Count 'em: 17 ballot measures for the November 2016 election here in California.
Above is a chart of the endorsements from four of the political parties in California.
http://www.cagreens.org/elections/propositions
http://www.cademvote.org/endorsements
https://www.cagop.org/ballot_measure_endorsements
http://ca.lp.org/measures/
As you can see there are some differences: two of the parties like to support the initiatives while two of the parties are more skeptical about them.
The initiative process in California is of long standing (since 1911). If you are curious, this PDF gives, by year, the number of initiatives that attempted to qualify, qualified, and ultimately adopted/rejected by the voters.
Looking at the sum total over the years, initiatives are more likely to be rejected than adopted. And that makes sense: one, people may think the issue being raised by the initiative is not of concern, hence a NO vote; and two, even if they think it is of concern, do voters believe the initiative would actually be helpful?
Often times, after seeing the rival commercials on TV and reading the ballot summaries, the voter is left confused and thus vote NO rather than pass something they don't understand. Although, I suppose there are some voters who feel if it is an important issue then they vote YES as something needs to be done even if they don't know exactly what the initiative will do.
Anyway, my default is to vote NO unless I find some compelling arguments in the ballot summaries and in editorials from newspapers in favor of the initiative.
No comments:
Post a Comment