The Brief

Turn off Highway 99 in rural Elverta, drive five miles down the road and you’ll find a dusty lot crammed with cars on this scorching Friday evening. Behind the wooden fence, for a $10 entry fee, awaits a gathering akin to a block party crossed with a high-potency farmers market.

Alongside shirtless young men displaying jars of weed and decorative bongs, there are tacos and smoothies for sale. A woman in cannabis leaf-patterned shorts peruses the merchandise, while another with a severe black bob offers dab hits near the front. The DJ occasionally interrupts his mix of throwback hip-hop tunes (do you enjoy Coolio’s “Fantastic Voyage”?) to sell tickets for a raffle raising money for one vendor’s comatose employee.

Next to his booth, a table gives out free cannabis for veterans, who don’t have to pay to get into the event. Neither do patients with a doctor’s recommendation, like Dannie, a barber who was shot three times in his left arm and smokes cannabis to manage pain often inflamed by cutting hair.

Dannie, who agreed to be identified only by his first name, said he carries a medical recommendation because it’s safer should he ever get stopped by the police. But he still prefers buying weed at these clandestine pop-ups, where the products are more potent than at a dispensary.

“I’d rather spend my $30 on something that lasts,” he said.

This is just one of four unlicensed cannabis “seshes” in the Sacramento area that Bette Braden will host this week, as she does every week. The events started eight years ago for medical marijuana patients in an era of looser regulations, before California legalized recreational sales.

Since 2016, when voters approved Proposition 64, the initiative that authorized a commercial cannabis market in the state, Braden has come to view her seshes as both a business opportunity and an act of protest. Like many longtime advocates, she believes all weed use has a medical purpose, and considers it immoral that high taxes and a lack of dispensaries have made it inaccessible to many patients.

“The laws are so hideous,” Braden said, as she supervised from a camp chair near the entrance. “I used to be an activist. Now I’ve gone over to the underground.”

‘No one really cares about the medical side’

Frustration runs deep among medical cannabis patients and advocates who — by persuading voters to pass Proposition 215 in 1996 — paved the way for legal weed in California, but now feel left behind in a post-Proposition 64 era. In a profit-centered system focused on recreational sales, they argue there is little consideration for patients and their unique needs.

Collectives that once provided cannabis and community largely dissolved nearly five years ago, as California transitioned to a new regulatory framework based around licensed growers and retailers. Dispensaries, which are still prohibited in many parts of the state by local rules, have not widely embraced a replacement program that allows them to donate medical marijuana to patients who cannot afford to buy it. Medical identification cards, which can cost several hundred dollars to renew annually, confer few tangible benefits.

“No one really cares about the medical side, and that’s a mistake, because that’s where the value is,” said Richard Miller, who has promoted patients’ rights at the state Capitol for nearly two decades as a member of the American Alliance for Medical Cannabis and Americans for Safe Access. “I’ve been feeling over the past year like my work is a failure.”

The shift to treating medical marijuana users more like customers is especially tough for older patients with limited incomes and those with chronic conditions who need a large amount of cannabis for treatment. While California physicians can recommend cannabis for conditions including arthritis, glaucoma, migraines and seizures, most health insurance plans do not cover medical marijuana because it remains illegal at the federal level.

So some cost-conscious patients seek other ways of getting their supply, such as the underground seshes sprouting up around the state. That further bolsters an illicit market that California has struggled to bring under control and alarms advocates who want patients to have high-quality, safe medicine.

“There are some things in this world that should not have a f—ing price tag. And feeling good when you’re sick is f—ing one of them,” said Bonnie Metcalf, who lives in Sacramento County and suffers from sarcoidosis, a disease of the immune system that fills her body with lumps of inflamed cells called granulomas.

With an $1,100 monthly disability payment her only income, Metcalf said she cannot afford dispensary prices and relies on friends and Braden’s pop-ups for cannabis.

“It ain’t funny no more. My life is being messed with,” she said. “I should not have to continue to do this, to have to, you know, search out ways of finding the only medicine that has ever helped me in a way that I can still have a value to my life.”

