Now the fourth-term governor has new evidence for his case. A comprehensive new report by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University that looked at every state’s audited financial documents from 2014 ranks California 44th in its ability to meet short-term bills and longer term obligations. The report makes the case both for caution on expanding new state spending and for putting as much as possible in the rainy-day fund that voters approved in 2014.

In two categories, the Golden State is in the middle of the back.

On budget solvency — which Mercatus defines as “can a state cover its fiscal year spending with current revenues, or does it have a budget shortfall?” — California ranked 23rd.

On service-level solvency — “how much ‘fiscal slack’ does a state have to increase spending if citizens demand more services?” — California ranked 28th.

Long-term picture for California is grim

But in three categories, the Golden State was far worse than the national average, buttressing Brown’s call to beef up the state’s rainy-day fund.

On long-run solvency — “can a state meet its long-term spending commitments? Will there be enough money to cushion it from economic shocks or other long-term fiscal risks?” — California ranked 46th.

On cash solvency — “does a state have enough cash on hand to cover its short-term bills?” — California ranked 47th.

On trust fund solvency — “how much debt does a state have? How large are its unfunded pension and healthcare liabilities?” — California ranked 42nd.

A recent New York Times story about Gov. Brown depicted him as having put California on solid fiscal ground and guided the state’s economy into a “period of prosperity.” The Times account suggested Brown and the Golden State could be a model for national Democrats.

The Mercatus study indicates that this narrative is based on perception more than hard data. Recent U.S. “U-6” unemployment data, which covers not just people without a job but people who work fewer hours than they want, backs up Mercatus. As of August, only six states had more residents unable to find jobs or full-time employment than California.

The conventional wisdom holds that primary turnout in California is generally weak unless there is a particularly contested election of note or a high-profile, high-stakes ballot measure. This June 7, with the presidential nominations largely determined for both parties, most observers have low expectations.

But the National University System Institute for Policy Research thinks we’re in for a surprise. The San Diego university recently released a policy brief that predicts at least half of San Diego County residents will vote — up at least 13 percent from the June 2012 primary. 

This is based on a huge surge in voter registration in the county — a development that has also been seen statewide, with similar implications.

“California is experiencing historic growth in new voter registrations; more than 850,000 voters have registered between January 1st and March 31st of this year. This registration figure is twice the total from January 1st to March 31st in 2012. As noted by elections analyst Paul Mitchell in Capitol Weekly, the last time the state voter rolls grew in the 18 months prior to a presidential primary election was in 1980,” the National University report said.

“San Diego County is no exception – using registration reports from the San Diego County Registrar of Voters, we found countywide registration increased a net 50,977 voters from January 5th to April 30th. Most of the net change in partisan registration was among Democratic voters, further increasing the small registration lead the Democratic Party has over the GOP in San Diego County.”

This influx of voters is “younger, more diverse and more Democratic-leaning,” the policy brief noted.

“Demographically, they largely fit the profile of Bernie Sanders supporters,” Vince Vasquez, senior policy analyst at National University System Institute for Policy Research, told KPBS. “How many will vote down ticket, and what are the campaigns doing to appeal to these new voters? We’ll find out on election night.”

Is social media leading to more young liberals voting?

The report doesn’t speculate on why voting might be higher than normal. But the Obama campaign’s successful “microtargeting” of voters in 2012 is seen as having created new ways to reach and lobby younger voters. In the last month before the 2012 election, the Obama campaign unveiled a new tactic that it credited with leading to a surge in youth voting. Time magazine’s election post-mortem had details:

Half the campaign’s targeted swing-state voters under age 29 had no listed phone number. They lived in the cellular shadows, effectively immune to traditional get-out-the-vote efforts. … But the Obama team had a solution in place: a Facebook application that will transform the way campaigns are conducted in the future. …. “I think this will wind up being the most groundbreaking piece of technology developed for this campaign,” says Teddy Goff, the Obama campaign’s digital director.

