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Each election I research and analyze the propositions on the California ballot to create this voting guide, and they represent nothing other than my own personal view of these measures. I do this analysis on a non-partisan basis, but that doesn't mean I have no opinion. I do, but I believe it's transparent (note that transparency means only that I claim no hidden agenda, not that I'm trying to be unbiased).
I generally have no connection with any group supporting or opposing any of these propositions.
My main intent is to get to the bottom of these issues, knowing that the real purpose is not always evident. Once uncovered, I apply a mainly libertarian eye to them.
I'm more interested in examining the issues thoughtfully than I am in getting you to vote the way I do, so I hope these pages help you understand the issues in front of us.
I hope my thoughts are helpful.
Other resources:
Important Note: if you are tempted to say "The hell with it" and just vote "no" on all of them, please do not. An uninformed vote, even a no, may have an unintended consequence that you don't want.
Either educate yourself on the measure, or leave that spot blank. Really. This matters.
Note for 2024: the gap in proposition numbers is because legislative measures start with 1 and count up, while those created by the citizenry (referenda and initiatives) start at 30 and go up. This is supposed to make it easier for us to tell which is which, though I am not sure who really cares that much (or how much it un-confuses things).
Note for 2026: I have used ChatGPT very extensively while researching these measures, it's been exceptionally helpful, but this is all my writing. Occasionally I'll ask it to help rewrite a paragraph that I don't think sounds quite right, but this is 100% my own work here.
Click each link for the rationale for each position.
| Proposition | Source | My Position | Description / Title |
|---|---|---|---|
 Prop 1 |
Legislature | No | Affordable Housing Bonds |
| Prop 2 |
Legislature | Soft No | Increase state rainy-day fund |
| Prop 3 |
Legislature | No | Temporary tax extension |
| Prop 4 |
Legislature | No | Repeals prohibition on public-funding of election campaigns |
| Prop 5 |
Legislature | No | Changes recall procedures |
| Prop 37 |
Initiative | Soft No | Creates Loan Program for Middle-Income buyers |
| Prop 38 |
Initiative | Soft No | Bonds for Immunology Research |
| Prop 39 |
Initiative | No | Voter ID |
| Prop 40 |
Initiative | No | "One-time" billionaire tax |
| Prop 41 |
Initiative | Yes | Procedures about new State Taxes |
| Prop 42 |
Initiative | Yes | Prohibits new personal-property taxes |
| Prop 43 |
Initiative | Yes | Procedures for local taxes |
| Prop 44 |
Initiative | No | Community Health Clinic spending |
| Prop 45 |
Initiative | Yes | Modifies environmental review requirements |
Prop 1: Affordable-housing Bonds
This measure allocates $11.25B of bonds for housing-related purposes: building/renovating public-sector housing, affordable housing for low-income and homeless, state-funded mortgages for California veterans, down-payment assistance, plus various housing-assistance programs.
I oppose this measure.
Mainly, California is not in a great position to borrow more money right now, especially where borrowing is among the most expensive ways to fund even legitimate programs. This is even more so when the proponents inevitably claim, in capital letters, "WITHOUT RAISING TAXES". This is technically true but completely disingenuous: most of the bonds are repaid through the General Fund, though the smaller CalVet portion is not. That $500-600M per year for 25 years has to come from somewhere.
Anyway, everybody is aware of how crazy expensive housing is right now, especially in areas where people actually want to live, and the old days where a family could afford a house with one working man's salary seems to be a fantasy in California.
But one of the main drivers of high housing costs is restricted supply: we simply aren't able to build enough housing to keep up with demand, so costs go up. You can't repeal the law of supply and demand any more than you can repeal gravity.
Restrictions on supply come from several areas:
Permitting costs and delays; you can't build anything without permits, and we can divide these into three informal types:
My particular ire is on #3, with "Impact Fees" added just-because-we-can. A particularly egregious example is the "Affordable Housing Linkage Fee" in Los Angeles, which is meant to fund affordable housing and related services - these can add tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of each unit.
Think of Impact Fees as:
We are addressing the crisis of expensive housing by making housing more expensive.
But even if one looks at only items #1 and #2, and even if one agrees that the costs and scope are reasonable, the delays in the permitting process add a real cost of their own: the bank-interest clock is often running while waiting for permits, and these add up fast. There have been cases where a project was completed but was in limbo for months waiting for the Certificate of Occupancy from the City.
Imagine if your money were on the line (or if you were waiting to move in!), desperate to stop the bleeding, and you can't get the City to even return your calls?
Hang around with some developers to find horror stories about the Kafka-esque situation in big cities where what could have been a 10-minute conversation with an engineer at the permit desk turns into a multi-month "open a ticket in the portal" ordeal, with multiple departments all pointing to each other and having the kind of attention to customer service normally attributed to the DMV or the Internal Revenue Service.
"Environmental" reviews; nobody wants their neighborhood air/water polluted, and it's fair to have regulations insisting on that, but the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) is a gold-mine for those who have no real environmental concerns, but just want to throw a wrench in a project they don't want.
This hindrance is squarely addressed by Proposition 45 (later in this analysis) that goes into much more detail.
I'm simply not willing to take most "affordable housing" concerns seriously until proponents first focus on increasing supply, and - particularly - addressing the impediments above.
