If you think California governing system is badly broken, how should you vote in the governor’s race?
The likely nominees of each party, Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman, haven’t even bothered to offer an answer. (And for the record, Steve Poizner, despite being more specific about his policies than his rivals, has dodged this big question too).
Neither has spoken at any length about the state’s deep structural and constitutional problems, much less committed to addressing them.
At best, a vote for either Brown or Whitman is a wild guess. At worst, a vote for either is a waste of time. Without a mandate for broader change, the next governor, whether it’s Brown or Whitman, will be lucky to muddle through four years with more of the budget gimmicks and debt we’ve used for too long in California.
Is there a better option?
Well, leaving the ballot blank might be the better option.
A non-vote in the governor’s race isn’t a cop out. It’s a choice. In California, a “none of the above” vote has real weight.
How’s that? Because under the rules of California’s direct democracy, a non-vote for governor matters.
The qualification standards for initiatives and referendums are based on percentages of the number of votes cast for governor in the most recent election.
Thus, if fewer votes are cast in a governor’s race, it will take fewer signatures to qualify an initiative or referendum for the following four years. With lower signature requirements, the cost of qualifying initiatives drops.
So if you’re an advocate of a constitutional convention or some of the reforms offered by California Forward, you could give a boost to those efforts by not casting a vote in the governor’s race. Effectively, your non-vote would make it easier for those reformers – or others – to qualify their measures in the future. This could be an important boost for reformers, who have been unable to raise the big money needed to qualify measures this year.
Here’s a suggestion: someone in those reform movements should start making this point, and launch a campaign for “none of the above” in the governor’s race. Such an effort, if cleverly conceived, would be a lot cheaper than qualifying good government initiatives.
And if “none of the above” gained any steam, it could have more than just the long-term effect of making future reforms easier to qualify.
It might force Brown and Whitman to stop hiding the ball and start addressing the concerns of reform-minded voters right now.