This November, Californians will decide the fate of 14 different statewide ballot measures. While it sounds exhausting, we’ve voted on more in the past – a whopping 29 in the November 1988 election and 28 in the 1990 general election.
Adding to the confusion are the ballot proposition numbers themselves.
When reviewing your sample ballot and seeing Proposition 1, the housing bond measure, you might ask yourself – didn’t we just vote on Proposition 1?
The answer is yes – Proposition 1 in the March 2024 primary dealt with mental health bond funding.
We also voted on Proposition 1 in November 2022 when voters decided on the so-called right to reproductive freedom constitutional amendment.
Aren’t the numbers of the propositions supposed to grow over a certain number of years? So, why are we always voting on Proposition 1?
The answer lies with Sacrament politicians manipulating the system to try and maximize the chances of their favorite ballot measure passing.
Under California law, the numbers assigned to statewide ballot measures are supposed to run in a continuous sequence starting with 1 over a 10-year period, starting with the 1998 election. In 2028, we should flip back to voting on Prop. 1 once again. Before that, the numbers climbed sequentially election after election. There would be some duplication, but over a reasonable number of years so as not to confuse voters.
Then state lawmakers started getting involved by putting their thumb on the scale to boost the chances of their favorite ballot measures.
In 2022, Democratic lawmakers passed SB 131 to move the abortion measure to the top of the ballot. In March 2024, lawmakers curiously voted to make the mental health bond Prop. 1 even thought it was the only measure on the ballot (this is another example of lawmaker tinkering; Democrats enacted Senate Bill 202 in 2011 to only allow legislative ballot measures to be voted on during the June primary).
We had repeats of Propositions 2 through 6 in November 2024, which the rest of the initiatives numbered 32 through 36.
This year, we have a repeat of Propositions 1 through 5, with the rest of the measures numbered 37 through 45. Typically, the renumber of ballot measures by the Legislature only covers measures that lawmakers themselves vote to place on the ballot. Curiously, this year’s batch tries to boost the fortunes of a measure placed on the ballot by teachers’ unions and other special interest groups to make “permanent” a temporary tax for education funding, not through a vote of lawmakers.
Another interesting case was last year’s vote on Prop. 50. The reasoning behind picking the number out of thin air was campaign semantics – Gov. Newsom picked it to promote “fair elections in all 50 states.” Ironically, he did so by making California elections far less fair by bringing back the gerrymandering of congressional districts.
What’s the point of all of this? Does having Proposition 1 numbering help a ballot measure’s chance of passage? Research has shown not really.
USC economist and political scientist John Matsusaka has published the definitive work on the subject, reviewing the impact of ballot order in proposition elections in California and Texas. His research found that, “propositions are not advantaged by being listed at the top compared to the bottom of the ballot.”
Other scholars, however, have shown that there is something to the concept of “choice fatigue,” or voters not voting for all of the measures on the ballot when given a long list of decisions. A 2016 study showed that, without choice fatigue, “abstentions would decrease by 8 percent, and 6% of the propositions in our data set would have passed rather than failed.”
Meanwhile, voters are not pleased with long ballots. 77 percent of voters in a recent Public Policy Institute of California poll said there were too many propositions on the state ballot.
Which gets us back to the main question – why are politicians playing around with the numbers of ballot measures? It’s not for good government, that’s for sure. That they feel compelled to do so, when the research shows it has a negligible impact on people’s votes despite their displeasure with the significant numbers of ballot measures, says it all.
Tim Anaya is the Pacific Research Institute’s vice president of marketing and communications and co-author of The California Left Coast Survivor’s Guide.
