrants and get salmonella while your family goes broke!”), I don’t think they’re fooling anyone into believing that allowing chickens to stand up and move their wings and turn in their cages is unreasonable. LIKELY YES.
• Prop. 3: These type of bonds are like catnip. LIKELY YES.
• Prop. 4: It was close the past two times on the ballot, and it’s going to be close this time. Both sides seem to agree that Latino voters, who vote often with Democrats but are typically socially conservative, are the key swing bloc. In fact, the Yes on 4 people are trying to find Latino voters in Los Angeles. Um, if they’re having trouble with that I don’t really trust their targeting efforts. The No on 4 team has revived some popular ads and look in position to repeat their 2005 and 2006 victories, but the likely voter model makes this impossible to predict. TOSS-UP.
• Prop. 5: Every living Governor in the state held an event for No on 5 today, and they join most politicians, living or dead, in their opposition. Of course they’re all opposed – they’ve been wrong on prison policy for 30 years, on a bipartisan basis, so why would they offer anything but more of the same. I enjoyed the Yes on 5 team use the opposition by Bush’s drug czar as a reason to support the measure, and their latest ad similarly uses the corrections officers opposition to explain how much they love overcrowded prisons as a boon to their bottom line. I’d like to think that people will come around to the idea that the drug war has failed and nonviolent offenders need treatment and not incarceration, but I’m sadly not hopeful. Too much demagoguing here. LEAN NO.
• Prop. 6 & Prop. 9: I put the Runner initiatives together because they both serve the same awful goal of warehousing more of California’s population in service to nothing but vengeance. The No side on both of these (funded largely by CTA) is doing a good job of painting these as extreme, and Prop. 9 is getting bad press for potentially violating inmates’ civil rights. I think they’re both going down. LIKELY NO.
• Prop. 7: I’m surprised that this initiative was able to fly under the radar for so long. Usually that means that the No side will probably come out ahead, and I don’t think this is any different. While many see the value in a strong renewable energy standard, the coalition that has come out against this will split Democrats and unify Republicans, which should be enough to defeat it. LEAN NO.
• Prop. 8: Well, there’s not much I can add to this one. It’s going to be as tight as a tick, to quote Dan Rather. The Yes side is creepily committed to denying fundamental rights (that video, exploiting kids for their cause, is a form of child abuse). The No side is committed to preserving them. They got a boost with this letter from 59 Con law professors rejecting the arguments of the Yes side and basically calling them lies.
In short, these legal scholars conclude:
Prop 8 clearly discriminates against gay men and lesbians.
Prop 8 would have no effect on the tax exemptions of churches.
Prop 8 would have no effect on teaching or the protection of parental rights already provided by state law.
“As teachers of the law we feel an obligation to speak out when claims are made about the law that are simply and clearly false,” said Professor Pam Karlan, the Kenneth and Harle Montgomery Professor of Public Interest Law at Stanford Law School.
We all know this is going to be a TOSS-UP, coming down to turnout in the most closely-watched race of the night. Here’s an easy way you can get involved and listen to some great punk rock music besides. Max and the Marginalized, a great band who posts a new song weekly on the Huffington Post, released their latest, Proposition Hate, and you can buy the track, with all proceeds going to Equality for All.
• Prop. 10. T.Boone Pickens has spent $19 million dollars to try and fleece the state, and even the kids from his ads are starting to reject him. When you put that much money into an initiative you’re going to have a chance, but it feels to me like the arguments are falling short. SLIGHT LEAN NO.
• Prop. 11. Well, Arnold will be making a full-court press on this for the next five days. It’s his only proposition on the ballot, really. It’s telling that they are still trying to push this as a generic cure-all rather than define what the measure would actually do, which is seek to fix a non-existent problem. The very fact that over a third of Republican held seats in the Assembly are threatened this cycle debunks the entire argument that gerrymandering automatically creates safe seats. If Republicans can’t manage to make seats competitive, they should be given a life raft by a measure that would seek to re-gerrymander for them. While Bill Lockyer is the lone statewide Democrat lending his name to this farce, Jon Fleischman’s FAIL put this into a partisan context and will make it difficult to win in a Democratic year. Still, Arnold’s going to work as hard as possible, so I wouldn’t put defeat down for certain. SLIGHT LEAN NO.