That’s because the more than 1 million Obama backers who signed up for the app gave the campaign permission to look at their Facebook friend lists. In an instant, the campaign had a way to see the hidden young voters. Roughly 85% of those without a listed phone number could be found in the uploaded friend lists. What’s more, Facebook offered an ideal way to reach them. … 

The campaign called this effort targeted sharing. And in those final weeks of the campaign, the team blitzed the supporters who had signed up for the app with requests to share specific online content with specific friends simply by clicking a button. More than 600,000 supporters followed through with more than 5 million contacts, asking their friends to register to vote, give money, vote or look at a video designed to change their mind.

This social media-access access often appears to lead to increasingly “pure” liberal views and is reflected in Sanders’ huge lead over Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton among voters under 30.

Trump seen as spurring Hispanics to register

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported Thursday that another candidate besides Sanders may be bringing out California voters: Donald Trump.

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is spurring a record number of citizenship applications and increases in voter registration among Latinos upset by the candidate’s rhetoric and fearful of his plans to crack down on immigration. …. 

In California, the number of Hispanics registering to vote doubled in the first three months of this year compared with the same period in 2012, according to state data.

Assembly Bill 2863, introduced by Assemblyman Adam Gray, D-Merced, would make California the fourth state after New Jersey, Nevada and Delaware to legalize some Internet poker websites. The measure, which passed the Assembly Governmental Organization Committee on a 19-0 vote last week, says the sites can only be operated by Indian tribes that already have casinos in California.

The connection between the financial struggles of California horse-racing tracks and online poker is based on track owners’ arguments that they have been financially devastated by the rise of legal online horse betting and by the proliferation of Indian casinos in the Golden State since 2000. That’s when voters approved a state constitutional amendment making it much easier for tribes to get casinos approved. While the racing industry is declining in California, it still has some pull in the Legislature.

But there is a split in the media over how much of a breakthrough online poker advocates truly achieved last week. Coverage in the niche media that specialize in gambling was less likely to see the committee vote as a huge step toward online poker’s legalization than the mainstream media.

OnlinePoker.Report.com challenged the description of some of California’s wealthiest tribes as being “neutral” on AB2863 simply because they had not taken an unequivocal public stand on the measure. In particular, OPR reported, Agua Caliente and Pechanga representatives privately express broad skepticism about Gray’s bill. 

Some CA tribes want to block online juggernaut

Their biggest objection involves what in the online poker world is known as the “bad actor” debate: whether online poker sites with questionable histories should be firmly banned from partnering with casinos in setting up new state-specific online sites.

PokerStars is the site most consistently depicted as a villain, which led to clauses in a Nevada law meant to keep it out of state-approved online poker sites. Founded in 2001, the world’s largest online poker site was the biggest fish targeted in the U.S. government’s 2011 crackdown on online betting. The next year, it settled its legal fight with the Justice Department by paying $700 million without admitting wrongdoing.

Now PokerStars has quickly established itself as a juggernaut in New Jersey with its pokerstarsnj.com site. In 2014, it lined up partners in California: the Morongo Tribe and the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians.

Unless other tribes get language in AB2863 that provides hard protections against a PokerStars-Morongo-San Manuel partnership, the legislation may end up being opposed by most of California’s richest tribes, whose generous campaign donations have given them considerable clout in Sacramento.

There is again a gap between mainstream and niche media coverage of this issue. Instead of being about keeping “bad actors” out of states, gambling news sites depict “bad actor” clauses as being about market protectionism.

One of the world’s best known law professors, Harvard’s Lawrence Tribe, agrees with that description and could work as a lobbyist for and counsel to PokerStars if a state law attempts to keep PokerStars from partnering with California tribes.

These contrasting results were underlined Friday by officials with the federal Central Valley Project — the U.S. government’s elaborate system of moving water around Northern California and in the Central Valley using dams, pumps and canals. Normally, farms get at least three-quarters of this federal water, though not in times of drought, when cities are favored. As the San Jose Mercury-News reports, the feds’ interpretation of its own rules leads it to widely different conclusions about how much water goes where:

South [Bay Area] cities will receive 55 percent of their contracted water amounts this summer — up from 25 percent last year — from the Central Valley Project, California’s largest water delivery system.

