Legal Commentary

Although California's Prop 8 is getting most of the country's attention, as a resident of San Francisco I'll have to cast a vote on 22 local ballot measures and 12 state-wide ballot measures.  Picking a President and protecting gay marriage are the easy parts of my job as a voter on Election Day!   Call me crazy, but I find direct democracy invigorating as a citizen.  (I confess that I find Proposition R to give direct democracy a bad name: it seeks to rename SF's sewage plant in "honor" of George W. Bush.)

Prop 11 -- if it passes -- will change how our state (though not Congressional) districts are drawn, moving the process from a legislative one to one controlled by a random sample of lay citizens.  I'll be voting for the measure.   My short argument: the perfect is the enemy of the good ; and if it turns out that this method needs some tweaking down the road, we have a very accessible ballot here to make the relevant changes.  The current method of district drawing is so pathological that a serious change is in order.  And given the Democratic Party's  opposition to any change (they oppose the proposition that is supported by the AARP, League of Women Voters, parts of the ACLU, parts of the NAACP (some oppose it there too), Michael Bloomberg (?)(!), the LA Times, the SF Chronicle), we're not likely to see real reform of redistricting without a ballot measure.  It is, admittedly, a pain to amend an initiative statute (you need another initiative!).  But I have no faith that legislators will ever deal with this problem on their own or that a perfect proposition on the matter will make its way before me.  Proposition 11 is far from perfect.  Yet it is far enough along the path of reform to be worth supporting.

If you have some other views about Prop 11 that you wish to share, we're all ears here!