‘It’s nothing but pain’

Metcalf’s body is snap, crackle, popping as she rolls into the living room in her motorized wheelchair for breakfast. An excruciating tingle runs from her neck and shoulders down through her hips and legs, she said, like a limb that has fallen asleep. It’s a dull, aching, don’t-fricking-talk-to-me kind of feeling, the same agony she wakes up to every day “until I get some pot in me.”

“As soon as I hit this reality, it’s nothing but pain,” Metcalf said. “It’s the first thing I think about. Because how can it not be?”

Metcalf does not like the side effects she experienced with pharmaceuticals — she took a steroid for her lungs that she said gave her diabetes — so she primarily sticks to cannabis and meditation to treat her sarcoidosis.

“It’s very strange, because there’s a point you get to where you don’t give a f— that you have pain. You’re so euphoric,” she said. “People would say, ‘Oh, you’re just doing it to get high.’ Well, yeah, dude, I would rather be in a euphoric state of mind than, you know, I can’t get comfortable. You can’t eat. Your muscles are constantly spasming. I’m on hot water bottles. I mean, it’s ridiculous.”

Bonnie Metcalf prepares to take a cannabis-based product during her medicating session at her residence in Sacramento on July 20, 2023.

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Rahul Lal

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CalMatters

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Cannabis has been part of Metcalf’s life for decades: Now 61, she said she first smoked weed at the age of 8, when an older teen gave her a joint at the park, and became an activist for cannabis access as a teenager.

While living in San Francisco in the 1980s, she worked with cancer and HIV/AIDS patients, Metcalf said, advocating for them to be able to use cannabis in medical settings. She collected signatures for the initiative that legalized medical marijuana and, after it passed in 1996, moved home to Yuba County, where she opened her own cooperative. Metcalf said she would drive a bus of patients down to San Francisco twice a month so they could see a doctor and get their paperwork in order.

That ended after 11 years, when Metcalf became too disabled to run the collective any longer. Despite her activism, however, she now refuses to get a doctor’s recommendation or a medical card or shop at dispensaries. She’s furious at how Proposition 64 commercialized cannabis in California, prioritizing getting high over medication and pushing aside longtime activists, growers and mom-and-pop businesses with expensive licenses and regulations.

“The system that exists is bulls–t,” she said. “These rich people are paying more for packaging and branding than they are worried about medicine for people. They don’t care. It’s not a medicine to them. It’s just another money-making scheme like beer or cigarettes.”

After eating a sausage scramble with green onions, Metcalf follows a meditative routine to help her mind vibrate above the pain. After her rituals she takes off her shoes and sits in the backyard for a few minutes, sticking her bare feet into the dirt to ground.

Finally, it’s time to medicate. Metcalf said she can no longer smoke weed because of the granulomas in her lungs. Instead, she takes two daily doses of FECO, a highly-concentrated cannabis extract — one in the morning to relax her body and one in the evening to help her sleep.

Back in her room, Metcalf turns on a playlist of affirmations by the musician Toni Jones and says a silent prayer (“May all beings live in peace, harmony, love and bliss”). Then she dips a fork into her jar of FECO and puts a dab of the oil on her tongue. She spits a chunk back into the jar, then bites another piece off the fork, until she estimates that she has half a gram.

The sensation starts in her head. She can feel her blood pressure calm. Her eyes relax and she sees the world in a whole different way. Everything is sparkly.

“It’s like a rain. It just starts raining,” she said, as the relief slowly washed down her body, loosening her joints before arriving, finally, at her feet.

“As long as my mind is high, I can control the body,” she said. “I can choose to disconnect from the pain. I can choose to put it in the background.

‘Our whole system fell apart’

Though it was the first state in the country to legalize medical marijuana with Proposition 215, California has always had a fraught relationship with it.

The Compassionate Use Act allowed people with a valid doctor’s recommendation, as well as their caregivers, to cultivate cannabis for their personal medical use — opening the door for collectives where patients unable to grow their own medicine could pool their resources to pay “caregivers” to do it for them. Compassionate care programs offered weed to the sickest and poorest patients for minimal or no cost.