Yes, I want housing to be more afforable - in the sense that actual real costs become more reasonable - but that's not necessarily the same as Affordable Housing™ that includes extraneous factors — frequently related to social justice — that are more about shifting costs around than reducing them, often with a dash of non-profit grift in the mix.
Before borrowing billions to subsidize the high cost of building housing, California needs to ask how much of that is entirely self-inflicted by restrictions, fees, delays, and other obstacles.
An exception to this analysis is the $1.25B allocated to funding home loans for California veterans. My understanding is this is self-funded by loan repayments, and it seems that the CalVet program runs a surprisingly tight ship for a program like this, and there is little to object to it fiscally.
And though the nation surely owes veterans a debt, this is a National obligation and I'm not entirely comfortable making this a State issue. But if this were the only thing on the measure I'd probably be for it, but given the other provisions of this measure it has to be "no" from me.
My Vote: No
Prop 2: Increases State Rainy-Day Fund
This measure would increase required contributions to the State's Budget Stabilization Account (aka "Rainy Day Fund") during surplus years as a buffer for subsequent economic downturns. It modifies the coincidentally-numbered Proposition 2 (2014), increasing the reserve cap from 10% to 20%.
It also extends the requirement for making additional payments towards certain State debt obligations during the good years.
My initial feeling here was to support it, thinking that during the boom times—such as when California was wallowing in Federal COVID money—that we put some of this aside for later rather than immediately dumping it into spending that would be hard to sustain and even harder to repeal.
I read the material—including the pro and con arguments—several times, thinking this is so obviously a good idea that my spidey sense started to go off: this can't do what it looks like it does, can it?
Let's start with the debt-repayment provisions.
I read that the specific debts targeted for accelerated repayment are primarily state pension debt obligations (a provision carrying over from 2014's Prop 2), and that the SEIU (a service-industry union) is backing it, and that changes how I read everything. (There are other categories of debt included, somewhat expanded beyond Prop 2 (2014), but that doesn't really change the analysis.)
The fact that the SEIU supports something doesn't automatically make it wrong, but it absolutely destroys any presumption of innocence: I really need to dig in here.
Virtually every jurisdiction in the United States has enormous unfunded pension liabilities, starting at the top with Social Security at the Federal level [see sidebar →] down to individual cities (typically police/fire pensions). It's hard to overstate just how big a hairy deal this is, and how legislatures are repeatedly kicking the can down the road.
During surplus times, paying down debts of any kind is wise: if you are flush with a bit of cash, it doesn't matter that much whether you're paying down your Visa or your MasterCard compared with the fact that you're paying down your debt in the first place.
I'd prefer a mechanism that pays down debts with the highest interest rates rather than targeting one specific category of debt, but that feels a relatively minor distinction. In this respect, paying down pension debt isn't sinister, and the interests of SEIU's members happen to align with reasonable fiscal discipline (even if only this once).
So: I'm satisfied that the debt-repayment provisions are reasonable enough. Now onto the reserve fund.
I'm still wrestling with: how is something that seems so appealing backed so strongly by those who love spending money? Did the state's Democrats and public-sector unions all suddenly acquire a sense of fiscal responsibility?
In the main the answer seems to be along the lines of: yes, we very much like spending money and want to be able to do so after a budget downturn, so a small bit of fiscal discipline now means we don't have to make painful budget cuts later.
This seems unusually responsible for a cohort genetically predisposed to fail every marshmallow experiment they have ever faced.
Ah, but here's the twist.
The California constitution provides for outright tax rebates during a surplus in certain circumstances, and this measure mucks with a key component of that provision (the Gann Limit) to make rebates less likely.
So it appears this will legitimately do a better job saving for a rainy day, but steering overages back into eventual government spending instead of back to the taxpayer.
This is far less nefarious than I expected, but I'm still inclined to echo the words of Donna Moss from The West Wing: "I want my money back".
And this is in spite of the terrible ballot arguments from the opponents, who seemed more interested in namecalling than thoughtful persuasion.
My Vote: A soft No
Prop 3: Extension of a "Temporary" tax
This measure would make permanent a "temporary" tax on wealthy Californians passed by Prop 30 in 2012, and then extended by Prop 55 in 2016.
At the start, they swear up and down that this is a "temporary" tax, and then at the renewal have the nerve to claim (as they do here) "is not a new tax" and "does not raise taxes", and then go on and on about all the things that are funded by the tax and how it should not be cut.
This is so completely and totally dishonest: they knew full well up front that this was never going to be allowed to expire because the things funded were not going to expire. It's not like four years went by and they are shocked, simply shocked to see that they need more money still. They are completely shameless about it.
This is the tax-policy equivalent of "just the tip": we're only asking for this little thing, and only temporarily — and later explaining why of course it can't go away.
The only legitimate case for a "temporary" tax is when the thing it funds is itself temporary, such as (say) a one-time statewide earthquake retrofit of bridges. Yes, it's a lot of money, but the bridges need to be reinforced, and when the bridges are fixed the tax expires. In those cases, you can debate the tax on the actual merits rather than rely on bait-and-switch.
Politics is just so toxic, and complete disingenuity like this should not be rewarded.
We'll revisit this in Prop 40 later in this analysis.
My Vote: No
Prop 4: Repeals prohibition against public funding of election campaigns.