 

Heavy rains in March boosted the amount of water in Northern California’s large reservoirs such as Shasta and Folsom, allowing farmers in the Sacramento Valley and wildlife refuges to receive 100 percent of their contracted amounts, while the Contra Costa Water District also will receive 100 percent, up from 25 percent a year ago.

Water allocations: Some farmers more equal than others

But the news was brutal elsewhere. In the San Joaquin Valley, federal regulators announced that only 5 percent of normally supplied water would be available. In interviews with the Sacramento Bee, farmers and their allies said the drought essentially had never left:

While a 5 percent supply is better than the zero allocation they received in each of the past two years, those farmers will again have to scramble to buy water from growers with stronger water rights – assuming the officials who monitor endangered fish in the Delta even allow for the extra water to be pumped south. The limited water shipments will put continued pressure on the valley’s groundwater basins, which in many areas have been pumped to record low levels in the drought.

 

The huge disparities in water allocations reflect California’s hodgepodge water rights system, which generally favors farmers north of the Delta. … On top of that, concerns over critically endangered fish have prompted federal and state officials to limit pumping to the south state even though Delta flows surged dramatically after March storms. The pumping restrictions drew complaints from south-of-Delta advocates who argue that stormwater flowing out to sea is being “wasted.”

 

[Federal reports] said that, in total, the federally operated reservoirs hold 86 percent of their average water for this time of year, but the south-of-Delta facilities are comparatively empty. New Melones Reservoir, which dams the Stanislaus River and is the state’s fourth-largest reservoir, is just 26 percent full – a figure so low that the Central San Joaquin Water Conservation District and Stockton East Water District will receive no water from the CVP this year.

Most, but not all, of SoCal struggling with supplies

In Southern California, meanwhile, the raw numbers illustrate the drought’s continued hold on the region:

The water level of Lake Mead, the reservoir behind Hoover Dam that stores Southern California’s Colorado River supply, stood last week at 1,081.32 feet above sea level — a recovery of about 6 feet since it reached a recent low point in June. But that’s still the lake’s lowest level in any March since 1937, when it was still filling for the first time. Mead is currently at about 39 percent of capacity. …

 

Reservoirs in Central and Southern California remain well below their averages, with Don Pedro Reservoir in the Sierra foothills at 82 percent of its average and 60 percent of capacity, and Perris Lake in Riverside County at 43 percent of its average and 36 percent of capacity. While the snowpack is calculated at 87 percent of normal overall, its depth varies widely across the state — rising over recent months to roughly 100 percent of the average in the far north of the state, but reaching only about 75 percent of the average toward the south. The U.S. Drought Monitor still shows much of Southern and Central California to be facing long-term “exceptional drought.”

That’s from an L.A. Times’ analysis calling for a “statewide approach” to address California’s continuing water crisis.

Only San Diego County is doing well in the state’s southern realms. The county water authority’s 25-year-old emphasis on seeking new sources of water independent of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California has paid off so well that two months ago, its reservoirs brimming, it had to dump some 500 million gallons of treated drinking water.

The latest measurement …  showed that the “snowpack is growing quite nicely.”

 

Frank Gehrke, chief of the California Cooperative Snow Surveys Program for the California Department of Water Resources, said the measurement was 130 percent of average at Phillips Station off Highway 50 near Sierra-at-Tahoe Road. He says the storms are making a difference in building snowpack so far this winter.

 

“These are not major storms, but they are making a difference in terms of snowpack accumulation,” Gehrke says. Gehrke says “this snow is not going anywhere” and will be important for “reservoir recovery.”

 

Both the depth and water content at Phillips Tuesday were the highest since 2005, when a depth of 77.1 inches and water content of 29.9 inches were recorded, according to the DWR.

While the snowpack is the most crucial measurement, since the water it provides lasts for months to come and helps communities statewide, the drought news was also good on many other fronts. Here’s one example:

San Francisco recorded an impressive 6.94 inches of rain during the month, far above the 4.5 inches it averages in January and the most the city has seen in any January since 2008 … . The total, in fact, is more than the city received over the past five Januarys combined. (Don’t forget: San Francisco saw no rain for the first time in 165 years of record-keeping in January of last year.)

