Ballot fee jumps in effort to end goofy initiatives
It won’t be as easy on the pocketbook for mischief makers to propose outrageous ballot initiatives in California, like a recent one that called for executions of gays and lesbians.
Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill Tuesday that raises the fee for filing ballot initiatives from $200 to $2,000 in an effort to discourage what has become a plethora of over-the-top measures in recent years.
“It has been over 72 years since this aspect of the initiative process has been updated. This reform is overdue,” said Assemblyman Evan Low, D-Campbell, who co-authored AB1100. “We live in California, the cradle of direct democracy, but we also need a threshold for reasonableness. And this bill will do just that.”
The $200 filing fee, unchanged since 1943, has been too small of a price to pay for satirists and cranks intent on using the initiative process for making outrageous statements. It really got out of control this year when an Orange County lawyer filed what he called the “Sodomite Suppression Act,” which would have called on the state to execute gays and lesbians.
State Attorney General Kamala Harris took that initiative to court and a Sacramento judge ruled it unconstitutional, but that was merely the most outlandish of many measures. A Southern California woman countered with the “Intolerant Jackass Act,” requiring people who propose measures to murder gays and lesbians to attend sensitivity training.
A San Jose man advanced the “Shellfish Suppression Act,” which would have made the sale or consumption of shellfish a felony with heavy fines or imprisonment. Other measures included a ban on alimony in divorce cases, separating California from the United States and designating the state’s top elected official “president of California.”
By August, 58 proposals had been submitted in efforts to qualify them for the November 2016 ballot, including the one to kill gay people.
The bill originally called for raising the filing fee to $8,000, but the state Senate was reluctant to raise the price that much and revised it downward.