This measure would repeal current prohibitions on public funding of election campaigns for state or local offices: it would not directly fund any actual campaigns, only remove their prohibitions against doing so. This measure would not apply to Federal campaigns, nor to certain charter cities that already provide for some public funding.
It imposes requirements on potential public-funding schemes that mostly make sense: limits which kinds of funds could be used (no funds from the education budget, for instance), cannot be used for legal defenses or to repay personal loans to candidates, recipients must have broad support and agree to spending limits. These provisions all seem reasonable enough.
The prohibition on public funding was passed in 1988 via Proposition 73; I'm certain I reviewed the ballot measure at the time, but alas, I haven't been able to locate any of my analysis prior to the year 2000. The law has been modified several times by the Legislature since, but because some proposed legislative changes have been rejected by the courts, they brought this measure to the voters.
There is no doubt that money has an outsized influence in politics, and it pretty much offends everybody (including me). Because of the very broad reading of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, political spending is generally considered to be protected speech by courts, so no matter how much you hate this state of affairs, it's the world we're living in right now.
It's gross.
In my view, the best way to reduce the value of money in politics is to reduce the size and scope of government so that it's less of an attraction to those who want to make a career out of grifting in public office.
In practice I might as well be wishing to repeal the law of gravity, so this is also the state of affairs that I have to live with. Sigh.
I see the appeal of public funding, but this doesn't actually get money out of politics: it potentially adds a new source of money while leaving the existing private political machinery largely intact.
And though any particular public-funding scheme might well include spending limits by a candidate, it has no effect on all those independent expenditures by the bajillion Political Action Committees who have dogs in this fight (and snouts in the trough). That money can easily dwarf whatever the candidate is allowed to spend.
One particular concern is how these schemes are implemented at the state or local level. Proposition 4 sets broad rules but leaves many key design decisions to future state and local politicians who are the very people who will be standing in line for the money. Do we really believe these provisions won't be gamed by clever lawyering? This has "shenanigans" written all over it.
And given that the independent expenditures are untouched, this will have essentially no impact on the deforestation filling my mailbox with junk mail.
I'm sure there's an even more cynical view here, but in the end I'm not sure I want my tax dollars going to try to get people elected I'm not going to vote for.
My Vote: No
Prop 5: Changes process for recalling elected officials
Under current law, if an election is held to recall a state official (say, the governor), then not only is the "should this person be recalled?" on the ballot, but there's also the usually-long list of potential replacements on that very same ballot. If the recall passes, then the maximum vote-getter from the smorgasbord of candidates is elected to that office.
Under this measure, the replacement would not be on the same ballot. Instead, if the governor is recalled, the lieutenant governor would take office immediately, serving either until the next statewide election or for the remainder of the term, depending on when the recall occurred. For other offices, the vacancy would be filled using the normal process for that office—typically a special election for legislators, or appointment for other statewide offices.
My first thought when reading this was: why is somebody trying to fix a non problem? In this matter, the motivation is likely far more interesting than the mechanism.
The last recall attempt was in 2021 when Gov. Newsom weathered his challenge, and there were 46 candidates on the ballot hoping to replace him.
The last successful recall attempt was in 2003 when Gov. Gray Davis was recalled, with the always colorful Arnold Schwarzenegger taking the top spot out of one hundred thirty five challengers.
Some candidates did not even pretend to be serious: Gary Coleman (the child actor on Diff'rent Strokes) had his filing fee paid for by a radio station, and the famous watermelon-smashing comedian Gallagher was on the ballot as well. So was Larry Flynt of Hustler fame.
The concern with recall elections is that it skips an important candidate-filtering process that helps build consensus around the winner (see sidebar →).
This process also makes it more appealing to those who treat a recall as a second bite at the apple in the hopes of smuggling in a replacement with a super-minority of public support. The proponents state this well.
Said by the proponents:
This encourages political actors to target officials they couldn't defeat in a regular election to install replacements who lack broad public support.
By moving the election of the replacement to its own election, we can rely on this crucial step that avoids the free-for-all with a thundering herd of candidates.
But the proposed system is not all sunshine and rainbows.
Mainly, it sets up a scenario where a candidate is recalled with 51% of the vote, runs in the replacement election, and wins with 37% of the vote. This would be absurd, very easy to imagine, and might even be likely.
Note that for the governor, the Lt. Governor would take office upon recall, and the election for replacement (if any) would happen at the next usual statewide election.
Both of these forks in the road can lead to absurd scenarios, so it's not so easy to tell which way to go: almost a coin-flip for me.
But then I learn that one of the authors of this measure, Sen. Josh Newman, was himself recalled in 2018 (said to be over his votes on the gas tax), and who was later re-elected in the ordinary way.
This tipped it for me and resolved the coin flip: it feels a little too much like "sore loser".
My Vote: No
Prop 37: Down-payment assistance for middle-class homebuyers
This measure would authorize up to $25B in Revenue Bonds to offer down-payment assistance to middle-class buyers of certain Qualified New Homes, to be administered by the California Housing Finance Agency (CalHFA).
Buyers would be required to put down at least 3% of their own money, CalHFA providing up to 17% to bulk up the down payment in the form of a second mortgage, with a traditional first mortgage by a traditional lender providing the rest.