That’s from the San Francisco Chronicle.

Water officials: Too early to ease tough rules

But as the Sacramento Bee reported, state officials object to any complacency on the drought front:

California’s drought regulators agreed Tuesday to extend water conservation mandates through the end of October. The decision came in spite of increasing evidence that El Niño is delivering better-than-average precipitation, including an encouraging measurement of the Sierra Nevada snowpack recorded just hours earlier.

 

The new regulations adopted by the State Water Resources Control Board mean urban Californians will have to reduce their water usage between March and October by about 23.4 percent compared with the baseline year of 2013.

 

That represents a slight easing of the existing mandates expiring this month, which require a savings rate of 25 percent compared to 2013. Sacramentans will be among the main beneficiaries of the relaxed rules, as the state board voted to ease requirements for hot inland communities where it takes more water to keep trees and lawns alive.

Nevertheless, as CalWatchdog reported on Jan. 19, state officials have already acted to ease conservation rules announced by Gov. Jerry Brown a year ago. Bureaucrats appear to be trying to strike a balance — acknowledging good news on the water supply front without discouraging conservation efforts that have been strikingly successful at times.

The fact that about 23 percent of state residents are barely getting by has helped fuel the push for a much higher minimum wage and prompted renewed interest in affordable housing programs. It’s also put the focus on regional economic disparities, especially the fact that Silicon Valley and San Francisco are the primary engine of state prosperity.

While the tech boom and the vast increase in housing prices it has triggered in the Bay Area are national news, prompting think pieces and thoughtful analyses, the poverty picture in the state’s largest population center isn’t covered nearly as fully. Although the fact is plain in Census Bureau data, it’s not commonly understood that Los Angeles County is the capital of U.S. poverty. A 2013 study by the Public Policy Institute of California and the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality based on 2011 data found 27 percent of the county’s 10 million residents were impoverished, the highest figure in the state and the highest of any large metro area in the U.S. The study questioned long-held assumptions about poverty being worst in rural areas.

But there are reasons to think the rate in Los Angeles County is significantly higher than the 27 percent reported in 2013.

The first is that many surveys of poverty struggle to account for undocumented immigrants, who often work for cash and don’t show up in wage surveys. The Pew Research Service in 2009 estimated that undocumented individuals face poverty rates “nearly double” those of Americans in general. Los Angeles County has by far the most undocumented immigrants, estimated by PPIC to be 815,000 in 2013.

The second is that the cost of housing has surged in Los Angeles County over the past four years even as wages have stagnated. The average rent of an apartment countywide is expected to be $1,800 by year’s end, with the biggest percentage jump in poorer communities in the San Fernando Valley.

Poverty-related stress takes heavy toll

A summer report by Southern California Public Radio laid out a grim picture of the toll this mass poverty takes on the young.

New research shows the mere fact of being poor can affect kids’ brains, making it difficult for them to succeed in school.

 

Los Angeles public schools — where more than 80 percent of students live in poverty — illustrate the challenges for these students. …

 

Children living in poor neighborhoods are more likely to suffer traumatic incidents, like witnessing or being the victims of shootings, parental neglect or abuse. They also struggle with pernicious daily stressors, including food or housing insecurity, overcrowding and overworked or underemployed, stressed-out parents.

 

Untreated, researchers have found these events compound, affecting many parts of the body. Studies show chronic stress can change the chemical and physical structures of the brain.

 

“You see deficits in your ability to regulate emotions in adaptive ways as a result of stress,” said Dr. Cara Wellman, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at Indiana University.

 

Dendrites, which look like microscopic fingers, stretch off each brain cell to catch information.  Wellman’s studies in mice show that chronic stress causes these fingers to shrink, changing the way the brain works. She found deficiencies in the pre-frontal cortex – the part of the brain needed to solve problems, which is crucial to learning.

 

Other researchers link chronic stress to a host of cognitive effects, including trouble with attention, concentration, memory and creativity.