But federal pressure from the “War on Drugs” remained, and the state was reluctant to jump into regulating medical cannabis until 2015, largely leaving the task to local jurisdictions. Writing recommendations became a lucrative business for some unscrupulous physicians, while illicit operators took advantage of the enforcement gaps to open hundreds of what were functionally retail dispensaries, enhancing skepticism about the legitimacy of the medical marijuana system.

That changed in 2019, after the passage of Proposition 64, when California began requiring collectives to get licensed like a commercial dispensary. Unable to complete the expensive and complex process, many shut down. More than 60% of cities and counties in the state still ban cannabis retailers, even for medical use, though starting in January, they can no longer prohibit medical cannabis delivery.

“Overnight, our whole system fell apart,” said Valerie Corral, founder of the groundbreaking cooperative Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana in Santa Cruz. “They were so busy counting tax dollars that they put us all out of business.”

Corral received a license, but she sold it after it became clear opening and operating a dispensary would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars that her donation-based organization did not have. Now she grows cannabis and works with local dispensaries to donate it for free to patients — the result of a 2019 law that, after a multiyear effort, established a replacement to California’s traditional compassion programs.

Leona Powell, a former member of Corral’s collective who smokes weed daily to deal with lingering pain from a 1978 airplane crash, said she misses volunteering in the garden and connecting with other patients at weekly meetings, where they would share information and potluck dinners. Living primarily on Social Security payments, the 75-year-old Powell said she relies on donated cannabis from a local dispensary, because she otherwise cannot afford the price of a standard eighth of an ounce, which typically costs $40 or more plus tax.

“That’s only a couple of joints. That’s two days’ worth. Now what?” she said. “I don’t have that kind of money.”

Efforts to formalize the medical marijuana system in California also lagged. In 2003, the state established a medical identification card for patients, mainly as a way to defuse interactions with law enforcement, but made it voluntary. Few people applied for one, perhaps afraid to register themselves with the government — though some activists did as a political statement.

At its peak, in the 2009-10 fiscal year, counties issued 12,659 annual medical cards, according to data from the state Department of Public Health. Surveys at the time estimated hundreds of thousands, if not more than a million, medical cannabis patients in California. By last year, the number of medical cards dropped to just 3,218, among the lowest on record.

Advocates say there is little reason to get a card, which carries an annual fee of as much as $100, on top of the cost of the doctor’s recommendation. With the card, patients are exempted from the state sales tax on their cannabis but not other state and local taxes, so they would need to spend hundreds of dollars per month at a dispensary to realize any savings. Californians can also get medical cards before they turn 21, when it is legal to buy weed for recreational use, and cardholders can purchase more cannabis per day.

“There’s a tendency to be dismissive of cannabis users” among the medical establishment, which is then reflected in policy, said William Dolphin, a University of Redlands lecturer who researches and writes about medical cannabis. “We’ve seen across the country a desire to wash their hands of it.”

Cannabis products on display at A Therapeutic Alternative in Sacramento on July 19, 2023.

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Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters

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The state Department of Cannabis Control points to extensive testing and labeling requirements in the licensed market as a major benefit for patients, ensuring that Californians with potentially compromised immune systems are not using products tainted with hair, rat feces, heavy metals, illegal pesticides or mold.

In May, the department awarded UCLA two grants to study medical cannabis use in California, including what conditions patients are treating, what products they prefer and how they are accessing them.

“If they’re turning to the unlicensed market, we want to understand why they’re doing that so we can craft policies to bring them into the licensed market,” said Devin Gray, a policy analyst with the department’s policy and research division.

‘We sell products to stay alive’

Even dispensaries and other organizations dedicated to the philanthropic tradition of compassionate care are struggling amid a broader industry downturn.

Kimberly Cargile owns A Therapeutic Alternative, which opened in a converted house near downtown Sacramento in 2009 to serve medical marijuana patients. These days, it also has a license for recreational sales — and one of the only compassion programs in town, allowing low-income patients to receive cannabis for free.

Cargile said many dispensaries are reluctant to establish these programs because of the expense. Hers, serving an estimated 200 people, runs between $1,000 and $2,000 per month for staff time to manage applications, intake stock and consult with patients.

That’s a bigger sacrifice than it used to be. After a statewide surge in cannabis sales during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Cargile said sales dropped by $3 million, or 20%, at her dispensary over the past two years. She’s been looking for savings everywhere she can to stay afloat, though the compassion program will remain a priority for as long as she can manage.

