Only a third of those eligible to cast ballots did so on Nov. 4. “Of those who registered to vote, little better than four in every 10 – about 42 percent – actually voted, either in person or by mail,” according to the California Secretary of State. Even more important, the total votes cast for governor, which determines the numerical hurdle signature-gatherers must clear to get their initiative on the ballot, hit a quarter-century low. The San Francisco Chronicle reported:

“In California, the number of signatures required to qualify a measure for the ballot is a percentage of the total votes cast for governor. Since the 42 percent turnout on Nov. 4 meant only about 7.3 million people bothered to take a side in Gov. Jerry Brown’s landslide win over Republican Neel Kashkari, the bar for qualifying ballot measures in 2016 will be at the lowest level in at least 25 years.

“The change isn’t a tiny one. Since the last governor’s election in 2010, it has taken 504,760 valid signatures to put a standard initiative on the ballot and 807,615 signatures for a constitutional amendment. Once the November election is certified Friday, those numbers will drop to about 366,000 and 586,000, respectively.”

A host of initiative hopefuls has already begun to plan for a big 2016, including public employee unions and taxpayers rights’ groups. But attention will focus most strongly around two high-profile efforts that have failed in the past, but enjoy the support of powerful backers: marijuana legalization and the breakup of California into six smaller states.

Hemp hopes

As Reason magazine observed, advocates of marijuana legalization and regulation have picked up steam in recent years, thanks to voter support. Alaska, Colorado, Oregon, Washington and the District of Columbia all have given pot the green light; emboldened, activists have turned for 2016 to Maine and Massachusetts in the East and Montana, Arizona and California — the biggest prize — in the West.

Along with proposals to fly the California flag at the same height as the U.S. flag, and to require the use of condoms in pornographic video performances, the marijuana legalization initiative has already been publicly proposed, but not yet made official with the Attorney General’s office.

Pot advocates hope to use 2016’s low bar to land on the ballot in a well-publicized but cost-effective way. In 2010, voters rejected a legalization initiative; this year, advocates see themselves catching a nationwide wave in favor of looser drug laws — and capitalizing on recent changes to California criminal law that treat inmates convicted on drug charges more leniently.

Six Californias 2.0

Venture capitalist Tim Draper, meanwhile, hasn’t given up his own hopes for an up or down vote on his Six Californias proposal. That idea, ridiculed in many corners of the press but viewed favorably by those seeking to shake up dysfunctional state governance, didn’t make it onto the ballot last time around. It would break up the state into six new states.

“Draper put about $5 million of his own money into gathering some 1.13 million signatures for ‘Six Californians,’ only to have the California Secretary of State’s office rule that just 752,000 were valid,” the Chronicle reported. “That was not enough to make the 807,000 required this year to make the cut.” In an interview with the Chronicle, Draper chose his words carefully:

“’We’re going for 2016, and we have 750,000 signatures, but they say we have to start all over again,’ he said Tuesday. ‘It’s a kind of Catch 22.’

“Asked if he will re-launch the signature-gathering process in light of the new 2016 lower bar, Draper said, ‘We want Six Californias to happen. We’ll see.’

“’This is a mission critical for the state,’ he said. ‘I live here and so does most of my family,’ and more than ever, he said, ‘we’re saying wait a second: we can make this change.’”

That’s an attitude typical of those who struggle to land initiatives on the statewide ballot. For them all, 2016 offers a once-in-a-generation chance to do so.

If so, hope comes from Catalonia, the region of Spain that just voted 80 percent for independence. Although it was only an “advisory” vote, the centralized autocracy in Madrid insists it never will give Catalonia its freedom.

Like Draper’s Silicon Valley, Catalonia is an economic powerhouse pulling the rest of its territory — Spain or California — behind it. It pays way more taxes than other regions that essentially parasite off it.

There are other similarities. Both California and Spain have a lot of Spanish speakers, a beautiful Mediterranean climate and creative people. For California, as well as for Spain, a centralized autocracy — the California state government in Sacramento or Spain’s in Madrid — sucks the life’s blood out of productive citizens.

California even wants to build a high-speed rail boondoggle like the one that already bankrupted Spain. Thomas Sowell wrote of it:

“Someone once said that government is the illusion that we can all live off somebody else. Spain’s high-speed rail system is not even covering its operating costs, never mind the enormous costs of setting up the system in the first place. One reason is that half the seats are empty in the high-speed trains in Spain.

“That is what happens when you don’t have the population density required for passengers to cover the operating costs. You would need the hordes of Genghis Khan riding the high-speed rail system to cover the additional costs of the rails and the trains.

“An economics professor at the University of Barcelona says that Spain ‘has not recovered one single euro from the infrastructure investment’.”