• Prop. 12. Safest thing on the ballot. Homes for veterans and it doesn’t cost a dime? SAFE YES.
Here’s the latest on the ballot propositions (Remember, you can find the Calitics endorsements here).
• Prop. 1A & Prop. 3: The California Budget Project put together an analysis of these two bond measures (for some reason they left off Prop. 12). It’s a decent enough overview, but of course the CBP is aggressively neutral, and the questions they raise have answers they refuse to list. For example, they ask:
Will high-speed rail gain access to rail corridors used by commercial and commuter trains? High-speed trains likely will require access to rail corridors – so-called right-of-way – currently used or owned by commercial or commuter train operators. The growth in freight transport at California’s ports and increased ridership on California’s commuter rail lines may mean that high-speed trains may have difficulty gaining required rights-of-way in certain highly trafficked corridors.
Or maybe not! Let’s not bother to delve into this any further!
That’s kind of the tone the whole paper takes. These projects could be laudable! Then again, they cost money! Good luck, California! One would think that some hard numbers about the role of public infrastructure investments during economic downturns or the need for job creation engines or how to reach emissions reductions targets without mass transit improvements could have entered the picture.
• Prop. 2: You know that an issue has gone mainstream when Oprah devotes an hour to it. Prop. 2 will essentially get an hour-long infomercial on daytime talk today, and that’s as good as gold. Their ads, starkly displaying the effects of animal cruelty, are powerful and effective as well. But in addition, I hope that Prop. 2 advocates make the argument about a comprehensive food policy that understands the externalities of eating meat ought to be built into the product itself:
It will be argued that moving animals off feedlots and back onto farms will raise the price of meat. It probably will – as it should. You will need to make the case that paying the real cost of meat, and therefore eating less of it, is a good thing for our health, for the environment, for our dwindling reserves of fresh water and for the welfare of the animals. Meat and milk production represent the food industry’s greatest burden on the environment; a recent U.N. study estimated that the world’s livestock alone account for 18 percent of all greenhouse gases, more than all forms of transportation combined. (According to one study, a pound of feedlot beef also takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce.) And while animals living on farms will still emit their share of greenhouse gases, grazing them on grass and returning their waste to the soil will substantially offset their carbon hoof prints, as will getting ruminant animals off grain. A bushel of grain takes approximately a half gallon of oil to produce; grass can be grown with little more than sunshine.
This is about stopping brutality, but also about intelligent food policy that would decrease risks and burdens on the environment and public health.
• Prop. 4: A very effective ad from the No on 4 team has returned to the airwaves:
Two years ago, opponents of a parental notification initiative on abortion put out a chilling ad. It depicted a soap bubble floating in the air in a seemingly tranquil setting of a residential backyard. The bubble drifted by windows of a house, where angry voices and rumbling noises suggested violence taking place inside.
Now the bubble commercial that opponents used to defeat Proposition 85 is back. This time, with identical treatment and text, it is being used in the campaign against another parental notification initiative, Proposition 4.
The commercial neglects to mention provisions in the initiative that allow a minor to petition a juvenile court judge to waive the parental notification requirement. It ends (with only the proposition number changed) by saying Prop 4 “would force girls to notify an abusive or violent parent that they are pregnant, and this puts them in real danger. Please think outside your bubble and vote no on Prop. 4.”
The ad is here. The commercial neglects to mention that provision because it’s a crap provision – the minor has to accuse the parent of mistreatment and claim that she fears physical or emotional abuse, which is really a great position in which to put a minor. And the idea of a 17 year-old going to a judge is just nonsensical.