Purchasers would have to be the first buyer of the home, meet certain income qualifications consistent with "middle class", and only to homes up to between $1M and $1.5M depending on the county.
CalHFA would have to make best efforts to keep interest rates and payments reasonable, consistent with the ability (and perhaps the credit) of the buyer.
So far this looks mostly benign and the kind of thing a do-gooder who cares about housing affordability would get behind: I don't find them superficially objectionable.
The ballot pamphlet has no opposition listed, which makes it a bit more work to find out what's really going on here, and sure enough there's something to see.
Buried in this supposed homebuyer-loan program is highly pork-scented side deal for the housing industry ecosystem: Builders, Labor, Realtors.
If a developer opts into the Housing Developer Option:
Furthermore, every buyer in this program—whether the developer has joined the special developer option or not—must use a licensed real-estate agent or broker in the transaction.
And there we have it; these coalitions are unsurprisingly the largest donors behind this measure, and though a builder is not required to participate this special Housing Developer Option, it's hard not to imagine that this was the entire point of the whole measure.
I oppose this measure and am joined by both the Libertarian Party and the Green Party, who don't often find common ground.
First, I don't believe the state should operate as a lender: we have markets for this kind of thing and it's hard to imagine the state doing a better job at it. In addition, the state is in the riskier second position behind the traditional lender, making some losses plausible, though perhaps not in volume enough to put the program at risk.
Because these are Revenue Bonds, losses would nominally be borne by the bondholders, but if the CalHFA program ran into serious trouble due to defaults or bad market conditions, it's not hard to imagine the Legislature deciding that a state-sponsored homebuyer program was "too important to fail" and reaching into the General Fund. This is highly, highly speculative, and nothing in this measure requires such a bailout.
And though I appreciate that housing is crazy expensive, this measure directly subsidizes demand, which ordinarily puts upward pressure on prices. To their credit, the authors have limited the program to newly-built homes, presumably hoping that the additional demand will encourage builders to create more supply. Maybe it will, but I'm skeptical: California doesn't suffer from a shortage of people wanting to buy houses.
The Builder Option also imports a collection of labor requirements, including prevailing-wage requirements for some kinds of projects. Whatever their merits as labor policy, adding labor costs and compliance requirements is an odd way to make housing less expensive.
The better way to make housing more affordable is to encourage supply (which Prop 45 squarely addresses).
This measure isn't terrible, but because it's so clearly funded by the interests who benefit, this is far more about helping Realtors, builders, and labor rather than middle-class homeowners.
My Vote: Soft No
Prop 38: Bonds for Immunology Medical Research
This measure would authorize $8.4B in bonds to fund medical research related to immunology and immunotherapy research medicine, with particular focus on cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer's disease. It sets up a framework for research institutions and grants, and has provisions for commercially successful medical inventions to repay the State by getting a cut of the action.
I don't think anybody can take issue with wanting to take on cancer, heart disease or Alzheimer's, and though this measure has a better argument for borrowing money than most, I still don't believe it's in the role of the state to fund research like this. But I don't have any kind of slam-dunk case.
California has done this before with Prop 71 in 2004 and again with Prop 14 in 2020, mostly revolving around stem-cell research (total authorization of $8.5B).
By all accounts, the programs have been reasonably well managed: no substantial financial improprieties, plenty of grants given, some seemingly powerful discoveries unlocked.
There were provisions for the state to receive royalties that were meant to offset the costs of borrowing, but to date have been just shy of $17M - this is such a small amount that I consider it zero compared with $8.5B authorized (that doesn't mean I consider it any kind of boondoggle).
This measure does structure things differently, where the state gets 10% of licensing revenue from successful commercial discoveries, so there's some hope that this will contribute to the costs.
The proponents state:
Prop 38 is designed to pay for itself WITH NO NET COST TO THE STATE OR TAXPAYERS.
"Designed to" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and the math for the State to recover everything (including interest) means there'd need to be north of $100B in revenue for the State's 10% to make itself whole. I can't predict the future, but the less than 1% return from the previous two propositions doesn't get my hopes up.
Nevertheless, there are strong arguments for this measure even going past the decency of the proponents to avoid the "DOES NOT RAISE TAXES" rhetoric that is inevitable with bond measures.
First, and most obviously: one can easily point to all the turmoil in medical research funding being cut in the Trump Administration, the State stepping in to fill a real gap is compelling.
There are also blind spots in Federal funding of some research areas (often around stem cells) that this could backfill.
Furthermore, the measure has some thoughtful provisions beyond the revenue sharing, including requiring resulting drugs and technologies to be sold to Californians below the national average price, though my gut tells me there will be plenty of room for creative accounting around exactly what that means.
One thing about this measure concerns me some: the proponent who submitted the initiative is Dr. Gary Michelson, a retired orthopedic surgeon who made a fortune with his medical discoveries and patents (mainly around spinal surgery), and the measure as written would effectively direct a large share of the money to the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy at UCLA as the organization to manage this.
This institution is not named in the Initiative, but the qualifications are written such that it's apparently going to be the only one that qualifies. Dr. Michelson founded this institute.
So this is clearly the project of one guy, though I haven't found anything nefarious here: he's putting his own money behind it (and many other medical-research enterprises) and all the evidence I can find shows he's a true believer who isn't doing this for the grift. This is refreshing.