The Madrid bureaucrats aren’t easily going to give up their cash cow in Barcelona, just as California’s politicians won’t easily give up their cushy jobs and mammoth pensions paid for by the state’s wealthier regions.

But independence is in the air. Even the Scottish vote for independence, which got only 45 percent, shows that freedom from centralized bureaucratic monstrosities are gaining support.

As a famous document once began:

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation….”

But pushing such revolts as far as they did shows a tidal shift in how people look at government. Scots voted 45 percent in favor of leaving the UK, a large number. And a lot of the 55 percent “No” votes came from people receiving the large welfare payments sent from London, and promised by PM David Cameron and other UK leaders to get even larger.

According to the BBC, average “public spending per head” — welfare — is a generous £12,300 ($20,650) in Scotland, higher than the £11,000 ($17,944) in the UK as a whole. So if Scotland split, it would lose £1,300 ($2,706) per head in subsidies from the UK. Many people currently on the dole at home watching “The Benny Hill Show” reruns would have to go out, get jobs and work.

The UK also is not in a recession, although growth is not strong. But should a recession strike, or the UK economy fall into severe debt and depression like Greece, sentiments for secession might become overwhelming.

Separatism

Separatist fever also is catching on in many other areas. The Washington Post identified eight that could be “next”: Venice, Catalonia, Faroe Islands, Corsica, South Tyrol, Basque, Flanders and Bavaria.

Even the New York Times noted a “Global Crisis of Elites.” Wrote Neil Irwin:

It is a crisis of the elites. Scotland’s push for independence is driven by a conviction — one not ungrounded in reality — that the British ruling class has blundered through the last couple of decades. The same discontent applies to varying degrees in the United States and, especially, the eurozone. It is, in many ways, a defining feature of our time.

The rise of Catalan would-be secessionists in Spain, the rise of parties of the far right in European countries as diverse as Greece and Sweden, and the Tea Party in the United States are all rooted in a sense that, having been granted vast control over the levers of power, the political elite across the advanced world have made a mess of things.

The details of Scotland’s grievances are almost the diametrical opposite of those of, say, the Tea Party or Swedish right-wingers. They want more social welfare spending rather than less, and have a strongly pro-green, antinuclear environmental streak….

What distinguishes the current moment is that discontent with the way things have been going is so high as to test many people’s tolerance for the governing institutions as they currently exist.

The details are, of course, different in each country.

Private popularity

The Scottish vote came a day before the release of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, with throngs of fans lining up early before Apple stores.

The contrast is striking: People voluntarily discomfit themselves to buy a privately produced product. Meanwhile, coercive governments everywhere are loathed for incompetence, repression, bureaucratic snafus and high expense.

In California, Gov. Jerry Brown’s re-election slogan is, “California is back!” Yet much of the state, including Los Angeles and the Inland Empire, barely has recovered from the Great Recession, if that. And the governor continues to pursue his Quixotic, $68 billion, 19th-century toy, high-speed rail.

And although Six Californias failed, almost every election brings new reform initiatives — Top  Two, term limits, redistricting — in which the people themselves have to take things into their own hands because their elected representatives and unelected functionaries  have botched things so badly.

Crisis of elites, indeed. Crisis of government, too.

As the Los Angeles Times reported, the Six Californias movement needed approximately 808,000 signatures by July 18. Venture capitalist Tim Draper, who masterminded the proposal, put almost $5 million of his own money toward achieving the figure.

Last week, Draper, a political independent, announced in a press conference that his street teams had amassed 1.3 million signatures. Amid a flurry of questions, he also acknowledged the two-year run-up to 2016 will provide Six Californias advocates much-needed time to sway public opinion, which stands at 59 percent against a state breakup.

Adding an extra layer of drama, the rival group One California petitioned Secretary of State Debra Bowen to investigate voter fraud surrounding the collected signatures — alleging that signature gatherers in at least a few instances intentionally misrepresented the goal of the initiative. That’s a misdemeanor in California.

Political crosswinds

Alone, a few thousand discarded signatures won’t strip Six Californias from the ballot. But even if it passes, the Golden State’s dismemberment would have to receive a stamp of approval both from the California Legislature and the U.S. Congress.

It’s not just supporters of Draper’s six statelets, however, who are hoping the secession scheme comes before voters. Capturing widespread rural and conservative discontent, the plan has attracted the admiration of some Republicans for its spirit, if not its practicability.

Although California’s Republican members of Congress are almost all reluctant to embrace the Six Californias plan itself, more than a few sympathize with the frustrations behind it. GOP Reps. Jeff Denham and Doug LaMalfa, both of the Golden State, told The Hill that Californians’ different needs call for different ideas. For Denham, “dividing up into states would be something to look at.” But, said LaMalfa, “I would think that if you are going to divide California, it’s ambitious to do three states or just two.” 