The commission’s consideration of alternatives to incarceration reflects its determination to persuade Congress to ease federal mandatory minimum sentencing laws that contributed to explosive growth in the prison population. The laws were enacted in the mid-1980s, principally to address a crime epidemic related to crack cocaine. But in recent years, federal judges, public defenders and probation officials have argued that mandatory sentences imprison first-time offenders unnecessarily and disproportionately affect minorities.
Don’t these people know that sentencing commissions with expert experience in the issues shouldn’t be trusted to carry out guidelines and recommendations on sentencing? This of course should only be left to politicians who worry about attack ads claiming that they’re soft on crime! After all, look how well that’s worked in California: 1,000 straight laws over 30 years increasing sentences, overcrowded prisons, costs of incarceration outpacing education and billions of dollars needed to fix an unconstitutionally cruel prison healthcare system! Clearly, the legislature has this covered, right? So there’s no need to vote yes on Prop. 5, because that would be too “risky.” What we have now is working so well.
• Prop. 8: This being the biggest and most expensive initiative on the ballot, there’s a lot of news here. Fresno priest Father Geoffrey Farrow took a stand against Prop. 8 recently and it resulted in his firing. His is a heroic story of someone coming forward at great personal cost to commit to equality and tolerance. That is the meaning of courage.
Peter Schrag has an article out about the lies of Yes on 8.
The ad, on behalf of Proposition 8, features a law professor from Pepperdine University who cites a federal appellate court decision in Massachusetts, where gay marriage is legal. The decision affirms a lower court ruling denying parents of a couple of young children the right to be notified when gay marriage is discussed in their classrooms.
“Think it can’t happen?” says the professor. “It’s already happened.”
But the insinuation about what might happen in California is wildly misleading. It relies on a set of leaps likely to land the leaper in a logical ditch. In the case of one of the kids, the court said, “(T)here is no evidence of systemic indoctrination. There is no allegation that Joey was asked to affirm gay marriage.”
If you want to see bigger lies than that, check out this deeply insulting ad targeted to the Chinese community.
On the lighter side, here’s a slick amateur ad for No on 8 playing off the ubiquitous Mac/PC spots.
• Prop. 10: Speaking of lying in campaign ads, have you met T. Boone Pickens?
The ad capitalizes on popular sentiment for clean, efficient and secure energy – and no new taxes. What goes unadvertised might stir the public’s distaste for special interest-driven initiatives, particularly those that increase state debt.
Nearly all $13 million in campaign contributions so far has come from Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens, who stands to profit from its passage. Pickens is founder of Clean Energy Fuels Corp. of Seal Beach, the nation’s largest supplier of natural gas for fleets of vehicles, including Sacramento city and county garbage trucks.
More than half of the $5 billion would be spent on rebates to companies and consumers that buy environmentally friendlier vehicles. And most of that rebate money is dedicated to heavy-duty trucks and vans, the kind of fleet vehicles that Pickens’ company supplies.
• Nancy Pelosi is going to ask for a second stimulus that includes aid for state and local governments, extending unemployment benefits and investment in infrastructure. This is desperately needed and she needs to follow up and we have to pressure her. It’s good for California and the nation.
• 538 did a “road to 270” feature on California a couple days back. Nothing in there you wouldn’t expect, other than some good demographic information (our Starbucks/Wal-Mart ratio is second in the nation).
• I don’t know if we’ve featured this in a post or not, but this ad for the Yes on 4 campaign is completely despicable and everybody involved in it should be ashamed of themselves. Apparently devoid of shame, the campaign, after saying they’d only run it once, has expanded it and aired it in selected markets last night after the Presidential debate.
• Here’s a fundraising breakdown for all 12 propositions. No on 4 has quite an advantage and they need to use it. Yes on 5 has a large advantage as well. There is no committee for No on 1A. Same with No on 10. It’s an interesting set of numbers.
• This is a sad story about a family of six murdered by the head of household, who had an advanced degree in finance but couldn’t find a job. I take no pleasure in saying this could be replicated around the state as we hit this downturn.
• You may remember Delecia Holt, the perennial Republican candidate in the San Diego area who suffered allegations of campaign fraud. She’s now been arrested for writing bad checks and avoiding bill collectors.