Kimberly Cargile, CEO of A Therapeutic Alternative, at the dispensary in Sacramento on July 19, 2023.

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Miguel Gutierrez Jr.

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CalMatters

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“We’re doing everything we can to stay true to our mission,” she said. She doesn’t want a cancer patient to feel forced to turn to “dirty” products on the illicit market.

“The whole entire reason I’ve dedicated my life to patients’ rights is because I want them to have access to high-quality, lab-tested products to treat their symptoms,” Cargile said.

Jude Thilman, who runs Dragonfly Wellness Center in Fort Bragg, said it is financially impossible for cannabis businesses to focus solely on medical use anymore. That has meant dispensaries providing less education for consumers, manufacturers of therapeutic products shutting down because they cannot adapt to new rules and a heritage slowly disappearing. Of the seven medicine makers that Thilman personally knew before Proposition 64, she said five have gone under and the other two are operating illegally.

“We sell products to stay alive,” Thilman said, “and then we sell products to help people.”

Medical donations through compassion programs increased over the first three years of the 2019 law, according to data collected by the state Department of Cannabis Control, though the reach remains relatively small. Last year, 440 dispensaries reported donating cannabis products to patients, fewer than a quarter of California’s nearly 2,000 licensed retailers.

Retailers reported 13,278 donations in 2020, 41,775 donations in 2021 and 47,371 donations in 2022. Each donation is counted separately, so the number of patients served is likely much lower.

Advocates said they initially benefited from an oversaturated commercial market, with businesses donating more products that they could not sell. But in recent months, as a dramatic price drop caught up to growers and decimated cannabis communities, supply has been scarcer.

“What’s been heartbreaking is that extinction of all the small farmers who have been our most loyal donors,” said Ryan Miller, who founded Compassionate Veterans, until recently known as Operation EVAC, a program that combines peer support sessions with free cannabis to prevent suicides. “The corporations are not stepping up, to be honest.”

After his pioneering San Francisco collective had to stop handing out cannabis to patients in 2019, Joe Airone, known as Sweetleaf Joe, turned his attention to logistics for compassion programs, helping find and deliver donations. He said his efforts connected more than 3,000 patients with 1,600 pounds of free medical cannabis last year — but without more support, such as tax write-offs, for participating businesses, securing donations is getting more difficult.

“All of our partners are taking a financial hit to do this,” he said. “There’s no incentive to do this. Zero.”

‘How much are you really helping people?’

In spite of the triple-digit heat, Metcalf was among some 400 people who attended the underground marketplace in Elverta that Friday evening. After visiting with Braden, she stopped by a booth for The Sisters Edibles, where she sometimes buys gummies.

Metcalf eyed the table stacked with tubs of colorful CBD-infused bears and worms, packaged by the generous handful, available for $10 each or three for $25. It was a fraction of the cost of what she could get at a dispensary, where a tin with 10 doses would be $20 plus tax.

“If you limit it, how much are you really helping people?” said the owner, Jen, who said she started taking cannabis three years ago to treat her migraines and moved into manufacturing her own products to supplement her veteran disability payments. She declined to share her last name out of privacy concerns. “I have so many people who come up to me and say, ‘I can get out of bed now.’”

Metcalf continued on to find some weed for her caretaker. At another small booth, she held brown mason jars to her nose, inhaling the scents of dried cannabis flowers. Dank. Like a cheese.

“That has a nice little sweet kickback smell,” she said. “I’ll take a half.”

With only two $20 bills, Metcalf was $10 short of the price for half an ounce. The vendor, who asked to withhold his name so as not to jeopardize applications he has submitted for cannabis delivery and manufacturing licenses, waved it off.

Touched by his generosity, Metcalf asked for his number. She knew a lot of people who might want to order from him.

“Do you have a medical card?” he asked. He said he didn’t charge patients delivery fees.

Metcalf, a self-proclaimed outlaw, shrugged at the idea and threw up her middle fingers.

California State University is betting that artificial intelligence will transform the workplace — and that its 470,000 students need to learn how to use it before they graduate.