Crafting the pitch

Without resounding support from sitting state officials, Draper and company have the luxury of choosing for themselves how they intend to appeal to voters. Fittingly for a proposal that relies on sectional interests and identities, Six Californias likely requires more than one rationale to maximize support.

In a new report issued by the California Legislative Analyst, for instance, the plan is shown to leave two of the new states richer, and four poorer. That might be a problem for some voters. But for at least some in northern California, the prospect of a short-term economic hit is more appealing than the alternative.

Jefferson Declaration Committee spokesman Mark Baird told the Washington Times that “the short-term economic hit would be far preferable to the state’s slide into a morass of ever-greater debt, taxes and regulation.”

In interviews, Draper himself takes a more cheerily libertarian approach to framing California’s challenges with sectionalism. Rather than berating Bay Area Democrats for capturing state policy, he talks up what classic libertarian theorists such as Robert Nozick call “exit options.”

‘Our government’

As Draper put it, six states would give Californians “a chance to make it our government. We can make it more local, better representation, closer to us. It also creates a choice. If some people feel that their government isn’t working for them – and I know a lot of people in very poor regions feel that the status quo is not working for them – this would be an opportunity for them to easily move to another state without leaving the beautiful weather we get here.”

It’s a logical rethink of long-familiar, but often inconsequential, Republican arguments in favor of “devolving” power from Washington and “returning” it to states. As residents of red and blue states alike have discovered, state governments can sow just as much partisan and policy opposition as the federal government.

Ostensibly, it’s easier to bring about change in government at the state level than it is to alter the federal landscape. But in states that are deep red or, like California, deep blue, any kind of fundamental political change requires a longer time span than many residents are willing to accept.

The initiative is advisory. So even if it passes, the idea still would have to be passed by the California Legislature, then the U.S. Congress.

Obstacles are: 1. California politicians like being kingmakers in a huge state. Almost any statewide politician or big-city mayor has ambitions to become president. The current governor, Jerry Brown, ran for president thrice — and could do so again in 2016.

2. The rest of America already thinks one California is too many. Folks in Wyoming and West Virginia look West and see six Jerry Browns, six Nancy Pelosis, six Barbara Boxers, six Dianne Feinsteins.

But for Californians, a divorce would be a boon. There’s not much in common  between Orange County and San Francisco, so why shouldn’t they split? That way, Orange County could become a surving version of New Hampshire: no state income and sales taxes.

And San Francisco could imitate the French welfare state, with top state income tax rates of 75 percent (on top of the 39 percent federal tax rate: total income tax rate: 114 percent. Don’t ask about the math.)

Now we’ll all get our say, if not our wish, in 2016.

“Steven Maviglio, a Democratic consultant, and Joe Rodota, a fixture in GOP politics, have formed OneCalifornia, a committee that will oppose Draper’s “Six Californias” plan if and when the constitutional amendment gets on the ballot.”

And you thought there was a two-party system?

It’s easy to understand why this opposition is swarming.. The power of political operatives, as well as such special interests as the California Teachers Association, depends on knowledge of the political makeup and personalities of the current state. Draper’s initiative would multiply the difficulty of their jobs by six.

It would be like, in the current arrangement, trying to influence the state legislatures of California, Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Washington State and Idaho. Nobody does that. OneCalifornia? One political milch cow is more like it.

Secession fever

No question passing Draper’s initiative will be difficult. Yet secession is in the air:

• In Venice, 89 percent just voted to split from Italy. A united Italy always was a mistake. The people of Dante and Boccaccio, St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thomas Aquinas, Leonardo and Michelangelo, are too anarchistic to join in the large state jammed together at the opera buffa 1861 Risorgimento.
• Crimea just voted to leave Ukraine. Although admittedly that is complicated by its vote to join Russia amid international tensions.
• In Quebec, which in 1995 voted 49 percent for secession from Canada, separatist fever is back. The people again are echoing the words of de Gaulle from his 1967 visit: “Vive le Québec libre!“
• The Scotts have scheduled a Sept. vote to regain their independence from the United Kingdom. Braveheart lives.
• Catalonia also has set a Sept. vote, in their case to leave Spain. 
• If that happens, the Basques, who long have wanted to leave Spain, wouldn’t be far behind.

Of course, small countries can be repressive. Witness Cuba and North Korea. But at least in those cases, the repression is contained. But in general, small countries — or small states, in case of splitting California — generally engender competition, with freedom bringing immigrants seeking prosperity, while tyranny expels people. We’re already seeing that as so many people and businesses flee California’s highly taxed and regulated economy for Texas, Arizona, Washington State and other states with much lower state taxes and regulations. Six Californias would spark competition among the parts of OneCalifornia that currently are stuck in a dysfunctional relationship. If not this year, then soon California’s parts will be ready for Divorce Court.