Judge Strikes Redistricting Initiative From Ballot

LA Times reported Delivering a substantial blow to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's "year of reform" agenda, a judge Thursday struck from the special election ballot an initiative that would have wrest away the Legislature's power to draw political districts. Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Gail Ohanesian ruled that the initiative should not have been placed on the Nov. 8 ballot because the wording circulated on voter petitions had not been approved according to law.

I thought the idea behind a voter petition was that it gave the voters a chance to do an end run around the establishment and propose a law they liked. Now we learn that the establishment has to approve their end run?????

The decision was a victory for Attorney General Bill Lockyer, who had sued to block Proposition 77 upon learning that backers had submitted one version to his office -- the first stop in California's initiative process -- but circulated a different one to the more than 950,000 voters who signed petitions to put it on the ballot.

As long as all of the petitions had the same wording, it would seem that is the wording that should be on the ballot.

The ruling, which Proposition 77 proponents vowed to appeal, seriously weakens the ambitious plan that Schwarzenegger spelled out in his January State of the State speech. Already the governor has dropped a public pension overhaul initiative because of errors in the way it was written. Schwarzenegger had vowed to take away the Legislature's ability to shape its own voting districts, which Democrats and Republicans have both long used to maintain power and keep challengers at bay. But his move to put the redistricting task in the hands of independent judges annoyed politicians from both parties.

I like the idea of taking redistricting out of the hands of the legislature, but I would rather see it done by a computer, the did not know anything about how voters had voted, but just how many registered voters there were in any particular area, and let it form districts that were as compact as possible, and used major streets as boundaries to make it easy for voters to know what district they were in.

Removal of the measure would leave just two governor-backed initiatives for the special election that Schwarzenegger called at a cost now estimated to be at least $50 million: An initiative to curb spending in a way that would increase the governor's power to make budget cuts and one that would make it harder for public school teachers to get tenure. "It removes the underpinning of his most important reform proposal, and I use `reform' in the broadest sense possible," said Lance Olson, an attorney for the No on Proposition 77 committee, which intervened in the case. "So now we're going to have a special election over whether teachers are entitled to a hearing after two years or five years.

I dont think teachers should have tenure at all, and I think they should be paid based on Merit and not on Seniority. If a teacher is not doing his/her job, they should be replaced by a good teacher, regardless of how long they have been failing to properly teach students.

What a waste of taxpayer money." He called Schwarzenegger's political team "the gang that can't shoot straight." The defeat also will likely weaken the governor's ability to negotiate further initiatives with legislative Democrats, who hold majorities in both houses. Schwarzenegger spokeswoman Margita Thompson said the governor was "disappointed that the ruling has silenced the voices of 950,000 Californians. He hopes the proponents will appeal." Thompson added that the governor's office was not involved in the preparation of the initiative. In handing down the decision, Ohanesian rejected the arguments of ballot proponents that the differences in the two texts were too insignificant to matter to voters. The procedures in question are clear and well known and easily followed," said the judge, who ruled from the bench after a two-and-a-half-hour hearing. "There is no good reason to put the courts in the position of having to decide what is good enough for qualifying an initiative measure for the ballot when actual compliance is easily attainable." She also rejected the argument that disqualifying the initiative would "disenfranchise" the nearly 1 million people who signed petitions, saying that proponents still had time to properly qualify the initiative for the June 2006 ballot. Her order bans Secretary of State Bruce McPherson from including Proposition 77 in voting materials or on the Nov. 8 ballot.

Kevin Drum blogged I wouldn't normally mention this except for an odd coincidence: on Sunday I was at a conference of conservative bloggers and heard a presentation from Ted Costa, the guy behind Prop 77. I can offer two firsthand observations. First, Costa is kind of a weird dude. He was dressed in sneakers, robin's egg blue socks, ratty running shorts, and an old t-shirt about a size too small,

I am not sure how a person's wardrobe bears on whether or not he has a good idea that should be submitted to the voters.

and rambled and mumbled his way through a talk that I couldn't really even follow. It was a peculiar experience. Second, he sure seemed mighty shifty about the whole thing, even though the room was full of people who fully sympathized with him and supported Prop 77. A couple of people asked for his side of the story, and in response he produced a disjointed tale about submitting the ballot measure to the AG, then making a change, then telling the AG to ignore the change, but the change got in anyway. Or something. I couldn't really follow it. How about the actual wording, though? Why weren't both versions of the initiative up on Costa's website so that people could compare them to see just how trivial the differences really were? At first Costa said he thought they were on the website, but maybe you had to click a bunch of links to get to them. That didn't really fly, though, and eventually he said he'd get right on this, and the text would be up by the next day. That doesn't seem to have happened, although I have to admit that I haven't scoured the site closely enough to say for sure. Anyway, the whole thing was passing strange. Costa was talking to a very friendly group, but even so they seemed more than a tad suspicious that he wasn't more forthcoming about what actually happened. I don't really know what to make of it all, but I thought I'd pass it along anyway. After all, vaguely remembered original reporting is what the blogosphere is all about, right?

ranaaurora commented Maybe this will give concerned Californians a chance to come up with a non-partisan redistricting measure that is not written by Ted Costa and signed off on by the Governator. It would be nice to see a ballot measure get started by the grass roots (maybe even the blogs). It's bizarre how Costa in California an Sizemore in Oregon dominate the initiative process. Schwarzenegger's designs on the process are also disturbing. I wonder how Robert Moses would have abused the process.