Controversial ballot measure falls short

Not enough valid signatures received in bid to limit campaign contributions, move San Jose mayoral race

Following a court-ordered recount, a controversial laborbacked ballot measure to shift the San Jose mayoral race to presidential election years and limit campaign contributions has failed to garner the required number of signatures to qualify for the November election.

According to the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters, the measure — dubbed the Fair Elections Initiative — fell 2,248 signatures short of the 69,024 needed to qualify for the ballot. The registrar could not validate 27,423 of the 94,199 signatures counted.

The Fair Elections Initiative called for aligning mayoral elections with presidential years to boost voter turnout, particularly among people of color, and placing a cap on certain campaign contributions, including those from any person or entity that has received city contracts of at least $250,000.

The final word on the measure’s failure came nearly two months after Santa Clara County’s top elections official admitted she made dozens of errors when counting a sample size of the signatures initially. Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters Shannon Bushey then filed an unprecedented — but successful — lawsuit against San Jose’s city clerk that required the city to conduct a full recount of nearly 100,000 signatures gathered for the initiative.

To make the situation even more convoluted, labor leaders claim San Jose City Clerk Toni Taber misplaced nearly 3,000 signatures — or multiple boxes full of papers — after they submitted their petitions on Feb 12. According to a city-issued receipt, the backers of the measure turned in more than 96,000 signatures to the city clerk but the county registrar only received about 94,000.

Now, after ligation and a series of serious errors by the election officials, labor leaders across the city are calling on the mayor and city council to place the initiative

on the November ballot anyway. They also say they’re “looking into their legal options” to fight the recent decision because the number of lost signatures could have been enough to qualify the measure — if the vast majority of them were valid.

“Since the beginning of this campaign, the City Clerk has mishandled the petition and the Registrar of Voters miscounted signatures,” Ben Field of the South Bay Labor Council said in a statement. “In the historical moment we are living, we need to amplify democracy, not keep rolling out bureaucratic failures that hold us back.”

Alison Brunner, CEO of the Law Foundation of Silicon Valley, said the loss of the voter signatures is “an egregious violation of voting rights.”

“Whether they agree with the Fair Elections Initiative or not, Mayor Liccardo and the City Council should uphold democratic values — and the voices of our community members — by putting the measure on the ballot,” Brunner said in a statement.

City Attorney Rich Doyle said previously that he had not seen “any evidence” of someone losing the signatures and instead believed the signatures may have been miscounted initially.

In April 2019, the San Jose City Council narrowly shot down the proposal to move mayoral elections despite advocates like council members Magdalena Carrasco, Maya Esparza and Sergio Jimenez arguing it would boost the number of people casting a vote for the mayor seat and make the city’s government more reflective of the views of all residents. Top labor leaders then pumped more than $420,000 into their petition drive last year and gathered signatures to put it on the ballot and let residents decide for themselves.

Opponents of the measure, including the region’s largest chamber of commerce — The Silicon Valley Organization — and Mayor Sam Liccardo took issue with the measure because it sought to weed out donations from particular special interests but exempted labor unions. On a recent public Valley Politics television segment, Liccardo said he wouldn’t support the initiative if the council voted on the measure again, citing concerns about the “constitutionality of the measure.”

“There’s a lot of concerns about the measure and how it decided who can contribute to a campaign and who can’t,” Liccardo said. “I suspect there’s a real First Amendment problem with the measure.”