California’s next governor will be decided by a simple majority of voters in the Nov. 3 election. As will the next mayor of Los Angeles, and whether the state will require voters to show ID at the polls in the future.
That’s the way most elections work: Decisions big and small come down to the preference of most voters. This is the majority-rule principle in action, and it ensures that every vote carries equal weight.
In California, there’s one glaring exception. Under the state constitution, local special tax measures that fund a specific purpose must earn two-thirds of the votes to pass. This high bar makes it exceptionally difficult for cities, counties, school districts and other local governments to raise taxes to pay for things like transit projects and homeless services.
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In recent years, however, several courts have ruled that taxes proposed by citizen initiative need only a simple majority to pass, as opposed to ones placed on the ballot by governing bodies. This cleared the way for new taxes to pass with less than 66.7%, including Measure ULA, the city of Los Angeles’ “mansion tax,” in 2022.
That would change under Proposition 43, a constitutional amendment placed on the Nov. 3 statewide ballot by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association as part of a deal with state lawmakers in which both sides backed away from more extreme tax proposals.
If a majority of voters (irony alert!) approves Proposition 43, the supermajority rule would apply to future initiative special tax measures. Supporters believe that was the intent of two previous anti-tax measures, Propositions 13 and 218, even if they didn’t actually spell it out.
Golden State staff
There’s certainly some benefit to having consistency when it comes to special taxes. And proponents are right when they claim that many so-called citizen initiatives are really just sneaky workarounds by groups aligned with a local government.
Case in point, says Susan Shelley, vice president of communications of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, was Measure A, a homeless services sales tax on Los Angeles County’s 2024 ballot. The initiative’s official proponents were organizations working on homeless services, but they appeared to be in concert with local officials. (L.A. Mayor Karen Bass even boasted about writing part of it at a public event last year.)
Shelley also cites Measure RTM, a proposed sales tax hike for transit projects in the Bay Area. The Legislature created the taxing district last year with the intent of putting a sales tax on the ballot. “How is that a real citizens initiative? It's coming from the government and it's just using this loophole,” Shelley said.
Opponents of Proposition 43 – which include about a million civic, community, civil rights, pro-housing and transit groups, as well as labor unions and the state Democratic Party – make an important distinction between citizen and government tax measures.
They point out that citizen initiatives already have a higher obstacle to passage than those placed on the ballot by a local government because they need to gather a significant number of valid signatures, typically based on a percentage of votes cast in a recent election. At the moment, qualifying a ballot measure in L.A. city takes 139,497 valid signatures.
Dan Morain
“If you try to stack the deck and say that you need two-thirds [of votes], that's not a fair fight,” said Bill Barnes, director of campaigns and community engagement for the Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California, who signed the rebuttal in the state’s official voter guide.
He’s right. It’s unfair for a small fraction of the voters in a community to have veto power over the majority in making funding decisions for a community. It’s undemocratic as well.
That’s why I can’t vote for Proposition 43. In fact, if there were a ballot measure to ban supermajority vote requirements, I would enthusiastically vote for it.
What do you think? Golden State is a public forum. Send your responses for possible publication to forum@golden-state.org.