Welcome to a probably not-so-regular feature, offering the latest news on the ballot propositions. The Calitics Editorial Board will be out with their endorsements on these initiatives sometime next week.
There is far more economic opportunity in fighting global warming than economic risk….We shouldn’t let the budget crisis hold back good things for the future. 20 years from now you can’t look back and say “well they had a budget crisis so we didn’t do it.” Just because we had a problem with the budget does not mean that people should vote “no” on high speed rail. Our rail system in America is so old, we’re driving the same speed as 100 years ago, the same system as 100 years ago. We should modernize, we should do what other countries do…We should start in this state, we should show leadership.
• Prop. 2: You can see it by clicking on the ad on the side, but, you know, Piggy Wonder deserves some main-page love. Joe Trippi is apparently involved in the Prop. 2 campaign, which would help stop animal cruelty; I got an email from him promoting this video.
• Prop. 5: The LA Times has a series of profiles on all the propositions, and here’s their edition on Prop. 5, which would finally increase treatment for nonviolent offenders like drug users instead of warehousing them at our overstuffed prisons. Opponents are smearing this by saying its true intent is to legalize drugs, but the failed Drug War is the great unmentionable sinkhole in state and national budgets, and a smart policy emphasizing rehabilitation is desperately needed, especially in California. The No on 5 people must have better spinmeisters, however, as most of the newspapers in the state have come out against the measure. Right, because the policymakers have done such a stellar job in sentencing law, we should just leave it to them.
• Prop. 8: An update on those million yard signs that were “in route” from China to the Yes on 8 campaign: they’re still not here.
It seems that the signs, some of them outsourced overseas, didn’t all arrive in time for the September event. And many still haven’t reached supporters of the measure that would amend the state Constitution to ban gay marriage.
“It takes longer to get a million than we thought,” said Sonja Eddings Brown, deputy communications director for the Protect Marriage coalition […]
Brown tried to spin the production glitch as a positive thing for the campaign — a sign, so to speak, of the overwhelming demand for lawn signs by voters who wanted to participate in “the most unprecedented and largest grass-roots effort ever attempted in California.”
Oh that’s just a FAIL.
Meanwhile, when the most reactionary editorial board in the state, the Orange County Register, comes out against your proposition, you know you’re having a tough time selling it. As for the right-wing boycott of Google for opposing Prop. 8, the website orchestrating it advises its supporters to follow the fate of the proposition – on Google News.
I think I’m going to miss this initiative, it’s been hilarious so far.
Maybe it’s all the endorsements, or that the anti-equality side has thus far been confined to right-wing zealots and religious forces trying to impose their doctrine on the state, but Proposition 8’s chances of passage are getting worse.
Opposition to a California ballot measure to ban same-sex marriage is mounting following Attorney General Jerry Brown’s move to change the language on the initiative, according to a Field Poll released today.
The poll found that just 38 percent of likely voters support the measure, while 55 percent intend to vote no. That compares with 42 percent in support and 51 percent opposed in July.
Brown amended the Proposition 8 summary language after the state Supreme Court’s decision on May 15 to overturn California’s previous ban on same-sex marriage.
The pollsters found the amended language played a role in that growing opposition, especially among the 30 percent of likely voters interviewed who had never heard of Prop. 8.
Those voters were much more likely to oppose the measure when read Brown’s wording (58 percent against it and 30 percent for it) than those in the same category who were read the old version of Prop. 8 (42 percent against and 37 percent for it), according to the Field Poll.
Yes, how dare that Jerry Brown put into print what the initiative would actually do, which is eliminate the right granted by the state for same-sex couples to marry. The Yes on 8 folks are whining that Brown “interfered” with the election, when actually, words with meaning did.
You can get the internals of the poll here. The initiative is running weak among DTS voters (56-28 against) and young voters (58-31 against). Hispanics are against it 51-36, which actually is not as solid as whites (55-39 against). And the key stat to me is that among divorced or separated voters, Prop. 8 fails 65-33. That makes perfect sense; those who have lived through a bad marriage have less illusions about how equality would ruin its sanctity.