Last year, CSU became the nation’s first public university system to pay for students’ access to ChatGPT Edu. It has awarded over $3 million in grants for faculty to experiment with how to use AI in classrooms. Several campuses now train students in how to responsibly use the technology.

Those measures are all pieces of CSU’s strategy to prepare students for a future labor market reshaped by AI. But the investment in AI has come under criticism from some CSU faculty, and some students remain skeptical of the value of knowing how to use AI even as most are concerned the developing technology will threaten their chances of landing a job and keeping it.

The success of CSU’s AI strategy will depend on the extent to which AI affects the workforce that today’s college students will soon enter.

Hiring is frozen in many sectors right now as employers wait to see the true extent artificial intelligence will change the labor market, said Eric Bettinger, a leading education economist with Stanford Graduate School of Education. But it’s not clear if the slowdown in the labor market can be attributed to AI.

As with previous emerging technologies, AI is forcing employers to decide whether they should replace workers with the technology, or hire more employees who can leverage AI to be more productive, Bettinger said.

New graduates are facing a difficult labor market, considering the unemployment rate for this population has steadily risen since 2022, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

“The reality is that the world outside of school isn’t slowing down, and we need to prepare our students for that reality,” James Frazee, San Diego State University’s vice president for information technology, told EdSource.

Students worry AI is taking their future jobs

Ismaeel Malik, a San Jose State University justice studies student, said he worries about AI taking over jobs in his desired field.

“Entry-level jobs are work that people don’t want to do,” Malik, who will graduate next spring, told EdSource. Malik said he doesn’t think AI proficiency will make it easier to win a position out of college.

Other San Jose State students who spoke with EdSource say they think some majors will be more affected than others. San Jose State prenursing student Jade Goodewin said the “hands-on” part of her preferred future career seems fairly AI-proof. But second-year student Vien Tang, who is studying advertising, said that AI could replace some of the work of entry-level jobs in the advertising industry.

“It’s definitely a possibility, because I think a lot of companies try to cut costs,” Tang said. “There’s a likelihood of that happening.”

Given SJSU’s proximity to Silicon Valley and many companies whose technologies are reshaping the workforce, the university hopes to be a leader in AI adoption, said Sandra Hirsh, special assistant to the university’s provost for AI initiatives.

“We need to be preparing students with whatever the latest opportunities are, but also prepare students for the fact that change and evolution are going to continue to happen,” she said.

Hirsh said companies want graduates to have a basic understanding of AI and how to use it in their work. Despite the nebulous changes happening in the job market, companies that hire SJSU graduates have told university leaders that students also need skills in leadership, inventiveness and ethics.

The CSU system is paying $13 million a year to provide ChatGPT Edu to all 470,000 CSU students.

Artur Gafurov, president of the California State Student Association and a fourth-year student at San Jose State, said many students appreciate access to AI tools like ChatGPT Edu, but don’t necessarily know how to use them responsibly and effectively.

“I know a lot of students who are taking it upon themselves to learn a bit more about the tool and restrict themselves with how they use it,” Gafurov said.

Some question the value of AI initiatives 

Other private and public universities have signed agreements with companies such as OpenAI to give students access to large language models, including ChatGPT Edu. Large public university systems, such as State University of New York, have also developed systemwide AI policies, and some colleges, such as Northwestern University, have launched AI majors.

But not everyone at CSU has embraced the growing use of AI on campuses. Some professors pushed back on the OpenAI deal after CSU signed it in early 2025. Martha Lincoln, an anthropology professor at San Francisco State University, said CSU administrators did not clearly explain how AI would be used on campuses and in classrooms by students.

“What will students be doing with AI that’s so valuable? If it’s so valuable to them professionally, educationally, where is that value and what does it look like?” Lincoln said.

Martha Kenney, a professor in the SFSU Department of Women and Gender Studies, said CSU’s claims that AI is helping prepare students for the changing labor market are dubious because the university has not clearly identified skills young people should develop for their future careers.

“It’s possible it has no use for our students in this way,” Kenney said.

According to an OpenAI spokesperson, ChatGPT Edu provides students with access to the company’s latest large language model, and includes plug-ins that students and faculty can use to personalize their accounts for teaching and learning.

