California voters support efforts to reform the state’s century

–

old ballot referendum process, in which Republicans and Democrats rarely agreed on a proposal by labor unions and good governance groups to increase transparency around campaigns to overturn state laws.

A poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies, co-sponsored by The Times, found that more than three-quarters of registered voters, including

7 out of 10

Republicans support change. These include announcing the top three funders of a referendum campaign on every page of a petition, having signature collectors declare under penalty of perjury that they have not lied to voters, and suspending the licenses of those who knowingly mislead voters.

By similar margins, voters across party lines support calls to simplify ballot descriptions to make it easier to understand whether a referendum upholds or overturns a law and to include the three largest donors for and against in the official summary of a measure.

“There is overwhelming support for cleaning up what I would call a broken referendum system,” said Tia Orr, executive director of SEIU California.

Lawmakers are considering these and other changes this year in the state capitol under Assembly Bill 421. The Assembly passed the bill Wednesday and sent it to the Senate.

Led by Orr and the Service Employees International Union, proponents of the bill allege that corporations lied to voters about the intent of signature-gathering campaigns as part of a political tactic to challenge progressive laws passed by state-controlled Democrats, to slow down and sometimes reverse. legislator.

Their frustrations mounted this year after companies successfully qualified initiatives for the 2024 vote that seek to overturn a state environmental law to create buffer zones between new oil wells and homes and schools, as well as legislation backed by labor unions that would raise wages and working conditions for fast-moving workers. food workers.

In both campaigns, California voters have shared stories of being serenaded and misled about the effect of their signature.

To get a measure on the ballot that would reverse a law, referendum backers must get valid signatures from 5% of voters in the last gubernatorial election. Political campaigns often hire companies that pay people by signature to distribute petitions outside supermarkets and chain stores and on college campuses.

The referendum process was established in 1911 to provide Californians with a mechanism through direct democracy to counter corporate influence over state government. But with Democrats making up more than two-thirds of an increasingly progressive California legislature, companies are spending millions of dollars to take advantage of the referendum process more often.

The bill to change the process would require that 5% of all signatures collected must be collected by volunteers in order to qualify for a measure. That is intended to make it more difficult for companies to rely solely on paid signature collectors, often from out of state, to push through unsupported measures.

The poll found that 50% of voters favored changing the state law to require unpaid volunteers to participate in signature gathering, compared with 15% opposed and 35% had no opinion.

Republican leader of the Assembly, James Gallagher (R-Yuba City), said Democrats and their allies are trying to put up barriers to the use of direct democracy because they don’t like their big measures being in front of voters next year. will appear.

“I think it’s interesting if the direct democracy process seems to work for the other party, they’re fine with it,” Gallagher said during the floor debate on the bill. “But if it doesn’t work, all of a sudden there are reforms and changes that need to be made.”

The Berkeley IGS poll was conducted online in English and Spanish May 17-21 of 7,465 California registered voters. The poll sample was weighted to match the census and voter registration benchmarks. Accurate estimates of the margin of error are difficult due to weighting, but the results are estimated to have a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points in either direction for the full sample.

Funding for the poll questions about the referendum process came from the Evelyn and Walter Haas, Jr. Fund, a private foundation based in San Francisco that aims to increase civic participation and improve the state’s democratic processes.