SCPR had a follow-up report that showed Los Angeles schools simply didn’t have the resources to help affected students in a comprehensive way.

But what was rarely acknowledged in the California media is that the Oregon law — while winning positive notices from that state’s media — has a solid core of skeptics who complained of skewed or inadequate data backing up assertions that the safeguards work.

Working with Oregon residents, the Ohio-based Patients Rights Council in 2008 published a review of Oregon’s law, surveying the measure after it had been in effect for 10 years.

The review includes a list of dubious cases in which suicides were botched or influenced by family members and noted how little documentation or evidence-gathering there was for claims that safeguards were working.

Most intriguingly, it included a link to a British House of Lords report on a possible British version of Oregon’s law, based on a fact-finding trip some lawmakers had taken to Oregon. It included more than 100 pages of testimony and related information involving different Oregon agency officials and others in state medical circles. Here’s a link to the PDF: Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill [HL], Volume II: Evidence. The Oregon testimony begins on page 255.

British lawmakers rejected law after Oregon visit

As the Patients Rights Council notes, British lawmakers who went to Oregon were skeptical of the official narrative.

After hearing witnesses from Oregon claim that there had been no complications (other than “regurgitation”) associated with more than 200 assisted-suicide deaths, Lord McColl of Dulwich, a surgeon, questioned that assertion.

 

He said that, in his practice as a physician, “if any surgeon or physician had told me that he did 200 procedures without any complications, I knew he possibly needed counseling and had no insight. We come here and I am told there are no complications.  There is something strange going on.“

A Portland physician, Dr. William Toffler, told British lawmakers that Oregon authorities were not taking oversight responsibilities seriously.

We have to be candid about these problems with overdoses. The state of Oregon has been less ingenuous about the problems of overdoses. It took six years before the Oregon Health Division’s flawed tracking system even reported one case of vomiting. Can you imagine any pills that you give, even for overdoses, that never cause vomiting? That is what the Oregon Health would have us believe from their tracking system. …

The British House of Lords ended up rejecting an Oregon-style law in 2006 on a 148-100 vote, according to the Patients Rights Council.

Before adopting its version of Oregon’s law, California lawmakers heard out many critics and supporters. But the Oregon-specific criticisms voiced by the Patients Rights Council, and evidently shared by the House of Lords, never were spotlighted.

Now a new UCLA study finds that of the 4 million adults in California who are 65 or older, 1.11 million struggle to make ends meet — an effective poverty rate of 28 percent. That’s more than triple the number of California elderly who were considered impoverished under standard federal measures. This is from the KPCC/PBS report:

More than 770,000 seniors in California aren’t making enough to get by but aren’t considered poor by the federal government, according to a UCLA health policy study that is challenging the definition of poverty. …

 

According to the study, about 340,000 Californians 65 years or older are considered poor based on the Federal Poverty Level, which makes them eligible for public assistance programs.

 

But in an analysis of 2009-2011 U.S. Census data, the researchers concluded that about 772,000 more seniors in the state could use the help but aren’t considered poor enough. She calls this group the “hidden poor.”

 

“They don’t have enough income to meet a minimally decent standard of living,” said study lead author Imelda Padilla-Frausto, a graduate student researcher at the Center for Health Policy Research.

‘Hidden poor’ in trailer parks fight for rent control

As with the jump in overall poverty rates in the 2012 alternative Census Bureau statistical review, elderly poverty rates are much higher than previously thought because of the high cost of living. UCLA explains its approach in its study:

Economic security requires that older adults have sufficient income to pay for basic housing, food, transportation, health care, and other necessary expenses. The Elder Index is an evidence-based approach that identifies the actual costs of those basic needs at the county level for renters, homeowners with a mortgage, and homeowners without a mortgage. …

 

Of the 4 million older adults age 65 and over in California in 2011, one out of three (38.4 percent) was part of an older couple living alone, one out of four (27 percent) was a single elder living alone, one out of 20 (5.5 percent) was part of an older couple housing adult children, one out of 30 (3.6 percent) was a single elder housing adult children, and less than 1 percent were grandparents raising grandchildren without the parents present.