Furthermore, because he made his fortune on commercializing medical research by being really sharp on not just the medical side but also the commercial side, he'd be in a great position to design something that will actually recapture as much revenue as possible.
As a cancer survivor myself (Stage 3a colon cancer, 2018) I can't help but wish that we were free of the scourges of these terrible diseases, but I really don't want the state to be involved.
You can vote for this in good conscience; I just won't be doing so.
My Vote: A soft No
Prop 39: Requirement for Voter ID
This measure means to increase integrity of elections by requiring ID of some kind when voting (either in person or via mail), and making best efforts to ensure that only US Citizens are doing the voting.
I oppose this measure, mainly because it's trying to solve a non-problem, but this issue is clearly an everybody-sucks-here situation.
Election fraud does happen, but it's incredibly rare and very rarely rises to the level of influencing an outcome (I have found a few isolated cases). When issues are found, it's usually at the local level where it ought to be investigated enthusiastically. Election integrity does matter.
Both sides have (at least superficially) valid points:
These are both fair arguments, but they're lost in the noise of wild fearmongering.
Those on the right dramatically overstate the impact of election fraud, including still—still!—claiming that Pres. Biden "stole" the 2020 election.
It's true there were concerning reports of irregularities all over the country, and the likes of Rudy Guiliani and Sidney "Release the Kraken" Powell raised these issues with breathless claims of widespread fraud amidst lawsuits aplenty.
The best way to find out if these claims are true is, surprisingly enough, not to investigate them, but check which claims they actually raised in court. When the wild claims in a press conference become far tamer in a court filing - where they have actual officer-of-the-court obligations - it becomes clear they are simply posturing for their base (which could be a base of one). It's exhausting.
And those on the left, who act as if showing ID is going to turn women into handmaidens and bring minorities into "Jim Crow 2.0", are acting as if this measure would re-elect Donald Trump himself.
It's true that some people may have difficulty getting an ID - though this is not terribly widespread - and some of the Republican plans were pretty onerous re: names matching for women who have been married, but the level of hysteria about this sounds like this is harkening back to the Civil Rights era.
The ballot arguments of the opponents are among the most hysterical I've ever read - it's all MAGA, all the time. It's exhausting.
Nevertheless, I did want to touch on a few non-hysterical points about voting:
Voting by non-citizens / green-card holders is quite rare, in part because doing so leaves a paper trail of illegal activity that could rise up to bite them even years in the future, possibly leading to arrest or deportation.
Given this is such a stupid crime, it's hard to guess why it happens at all: some could be mistakes, others could be idiots who didn't realize the mark left on their permanent record. There might be other reasons, but I simply do not worry about this at scale.
California law permits you to authorize another to turn in your ballot, and this is perfectly legitimate if a wife drops off her bedridden husband's ballot on election day.
But what concerns me is ballot harvesting, where partisan organizations may target favorable communities and offer to "help" the residents vote, seal/sign their ballots, and then collect those ballots in bulk for turning in.
This has always bothered me: I've read damning reports of this practice, though I'm not sure I've seen confirmation that it leads to election fraud, but in any case Prop 39 doesn't address this issue at all.
If you steal my mail-in ballot, there are real checks that prevent you from casting my vote. When I request a replacement, yours (with some kind of unique identifier) is invalidated automatically, and if I cast a vote in person, the system notices and holds my vote as provisional until the status of my outstanding mail-in ballot is accounted for.
I believe the only way you can actually steal my vote is if I don't vote at all; this would be bad (and illegal), but there aren't nearly as many avenues for shenanigans as it first appears.
Many hate on vote-by-mail, and this feels like an eminently reasonable objection: ballots all over the place and sometimes they go astray. I run across "I got the ballot for my dead uncle" and the like on social media - how could you not be concerned when you have a not-for-you ballot in your hand?
But Oregon has had vote-by-mail since 1998, Washington since 2011, and Colorado since 2013 (others have followed since): this gives an enormous body of experience, and if voter fraud was really rampant there, we'd have heard about it by now.
I'll note that Pres. Trump regularly votes by mail. Ok then.
Many have heard of the much-maligned "purging of the voter rolls" (including calls of disenfranchisement), but this is an important election integrity step. Life events such as moving, going to prison, or dying all impact your eligibility to vote.
Ensuring the voter rolls are correct is literally the job of election officials, so if they get a report of deaths (perhaps from the Social Security Administration?) they remove the voter.
And if California election officals receive a notification that you've moved (perhaps when your ballot is returned), they have reason to believe you're no longer living at that address. Though your ballot for President doesn't really care whether you moved from Tustin to Irvine (as my wife and I did last year), all the local ballots (school board, mayor, etc.) absolutely do.
All these folks who've been removed (except the dead ones, we hope) can fix this simply by re-registering. It saddens me that this voter purge thing generates calls of racism to "protect" people who apparently haven't felt that the last few elections were important.
So: an issue with honorable positions on both sides has those positions jettisoned for the tribal signalling and screaming - this is why everybody sucks here.
Vote no, investigate fraud when it happens, and worry about things that matter.
My Vote: No
Prop 40: "One-time" Billionaire tax
Note: This measure, along with Prop 41 and Prop 42, cover similar areas, so even if all pass, courts could rule that Prop 40 is invalid if other propositions receive more votes.