University officials say providing access to tools like ChatGPT is essential to prevent a digital divide for CSU students who may not be able to afford subscriptions to these technologies.

“We believe we’re doing the right thing to serve our mission to prepare our students for the future workforce,” said Ed Clark, CSU’s chief information officer.

The future workforce

Erika McEntarfer, the former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and a policy fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, said some experts in recent years have forecast that AI would wipe out white-collar workers’ jobs. There’s little evidence that has happened, she said.

It’s difficult for universities to predict which skills will be in demand in the future, she said, but colleges should prepare their students for disruptions to their careers. She noted that roughly 60% of today’s jobs didn’t exist in 1940.

Universities need to prepare students for a tough labor market, and not just because of AI, McEntarfer said. The recent rise in the unemployment rate among new graduates started before ChatGPT was introduced in 2022, she said.

McEntarfer’s advice to recent or soon-to-be graduates is to develop skills that make you a good “human” worker, such as small talk, showing up to work on time and meeting the needs of company leaders.

“With AI you need to make sure you’re using it as a personal trainer, not a human forklift,” McEntarfer advised future college graduates. “Hopefully that’s what colleges are doing.”

Mariana Sanchez is a fourth-year journalism major at San Jose State University and a member of the EdSource California Student Journalism Corps.

This story was originally published by EdSource.

Comedian Christopher Titus brings his 11th stand-up special Doomed to Repeat to Flappers Comedy Club in Burbank on Saturday, Oct. 10.

 Titus is one of the most prolific stand-ups of his generation. Over the past 25 years, his 10 comedy specials have touched on everything from his dysfunctional upbringing in the San Fernando Valley to issues of love, marriage and parenting, and even life under the Trump administration. All summer, he's been touring his 11th special, Doomed to Repeat, which he said is about what's going on in our country right now.

"Do you remember the bicentennial? I was around for the bicentennial. Don't do the math on that," Titus said. "I remember really being proud of my country. I was a little kid and was watching the sailing ships in New York and the fireworks behind the Statue of Liberty. I was proud to be an American. And then we had our 250th birthday, and it was thrown by our drunk, abusive stepfather. It was the weirdest, worst thing I've ever seen."

Titus said he goes after President Donald Trump "pretty hard" in Doomed to Repeat, but he does it "sideways."

"I did it in Texas, and I didn't get killed," Titus said. "So, it's good."

The signature bit of Doomed to Repeat centers on immigration, a topic Titus said he has a unique perspective on, pointing out that his ancestors have been in America for 400 years.

" I thought, what an interesting perspective with all that's going on with our country right now and all the hatred and demonization of immigrants, to talk about it from a place where my family's been here before there was a country," he said.

Titus said the routine is so pointed that it's caused people who disagree with him on the issue to walk out.

"You paid. We got your drink money. We got your ticket money, and now you're leaving?" Titus said. "The bit really nails why anybody who hates immigrants is not just a hypocrite, but like a mentally ill hypocrite."

Titus said that whether it's personal or political, no topic is too messy to bring to the stand-up stage.

"If talking about my mom's mental illness and being in bars when I was four and being kidnapped ... by my dad, I mean, I don't think so," Titus said. "Pryor taught us that. Richard was raised in a brothel. I think the whole point is to drag the audience through the horror that you went through, because we're all the same machine, right?"

Although Titus is currently touring his 11th comedy special, he's already thinking about No. 12.

" I'm at 990 minutes of stand-up comedy that I've written and produced," Titus said. " Carlin's my favorite guy, him and Robin [Williams].  George did 16 specials. I'm going for 17, hopefully before I crank out."

Titus headlines Flappers Comedy Club in Burbank on Saturday, Oct.10.

Newport Beach voters might get two separate ballots for the November election, which will determine whether they vote on one local ballot measure, or four.

In one of the weirdest cases to join Orange County’s substantial history of election oddities, Newport Beach is scrambling to comply with a court order by trying to stage its own election in conjunction with the regular, general election. This is highly unusual — the vast majority of cities in Orange County, and across California, rely on the county registrar of voters to administer their elections.