The way I would view this is the way that California initiative watchers commonly view the “Pro” side of the argument. You have to start out 55% or higher before the negative ads kick in. Right now the Yes on 8 folks are outraising the No side 3:2, mostly with out-of-state checks. They’re going to blanket the state with ads and so we should not let our guard down.
The assumption with Prop. 83, “Jessica’s Law,” was that it simply perpetuated the “Tough on Crime” myth that reactionaries have always rode to popularity. It turns out that Jessica’s Law also made a small group of contract psychologists rich for no discernible reason.
A 2006 law intended to crack down on sex offenders has proved a bonanza for a small group of private psychologists and psychiatrists, 14 of whom billed California taxpayers last year for a half a million dollars or more each, a Times investigation found.
Among the 79 contractors hired by the state to evaluate sex offenders, the top earner was Robert Owen, a Central Coast psychologist who pulled in more than $1.5 million in 2007, according to state records reviewed by The Times.
At issue is a provision in the law that mandated government-funded psychiatric evaluations for sex offenders, to determine whether or not they required hospitalization or instutionalization after their prison terms have been served. If this resulted in actual hospital commitments, perhaps there’d be a return on investment. But the $24 million state taxpayers have sunk into this just in 2007 has yielded nothing:
It’s unclear, however, what benefit the investment has yielded. There’s been a nearly ninefold increase in evaluations and a threefold increase in recommendations for hospital commitment. But the actual number of commitments has remained essentially the same — 41 in the 18 months before the law was passed, 42 in the 18 months afterward.
As the state confronts a budget shortfall of $15.2 billion, legislation to fund contractors to evaluate offenders through 2010 is expected to be voted on in the Assembly as soon as this week. Costs from Jessica’s Law are expected to rise to several hundred million dollars annually over the next eight years, with further increases thereafter, according to projections by California’s legislative analyst.
What a horrible boondoggle this thing has turned out to be, doing nothing to keep anyone safe, costing the state hundreds of millions, and violating all kinds of civil rights leading to ex-offenders sleeping under bridges (which makes them far more difficult to track). Prop. 83 is the poster child for why initiative campaigns have strayed far from their initial purpose as exercises in direct democracy, and why serious reform of the process is needed desperately.
The Center for Governmental Studies, as part of its Democracy by Initiative project, has published an article on online signature gathering. CGS stops short of endorsing the proposal but discusses some of the pros and cons:
One approach to balancing the influence of money in qualifying initiatives would be to let registered voters sign initiative petitions on a computer and transmit their signatures over the Internet to be counted toward the required total, so long as proper authentication and other security procedures were followed. This could help level the playing field for less-well-funded groups who could mobilize voter support via the Internet as an alternative to paying petition circulators the going rate — two dollars and up per signature. Online petition signing could also enhance public discourse about ballot measures through interactive online commentary and discussions.
Others have voiced objections to online signature gathering on the grounds that insecure computers or communications links could lead to large-scale fraud in signing initiative petitions; that voters without computers and Internet access would be disadvantaged; and that online signing would make qualifying initiatives too easy and thus deluge voters with many more ballot measures at each election.
It’s an interesting idea. Certainly it would be valuable in combating the dirty tricks signature gatherers use to get people to sign, where they typically obscure the actual meaning or intent of a proposed initiative. Online signature gathering would enable voters to better understand what they’re signing – though whether that’ll acutally happen or not is an open question.
To counter the likelihood that this would produce more initiatives on the ballot, CGS suggested raising the number of signatures required to qualify an initiative. And of course there are security concerns to be considered – with the possibility that more secure methods would be more off-putting to potential online signers.
It seems to me that this reform would only have value in concert with other fundamental reforms of the system, from meaningful and enforcable campaign finance reforms to limitations on what the initiative process can be used to do. I’m all for giving the people themselves more power (so I’m ideologically inclined to support having an initiative system) but for it to have maximum use online signature gathering ought to be enfolded within a larger package of reform.