A primary cause of economic insecurity among the elderly is their reliance on fixed incomes that can’t handle sudden increases in housing costs. This explains why trailer park communities with rent controls — and many renters among the “hidden poor” — are often involved in intense political fights in local governments.

California has nearly 5,000 trailer parks with nearly 1 million residents, according to a 2011 TIME report about trailer park owners’ war on what cities call “rent stabilization agreements.”

According to a website that offers resources to trailer-park residents in disputes with their landlords, 97 local governments around California put limits on how much rates can go up each year, from Alameda County to Yucaipa.

Elderly trailer-park voters are often eagerly courted by local politicians. They vote at higher rates than younger residents and form coalitions with other groups that have lost favor with city hall. In Oceanside, for example, trailer park residents and public safety unions have long fought with business interests and conservative Republicans for control of the City Council.

But perhaps no community has more cause to be upset than the city of Riverside. In the name of preserving limited water supplies in the Bay Delta, a city that gets no water from the Bay Delta and has taken many successful steps to be water-independent has been forced to cut water consumption by 28 percent. The Riverside Press-Enterprise elaborates on why city leaders have chosen to sue the state, seeking a temporary restraining order and injunction:

Riverside has its own groundwater supplies from the Bunker Hill Basin and is independent of imported water, said Kevin Milligan, deputy general manager at Riverside Public Utilities. …

 

The city applied to the state to be included in a special tier requiring only a 4 percent reduction, but was denied. The 4 percent tier requires a reliable water supply, but applies only to surface water, not groundwater, he said. …

 

“The only difference is surface water you can see and groundwater you can’t,” he said. …

 

To make itself water independent, the city has invested in the John W. North Water Treatment Plan, drilled new wells, captures storm water from the Seven Oaks Dam and has spent $10 million dollars on recycled water infrastructure, he said.

 

Thought it has been drawn down in the drought, the Bunker Hill Basin has at least 1.4 million acre feet of storage left and maybe as much as 5.4 million acre feet, Milligan said. One acre-foot of water is enough to serve two families for a year.

State authorities also rejected Riverside’s separate request for a 24 percent reduction instead of a 28 percent cut, disputing the city’s claim that it didn’t count college students in deciding which tier the city would be in.

More water intrigue in Riverside County

The city of Riverside has regional company in being consumed with water issues and concerns about how to respond to the drought.

As CalWatchdog reported in June, officials in Palm Springs and throughout the Coachella Valley are facing criticism over the vast amounts of water it takes to keep their 124 golf courses and dozens of resorts green and attractive. The explanation that the tourist region has plenty of cheap water thanks to plentiful underground aquifers — despite being located in a desert — hasn’t stemmed the criticism.

Meanwhile, the Elsinore Valley Municipal Water District, which serves more than 130,000 people in Lake Elsinore, Murrieta, Wildomar and many unincorporated communities, also has been subject to a mandatory 28 percent cut even though it has “already reduced water use by more than 25 percent since 2007 – surpassing the state’s mandated 20 percent by 2020 per capita goal established in 2009. … [Having] these new restrictions unfairly penalized our customers, who have set one of the best examples in the state over the last five years,” Elsinore Valley board President Phil Williams wrote in the Press-Enterprise.

Brown’s emergency water edict expires in February; under state law, it can only extend a maximum of 270 days. Water officials are expected to begin discussions soon on what rules will replace the existing ones.

A key factor will be whether the winter’s expected winter “Godzilla El Niño” brings the massive amount of rain that some — but not all — scientists expect.

The notion is both sickening and unconstitutional, but it’s also part of California’s political process dating back to 1911. The Golden State is one of 24 states that use the initiative process.

The issue arises as several other groups in the past month have submitted paperwork to the state Attorney General’s office to get the ball rolling on a wide range of ballot measures. After the paperwork is signed, supporters must collect 365,000 signatures to put their issue before voters.

There are currently 33 measures filed with the AG for the 2016 ballot.

The state’s largest service employees union, the SEIU, submitted a request to the state AG’s office in late April for a measure that would boost the minimum wage statewide to $15 an hour by the year 2021.

