Editorial: Stopping big money from tainting the ballot

When political reformers of the early 20th century pushed through a new system of direct democracy in California, their intent was to take the reins of power out of the hands of a few wealthy men and powerful corporations and put it into the hands of the people.

They did this in part by creating a citizen initiative process that allowed motivated Californians to bypass their elected officials and pass laws themselves. As a result, 123 state ballot initiatives have been approved (out of more than 1,800 proposed), including the abolition of a poll tax in 1914, the historic anti-tax Proposition 13 in 1978, and the creation of an independent redistricting commission in 2008.

Increasingly, however, this system has been co-opted by money, leading to ballots stacked with proposals sponsored by (and often benefiting) specific industries, public employee unions and, sometimes, just one wealthy guy with an idea.

This year, an historically low threshold for signatures required to qualify an initiative for the ballot and an open presidential election have led to a glut of ballot proposals. (Presidential years bring out nontraditional voters who are believed to be less savvy and easier to manipulate.) Companies that pay people to go out and collect signatures are enjoying the bonanza, as initiative backers bid up the per-signature price to get their measures top priority with petition circulators.

Gov. Jerry Brown’s sentencing reform measure, for example, is paying an eye-popping $5 per signature gathered, according to the Sacramento Bee; the proponents of a tobacco tax are paying $4. Multiply those figures by the required 365,880 valid signatures needed to qualify for the ballot to get a sense of what’s at stake.

There are a limited number of professional signature-gathering companies, so it’s understandable how worrisome was a tobacco lobbyist’s recent threat to pay $10 a signature for a referendum — which would have imperiled other measures now gathering signatures and push the tobacco referendum to the front of the line. The threatened referendum would have nullified a package of tobacco restriction bills that had been headed to the governor’s office.

This is a perversion of the citizen initiative process. Reformers from the turn of the last century would be dismayed to see how money has hijacked the process — but perhaps not surprised. Even then they surely knew how difficult it would be to keep big money out of politics.

The answer is not to dismantle the system, but to strengthen it and make it work. One idea is to develop a ballot qualifying process that doesn’t require boatloads of money, such as some type of electronic signature gathering. This could help level the playing field for citizens with good ideas but not much money. And though it might endanger the small industry of paid signature gathering, it would have a broader benefit if it advanced good ideas.

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