Pretty much everybody has heard of this one: it's a "one time" 5% tax on wealth of billionaires, intended mainly to pay for healthcare, plus a few other things, retroactive to January 1 of this year. Unlike most taxes, which apply to income (how much you earn in a year), this one applies to wealth (how much stuff you own), though it does exclude things like real estate and retirement accounts.
I'm squarely opposed to this, but it's not because I'm a fawning sycophant of Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos.
First and most obviously: you'd have to have been born under a rock to believe that this will be a one-time tax. Putting aside the general notion of them not wanting to give up the cash received, but because the thing they're using it for - healthcare - isn't going away. No sane person can believe that the proponents of this bill wanted to buy one year of healthcare.
But extending this is not legally a slam dunk: the one-timeness would be enshrined in the Constitution, and it's not clear that the Legislature has the ability to do it without going back to the people. The law is murky on this, but my gut feel tells me they'd find a way to pull it off.
Likewise the billion dollar threshold: I've already heard rumblings about reducing the cutoff substantially, though I've been unable to locate a concrete reference.
However this plays out in court, it's obvious to me that this was fully intended to be a foot in the door for the future.
It's also not clear that the retroactive residency provision will withstand court challenges, but it gets into a lot of legal arguments not worth a discussion here.
Though much wealth can be relatively easy to value (and liquidate in order to pay), such as stock in a publicly-traded company, those with privately-held companies are far more difficult to put a hard value on because they're not traded. This is inviting a pitched battle over what number to put on it. And because private wealth isn't exactly liquid, it might be almost impossible to find a ready market to sell in order to cough up the 5%. The measure has provisions for letting the tax be paid off over several years.
One might worry about the owner of a hard-to-value company taking the installment plan, the company later crashing and burning yet still owing a huge tax bill on wealth which has evaporated, but there's a separate provision ("Optional Deferral Account") that squarely addresses this by taking its cut from future value extracted from the company. The details are complicated, but it was a thoughtful provision.
It feels unlikely that I'll find any points about the measure that will change many minds, in part because many of those who the tax could apply to have not exactly made themselves sympathetic figures.
But my broader point is to be sad that so many believe, in a free society, that wealth is a zero-sum game. You are not made worse because somebody else has more.
This is pure politics of envy, with the recurring villain SEIU (a service-workers union) who believes that their want is the same as a rightful claim on another.
I'm sad it's come to this.
My Vote: No
Prop 41: Prohibition on New State Taxes
This measure has a lot of provisions regarding new taxes, audits, and other Proposition-esque language, but everybody knows what this is for: pushing back against the "one-time" 5% billionaire tax in Prop 40.
The meat of Prop 41 includes:
The first one—audits of new earmarked taxes—is pretty much Ballot Candy: a provision that looks reasonable enough, is appealing to the average voter, but there mainly to be an attractive bullet point for the measure. There is likely no organized campaign against it.
You're against auditing where your hard-earned tax dollars are going? What's wrong with you?
No, it's the second part that's the big deal here, and it all revolves around the Gann Limit, something I've only barely heard about even though I've been writing about this stuff for many years. This is a seriously wonky issue.
Enacted by Proposition 4 in 1979, the Gann Limit sets a Constitutional limit on how much tax revenue the State may appropriate (aka: spend) every year, based on a formula that accounts for population growth and some economic factors.
I don't know how the formula is calculated, I don't really have to, but I do need to point out that this is different from any notion of a balanced budget. This is strictly a spending limit, once the State runs up against it, the State can't simply spend the excess however it likes. Ultimately the excess revenues have to either be returned to the taxpayers or directed to schools.
Not every dollar spent is subject to the limit: debt service would be excluded, along with a bunch of other things that all seem reasonable, but the upshot is: if you want to spend a lot of money on a pet project, you'll have an easier time of it if your project manages to constitutionally exclude itself from the Gann Limit (it's not a magic wand). It's like a hall pass that lets you walk past the State's "Tax Refund" office.
There's an enormous amount of policy wonkery here that I have no hope of understanding (not to mention explaining), but the key point here: Proposition 40 exempts the revenue from the "one time" 5% billionaire tax from this limit. That's the hall pass I mentioned.
This measure says: you can't do that any more, and if Prop 41 gets more votes than Prop 40, the courts could find that the two conflict and prevent Prop 40 from taking effect.
It's hard to overstate how much hand-waving I've done here, I'm only slightly ahead of my own understanding, but I like what this is trying to do even independent of Prop 40.
Oh, and the audits are nice too.
My Vote: Yes
Prop 42: Prohibits new State Personal Property Taxes
This measure, also a direct response to the "one-time" 5% billionaire tax in Proposition 40, is a far more direct response than the indirect wonky mechanism in Prop 41.
It flatly prohibits new personal property taxes, which are taxes on what you have, rather than income taxes on what you earn, plus disallows most retroactive taxes that apply prior to their passage, which is exactly what Prop 40 does by stating it applies to billionaires who were living in California on January 1, 2026.
We currently have a few taxes on personal property. One familiar example is the Vehicle License Fee that's part of your annual auto registration, which is based on how much your car is worth. Businesses can also pay property taxes on equipment they own. These may be painful to pay at times, but they're not strangers to us.