Lena Shumway, Newport Beach’s city clerk, has been tasked with pulling off the flash election, including putting together voter rolls, getting ballots and election guides printed and mailed (there will be no in-person voting), and, if the election happens, counting ballots and verifying voter signatures. She told LAist she’s running into multiple roadblocks, some of them seemingly insurmountable.

And yet, she said, “We’re going to hold the election because we have to comply.”

How we got here

Newport Beach is in this bind because it challenged the validity of three ballot measures in court and, in the meantime, missed the deadline to have the Orange County Registrar of Voters place them on the general election ballot. The three measures would:

• Limit City Council members to serving a total of eight years — currently, council members are barred from serving more than eight years consecutively, but can run again as long as they take a break.
• Establish by-district voting where residents in each of the city’s seven districts vote only for their district representative on council — currently, all residents vote for representatives of each district.
• Add a “sunshine provision” to the city’s charters that would, among other things, require the city to make advisory committee meetings accessible to the public, and establish a “Sunshine Task Force” to watchdog public records requests.   
  

The measures are sponsored by the Southern California Opportunity Group, a company owned by local real estate developer Ken Picerne and his Picerne Group.

According to campaign filings, Picerne has sunk more than $1 million into these and a fourth initiative, Measure H, which will be on the regular, general election ballot. Measure H would essentially redo the city’s state-approved housing development plan and substantially decrease the number of units that could be developed.

How did Measure H make it on the general election ballot while the other three did not?

Measure H actually qualified last year, and the city promptly asked the O.C. Registrar of Voters to put it on the November 2026 general election ballot.

That didn’t stop the city from trying to block Measure H in court this year, but the effort was unsuccessful.

What’s so hard about putting on an election?

Historically, many cities did put on their own separate elections for city leaders and city-specific ballot initiatives, said Fredric Woocher, a Southern California-based election attorney. Some cities held local elections in a totally different month and day than state and federal elections. And some held them on the same day, with separate ballots.

“It was always very confusing to voters,” Woocher said. Plus, turnout for municipal elections was often dismal, leading the state to pass a law in 2015 requiring most cities to align their local elections with the statewide dates.

These days, there aren’t many companies around that offer the kinds of services Newport Beach needs, Woocher said. The city is already on its second ballot printing company, after the first company bowed out because the time frame was too tight, according to Shumway.

To help coordinate the election, Newport Beach hired a fledgling consulting firm, Stellara Group, which opened for business last year, according to its filings with the Secretary of State.

Under the contract, the city could pay up to $495,000 to Stellara and subcontractors if the election actually happens. That is still unclear.

Is Newport Beach’s parallel election really going to happen?

Shumway said there are several major hurdles that could make it impossible to successfully put on the city’s special municipal election.

For one thing, the O.C. Registrar of Voters has said it can’t provide the complete files for Newport Beach voters. This includes the signatures on file, which are used to verify mail-in voters’ identity, and confidential voter files.

Without this information, Shumway said, carrying out the election is essentially impossible “because we’re disenfranchising people … and we can’t verify signatures,” she said.

Bob Page, the O.C. Registrar, said he “felt bad” for the city during a recent media call. “I just can't put the general statewide election at risk by dropping what we should be doing to create ways to help them when their request has come way too late,” he said.

Another major hurdle for Newport Beach — the California Secretary of State has thus far refused to provide the city with the required watermark and special ballot tint. Without those two things, the printing contractor says it won’t print the ballots for the city’s parallel election.

The company has given the city until Oct. 7 to get everything in place, or else look for a new, third printing company. “At this point, it’s a waiting game,” Shumway said.

On a September evening, Adam Johnson, 40, settled on his porch chair in Morgantown, West Virginia, to go over his ballot for the upcoming midterm election.

Chatting through all the races and the different candidates, he worked to figure out who best represented his values. But rather than discussing it with a friend or family member, he held an hours-long discussion with ChatGPT — a chatbot powered by a large language model (LLM) owned by OpenAI, an AI research company.

A graphic designer studying to be an illustrator, Johnson said ChatGPT is a significant part of his life. He uses it for meal planning, assistance in job hunting and various other tasks around the house.

After prompting the AI-powered chatbot to make a list of all the races on his ballot this year, Johnson dug deeper.

