Feeling overwhelmed by your ballot? Welcome to California

When California voters open their ballots this November, they will find 14 statewide measures on issues such as immunology research funding, voter ID requirements and billionaire taxes. Add in various city and county propositions, and it’s — a lot.

How do Californians feel about all these propositions padding out the ballot? When pollsters ask, they tend to get mixed signals. People say the measures are too complicated. There are too many. And they can’t get enough of them.

The state’s love-hate relationship with direct democracy is on full display in surveys by the Public Policy Institute of California. Seventy-seven percent of respondents said recently there are too many ballot measures, and 89% said the wording of propositions is too confusing.

But two years ago, 79% of those surveyed also said propositions are a “good thing,” and 87% agreed that they “bring up important public policy issues that the governor and legislature have not adequately addressed.”

Feeling both overwhelmed and empowered by all this decision-making is a byproduct of deeply rooted California political traditions.

Other states ask voters to weigh in on far fewer contests. About half have no initiative process. Even those that do tend to use it far less often than California does.

Between 1904 and 2024, California put 396 initiatives before voters, more than any other state.

“We set up a system where we wanted to vote on things,” said John Matsusaka, executive director of the Initiative and Referendum Institute at the University of Southern California.

“People just believe that if they think there's something wrong with what the government's doing, they have a right to bring it before their fellow citizens and get an opinion on that,” he said. “It's just in the DNA of the state.”

Where did all these propositions come from? 

Ballot initiatives have become a big business in California. Collecting signatures, producing ads, paying political consultants — an entire industry depends on this system. Between 2020 and 2024, nearly $1.9 billion was spent on California ballot measure campaigns.

But the system was initially supposed to be a check on monied interests.

California’s adoption of citizen initiatives, referendums and recalls dates back to the early 20th-century Progressive Era. At the time, states across the Western U.S. expanded direct democracy in the hopes of countering dominant political machines and corporate monopolies.

Ed Lascher, a public policy professor emeritus at Cal State University, Sacramento, said he believes Progressive Era reformers probably would not recognize their vision in today’s initiative system.

“It’s doubtful to me that they would, because of the amount of money involved, the fact that decisions are made basically through advertising and the sort of overwhelming nature of things,” he said.

Then there’s the question of whether asking voters to decide complex issues makes for good policy. Over the years, Californians have approved some dubious, regrettable and ultimately illegal initiatives. Some have a whiff of absurdity, such as 1964’s Proposition 15, which sought to ban cable television. The California Supreme Court overturned it on First Amendment grounds.

Others reveal a darker side of the Golden State. Now a hotbed of resistance to federal ICE raids and deportation efforts, California passed Prop. 187 in 1994. Though it was quickly ruled unconstitutional, the law sought to ban undocumented immigrants from receiving public education, healthcare and other social services.

Less than two decades ago, Californians voted to outlaw same-sex marriage through Prop. 8, an outcome many would find unthinkable just a few years later. And in 1964, nearly two-thirds of Californian voters opted to allow racial discrimination in housing sales and rentals through Prop. 14.

“Most initiatives fail,” Lascher said. “But most initiatives that have targeted minorities in the state have passed. … If you look at things like gay rights, if you look at civil rights in the early '60s, these have been, generally, better protected by the Legislature than by the ballot initiative.”

Should California have fewer ballot measures? 

There have been various attempts to rein in the initiative process. Lascher himself supported making it harder to amend the California Constitution by initiative. That proposal sought to raise the voter approval threshold from a simple majority to two-thirds support. Such a reform would’ve doomed Prop. 8.

But there hasn’t been a groundswell of support for chipping away at the power held by voters.

“Most Californians — and we know this from polls — value having this opportunity,” Matsusaka said.

Though many say the number of ballot measures is too high, research shows it’s not driving Californians away from the polls. Political scientists say initiatives typically have the opposite effect, increasing turnout by about 3% to 8% compared with states that lack initiatives.

Matsusaka said this slight boost could be the result of certain measures turning out voters who care deeply about a particular topic. “When there's an issue they care about, I think it is valuable for them to have the opportunity to vote on it,” he said.

Voters may turn out more in initiative states, but Lascher said research suggests they often feel conflicted. He co-wrote a 2019 book on this topic called Initiatives Without Engagement.

“The bottom line is, voters aren't feeling more efficacious or more ability to control things in states that make heavy use of initiatives,” he said. “They're actually somewhat less trusting.”

Critics argue that today, rather than empowering citizens to directly enact popular political changes, California’s initiative process has evolved into an expensive tool for deep-pocketed interest groups to carry out their agendas.

In some cases, interest groups don’t intend to get their initiatives on the ballot, instead using the process as leverage to get what they want from elected leaders. They’re essentially saying: Cut a deal with us, or we’ll drag you into a costly ballot measure fight.

Other measures end up on the ballot because legislators are required to put them there. Lawmakers cannot pass bonds without approval by a majority of voters. They also cannot amend the state constitution or alter previous voter initiatives without a new ballot measure.

Could technology change how Californians handle confusion?

Matsusaka said despite feeling overwhelmed, most Californians are able to cut through the confusion and make up their minds.

Voters may lack the time or expertise needed to fully research every ballot measure, but they know how to turn to ideological groups for cues on how to vote. Others consult non-partisan guides written by fact-based journalists, such as the LAist Voter Game Plan (shameless plug).

Matsusaka said he believes busy Californians could increasingly offload their decision-making to another time-saving resource: AI chatbots.

“You have an app on your phone, and it reads the text for you, and it also knows your party, and it knows your political affiliations and your issue positions, and it says, here's how you should vote,” he said. “We're not quite there yet, but I don't actually think we're very far.”