What we generally don't have are taxes simply for owning financial assets such as stocks, retirement accounts, or investments. The State taxes income you receive from them, but not the value of the assets themselves.
I'll note that real property (your home) is a separate category even though I'm sure it's no less painful when you get the letter from the County Assessor.
This measure is designed to directly take on Proposition 40 (assuming it receives more affirmative votes):
I get that there's going to be some debate over property taxes in general, but I have a really hard time with retroactive taxation (because it doesn't relate to criminal punishment, the constitutional prohibition of ex-post-facto laws doesn't apply).
Unlike Prop 41, which takes a legitimate but indirect and somewhat wonky path to killing Prop 40, this one takes it on directly.
I'm for it whether Prop 40 is in the mix or not.
My Vote: Yes
Prop 43: Limits Voters' ability to raise revenues for local governments
This measure would require a 2/3 vote for a local special tax put on the ballot by the local equivalent of an initiative, aligning it with the same 2/3 requirement if that tax is put on the ballot by the city council, board or other local jurisdiction.
A special tax is one legally earmarked for a specific purpose: "please vote to increase the sales tax by 0.5%, with proceeds used strictly for the new Birdwatching Park over by the river", for instance.
This is as opposed to a general tax that's used for the ordinary funding of the government (even if the city chooses to fund that park from general revenues).
The difference is:
This measure would close this loophole by requiring that essentially all special taxes require the same 2/3 majority (with some exceptions).
To me this is an egregious loophole.
Maybe the city wants to build a new sports park but believes they have little chance of getting a 2/3 majority, so they wink & nod to some citizen group that magically springs up to collect signatures and put it on the ballot. Poof, now it only needs a bare majority.
To be fair, at some level of determined wink & nod by the city, it may lose the fig leaf of "citizen initiative", but I'd be surprised if this loophole hasn't been exploited already.
This is super easy for me to support: raising taxes should not be easy, and if you have a worthy project, you should be able to convince the people who have to cough up the funds.
My Vote: Yes
Prop 44: Community Health Clinic spending
Proposition 44 would require federally-qualified non-profit community health clinics to spend at least 90% of their revenues on program services, intending to cut off wasteful operators who blow money on excessive administrative expenses, such as a CEO with an outrageous salary. Those spending less than that 90% floor would pay fines to the state (with some provisions for recovery).
I think we can all get behind the notion that nonprofit clinics ought to spend their money on patients, right?
Who could be against such a noble purpose?
Let's see:
These people could not get on the same page for a measure declaring chocolate is delicious, and that such a cohort are all on the same side cues the danger music as to what's in store for us.
And now enters our shameless friend the SEIU. Again.
You're not going to believe this.
This didn't come out of nowhere. In 2025, SEIU sponsored Assembly Bill 1113, which proposed essentially the same thing: federally-qualified health clinics would be required to spend at least 90% of their revenues on "mission-directed" expenses. That bill ultimately died in the Legislature, but it contained a very interesting provision that didn't make it into Proposition 44.
A clinic participating in a qualifying labor-management cooperation committee was simply exempt from the 90% requirement. And this wasn't some generic employee advisory committee: half of its members had to represent organized labor, including unions representing health-center workers. So under AB 1113, clinics faced the new 90% rule — unless they participated in this very specific kind of union-management arrangement.
This is not exactly subtle: SEIU has been aggressive at the ballot box essentially trying to organize healthcare workers at dialysis clinics—Prop 8 (2018), Prop 23 (2020), and Prop 29 (2022), losing all three measures.
They missed 2024 but are back with this one.
Because the union-related exemption of AB1113 was inexplicably dropped in Proposition 44, I have been trying to figure out what's in it for SEIU (who is putting up a lot of money for it), and the utterly terrible ballot arguments against this measure don't give any clues. For a measure with such widespread and unified opposition, you'd think they could find one guy to write a persuasive argument? This is embarrassing.
My best reckoning here is that the measure itself is leverage.
In September, the California Primary Care Association (CPCA) and several clinics filed a lawsuit accusing SEIU and its leader Dave Regan of racketeering, alleging that they offered to withdraw Prop 44 if CPCA agreed to support union elections covering 25,000 healthcare workers over five years.
In other words: a shakedown.
This is merely an accusation, and nothing's been proven in court, but this kind of thing would be completely in character for SEIU (see the dialysis measures). The Orange County Register refers to SEIU's "thuggish tactics", and the LA Times has quite a bit more detail.
So: because unionizing their workers would not relieve these clinics from Proposition 44's requirements, the threat of Prop 44 appears to be the main leverage, with the measure itself as nothing more than a big fat FU if the clinics refuse to play ball. I surmise that AB 1113's union-related exemption was dropped from Prop 44 simply because it was too brazen even for SEIU.
Given that another healthcare labor union is calling for SEIU's leader to resign due to bad behavior, it sounds like these people are as tone deaf as they are thuggish.
If current polling is any indication, the measure is almost certainly going to fail, but I'm disgusted nevertheless. This is the biggest HELL NO of this ballot.
My Vote: No
Prop 45: Modifies Environmental Review for certain projects
This measure would modify the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) to expedite the environmental review process of many kinds of projects (housing, transportation, water, etc.) with an eye to reducing the costs of housing by allowing projects to complete more quickly.