Johnson is one of a growing number of voters using chatbots to research their ballots for the first midterm election since AI has taken the country by storm. About half of American adults report using AI-powered chatbots and about 42 percent of users said they use it to search for information, according to the Pew Research Center.

Several voters NPR spoke with said they rely on chatbots for down-ballot races — with thinner news coverage, to make tables comparing candidates for governors' races and to verify or debunk viral claims. Some have been using it to create tools to help others look up their own ballots. Experts say the properties that make chatbots useful also make them subtly persuasive and eager to please.

"It might select some things that would reinforce and persuade you even more towards the way that you were leaning already," said Rafael Batista, a fellow at John Hopkins University, who studies how AI shapes the way people experience the world. "So you leave more confident, without necessarily learning more about the world."

Since AI companies don't disclose how their commercial models are trained or how they choose which sources to draw on, it's hard to know what biases might shape their answers, Batista said.

Anthropic, the company that owns Claude, a chatbot, and Gemini, a Google-owned chatbot, did not respond to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for OpenAI, directed NPR to its election information and safeguards page which notes that the company continues to "monitor bias in our models to keep ChatGPT's responses politically neutral."

Concerns about AI

Johnson in West Virginia continued his research by outlining his political beliefs for ChatGPT. He stated that he usually votes for Republicans, unless those candidates are part of the Make America Great Again movement, in which case he votes for Democrats or a third party.

While deciding between candidates for the Senate race, Johnson nudged the chatbot about other issues he found important.

Johnson recognizes that AI-powered chatbots have sycophantic qualities.

"ChatGPT is just kind of a people pleaser," he said. "Whatever you lean towards, it will speak positively about it."

Still, Batista from JHU said that knowing these models are agreeable and persuasive, is not enough to "protect our minds from these influences."

Voters use chatbots in a variety of ways

Lisa Veldran, 65, was a staffer in the City Council in Madison, Wisconsin for almost four decades before retiring. This summer, she used Gemini to answer very specific questions she had about the primary election for governor.

After Sara Rodriguez, the lieutenant governor of Wisconsin, dropped out of the race, Veldran needed to choose between two candidates: Francesca Hong and David Crowley. She prompted Gemini to make a comparative table of both candidates.

Veldran said the chatbot can be a research tool, but it's not something that determines her life.

"You also have to keep in mind what's running these chatbots and AI in general," she said. "Who's paying to build these bots and what is their ultimate goal."

Lakshmi Iyer, an author living in Exton, Pa., describes herself as a power user of chatbots and thinks "it is capable of a lot of things, but the human in the loop is absolutely essential."

Iyer, 50, is part of They See Blue, an Indian American grassroots Democratic organization to drive up voter registration.

She did not use a chatbot to research her ballot, she said, but she used Claude, to create Ballot Lookup — a website that can inform Pennsylvania's voters about who is on their ballot and their stance on certain issues.

The website is described as an "independent, volunteer-built, nonpartisan lookup," and Iyer built it to help voters who may not learn more about candidates by searching across various sources.

Like other users, Iyer is aware that if chatbots "can infer your political leanings, they will push you towards what you are leaning to." To keep her own bias in check, Iyer prompted Claude to pick statements from the candidates' own speeches or from their official websites.

Some users noted that the decimation of local media has left them with fewer options for learning about down-ballot races. Tyler Black from Nashville, Tennessee, said he didn't use chatbots for House or Senate but is using them to learn about local candidates.

Black, who is a vice president at a software development company, is aware that chatbots sometimes hallucinate — that's when chatbots respond to prompts with false, misleading or fabricated answers. To overcome that problem, he often checks the information one chatbot has provided him against another.

Batista from JHU said that method of fact-checking is better than using the same model twice, but he hasn't seen evidence that it is effective.

If users are using chatbots to research their vote, Batista said, they should frame their prompts in a way that their personal preferences are hidden, and they could use incognito mode so the chatbot doesn't have much prior information on them.

Adam Johnson in West Virginia is still researching and chatting with ChatGPT about his ballot. The county commission races are still on his list to look into. But he feels like AI helped him learn everything else he needed to know for November.

"I wouldn't feel too bad if I had to do the election today," Johnson said.
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