Another group seeks to curtail the state’s often-generous alimony law.

Then there’s the aforementioned “Sodomite Suppression Act.”

The latter effort has put the state’s system of proposition-as-change in the national spotlight. State Attorney General Kamala Harris is seeking more time to figure out how to refuse the measure without violating the rights of the gay-killing advocate, who lists his name as Matthew McLaughlin.

Most scholars say Harris can’t halt it; the law allows even something as unconstitutional as murder to be put to a vote.

Every election year, “a lot of people will come up with an initiative idea and throw it into the system, and you have a lot of crackpots,” said Kenneth Miller, associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, who developed the Miller-Rose Institute Initiative Database of all statewide initiatives approved by voters through 2014.

“Most of the things that succeed are done by interest groups, trade association, labor unions, business groups,” Miller said.  “Usually not individuals at large.”

Among states using the ballot to enact statewide policy change, California voters are second only to Oregon in the number of measures approved, 121.

California voters have passed around 35 percent of measures since 1911, when the state approved the initiative process.

Many times these initiatives stem from a group or individuals who are sure that the state Assembly will never pass legislation to address their issue or grievance. Unless otherwise worded, propositions can only be undone by another voter-approved initiative or a legal challenge.

“Most states that use this approach to lawmaking were the western states, which at the time were a lot more politically fluid,” Miller said. “They were just starting to become states and didn’t have entrenched systems.”

Challenges to initiatives

A passed initiative doesn’t mean unchallenged, and California has by far the most challenges to voter decided propositions, with 78 percent being taken on post-passage, according to an analysis of data by CalWatchdog.com.

Since the ‘70s, around half of those challenges have been at least partially successful.

By far the most challenges have come to “Jessica’s Law,” approved with 71 percent of the 2006 vote. The law prohibited all sex offenders from living within 2,000 feet of schools and parks, with the goal of keeping them away from children. Nine legal objections have been made. It has so far survived, but one case led to a state Supreme Court ruling in March that it went too far and made it unconstitutionally difficult for convicts to find a place to live.

Its legacy continues to be cited; this session, eight bills cite the proposition in supporting various amendments to the law it created.

The second most frequently challenged proposition, from 1920, allowed non-citizens the right to own property. It was approved by 75 percent of voters. Of the five challenges, three failed, one succeeded in part and the other got rid of the measure’s effect altogether.

The most recent legal challenge to a proposition came regarding 2012’s Prop. 35, which passed with 81 percent of the vote, the highest margin ever for a state proposal. It provided for stringent penalties for human traffickers, though a camp in opposition contended that it peripherally targeted sex workers.

A federal court halted implementation of the measure, and last month the court prolonged the stay until September.

Legal foes, including the ACLU of Northern California, say they will seek a permanent injunction against the voter-approved law if legislation addressing the measure isn’t approved by September.

Prop. 213 in 1996 was approved by 77 percent of the voters and restricted lawsuits by uninsured motorists and drunk drivers. That measure was challenged twice in state court and upheld.

“Crackpots” not going anywhere

The “crackpots” pushing homicidal notions like sodomite suppression will probably be around for some time. Polls indicate California residents feel they are better at lawmaking than their elected officials.

Miller said that doesn’t seem to impede legislative efforts to alter or clarify the process.

Assembly Bill 535, introduced in February, seeks to create more specific language for initiatives. Assembly Bill 1457 would make a minor housekeeping change to a legal provision governing people collecting signatures for an initiative petition.

“You can imagine that state lawmakers would like to maintain a monopoly on lawmaking and not open it up to outsiders,” Miller said.

Added John Matsusaka, executive director of the Initiative and Referendum Institute and the University of Southern California: “Why some states allow the initiative and others do not, that is something of a mystery. Legislators usually dislike the initiative, so the puzzle is how so many states managed to adopt the process in the first place, given that it usually took a first action by the legislature.”

Steve Miller can be reached at 517-775-9952 and avalanche50@hotmail.com. His website is www.Avalanche50.com