I enthusiastically support this measure because I love pollution and hate the environment.
No. Wait. It's not like that. Let me elaborate.
Many construction projects in California undergo a review to determine if they will have a negative impact on the environment. For some projects where the impacts are modest, small changes in the project might be sufficient to make it ready to go, but larger projects could require a far more extensive EIR (Environmental Impact Report). These can be quite time consuming (and very expensive), and not inherently unreasonable: we all want clean air and water, right?
But addressing real environmental concerns is not the only use of CEQA: it's almost as if it were purpose-built to give project opponents almost unlimited power to drag things out with frivolous claims, extended public hearings, rounds and rounds of additional changes, etc. designed to wear down the project until they give up. Delaying projects by years is not uncommon.
What this measure does is tighten up the timelines for review to not allow endless dragging it out: this balances society's real need for environmental protection while giving at least a head-fake to our need for new housing, transportation projects, and the like.
For instance, currently an agency sets out requirements for a project application, but it can come back over and over again with new changes or requirements, with each one triggering another round of delays. This measure says the agency has to specify up front what information a complete application must contain, rather than continuing to go back to the well for information that could have been requested from the start.
There's an extended public comment provision in CEQA, but this is not like the guy at the City Council meeting whining about his trash not getting picked up until his two minutes are up. Ding. Next.
Instead, these are formal responses / challenges to the environmental review (which could be hundreds or thousands of pages long), perhaps claiming that the traffic study was incorrect, the air-quality model was defective, proposed alternative #3 isn't legal, etc. These are all included in the project's record. Responses can be highly technical and very long as well.
The lead agency has to consider this feedback and, when legitimate issues are raised, respond to it. These responses can lead to the agency making changes in project requirements which the developer must address.
Challenged items could be due to a legitimate oversight, a good-faith differing view of the data, or - in some cases - approval by an agency with a strong interest in approving the project and perhaps even a too-cozy relationship with the developer.
This comment period is absolutely vital to good governance so all the stakeholders have a voice at the table and projects don't get railroaded through to the detriment of everybody else.
There are other provisions. One states that the project is to be judged by the laws and standards in effect at the time of application, rather than having to be revisited every time the Legislature changes the laws. This avoids the treadmill of moving-goalposts that has plagued some projects in the past.
But there is a counter to that argument: if some new ugly thing is discovered and California changes its environmental standards around it, the CEQA review doesn't automatically get revisited under the new standards. That doesn't exempt the project from otherwise-applicable new laws, but it does mean its environmental review remains based on the rules in effect when it applied.
One particular provision says that court challenges (which are still allowed) regaring a CEQA defect can only halt the portion of the project related to that defect. Currently, the entire project can be put on pause while a perhaps-minor area is litigated in court.
Find a defect? Fine: fix it, but don't freeze the entire project while this works its way through court. There are narrow provisions for temporary injunctions involving specific public-safety impacts, but the ordinary remedy is limited to the defective portion.
There are other provisions about how alternative development proposals shall be considered: they matter a lot to the developer, the details are interesting, but become somewhat eye-glazing in a ballot analysis. There's a lot in here.
BUT: not all challenges are good-faith concerns for the environment: one group doesn't want the project at all, another might favor a competing project under review by the same agency, a labor union might raise a challenge and then drop it in exchange for some labor concession. It's a veritable Disneyland of perverse incentives here.
An anecdote that illustrates the absurdity here:
In May 2026, the union representing California state attorneys and administrative law judges sent letters to more than 100 state departments, arguing that Gov. Newsom's return-to-office order should undergo CEQA review before being implemented.
The theory was straightforward: requiring more than 90,000 state workers to commute four days a week would increase driving and carbon emissions, so agencies should analyze those environmental effects and consider alternatives—including continued remote work.
Well how about that; they don't want to sit in traffic on the 405 (totally understandable) so they file it as an environmental matter, never mind that all of them were doing exactly this for decades up until the pandemic reared its ugly head.
This is clearly and obviously an abuse of CEQA, and though I am absolutely not saying this is all it's there for, opponents of reform really must address concerns about abuse.
But they don't get within three area codes of addressing abuse.
Instead, the ballot arguments against this measure are the construction equivalent of "for the children", where raising "for the environment" is a thought-stopper against any conceivable pushback.
The whining is extraordinary: they do not address a single point of substance made by the proponents - I've read the opposition material many times, and it's remarkably alarmist. "THEY POLLUTE, YOU PAY". Wow.
Anybody who believes that Prop 45 puts a muzzle (or a COVID mask?) on CEQA either hasn't read the proposition or doesn't care about the facts.
Now some have argued that the particular timelines and other procedural changes to be implemented—much too much to detail here, read the ballot pamphlet—should be decided by the legislature rather than a ballot proposition, and this is a principled point.
But California has a Democratic supermajority that never met a developer they didn't want to extort, so something had to change. My reading of this feels entirely reasonable.
There is still a requirement for environmental review. There is still a public-comment period. Developers still have to respond to agency requirements. But this means they don't have to wait in purgatory while the administrative machinery slowly cranks.
I couldn't be more enthusiastic about a Yes vote here. Ding. Next.
My Vote: Yes
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Last updated: Mon Oct 26 02:38:20 UTC 2026
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