Everything No One Ever Told You About San Francisco Ballot Measures
Foreword
A few years back, I was trying to follow some political news about some ballot measures that were being proposed and wanted to look up a few details about the various deadlines that were in effect. Diving into the city codes made me quickly realize that I had a gaping hole in my civic literacy. Like many of you, I’d been voting on San Francisco’s alphabet soup of ballot propositions for the past five years. I thought I was an educated voter — I’d read multiple voter guides every election — but even the best guides never thought to explain, say, the fundamental difference between a city charter amendment and an ordinance. A poll of my friends showed that I wasn’t alone in my ignorance. Furthermore, I couldn’t find many good high-level educational resources on this topic.
What follows is my attempt to create such a guide on the differences between various types of measures, why we vote on them, and how they ended up on the ballot in the first place. As a disclaimer, I have no formal training in law. All the knowledge I’ll be contributing, I gained from a few late nights spent with various city and state laws. I’ve linked to the sources where appropriate, but there’s always the possibility I’m wrong about some of the details.
Introduction
Let’s start with a little history. Ballot measures have always existed in some form since the original 1849 California Constitution. However, initially they were only used for voter approval of specific legislative actions — voters could not independently put measures on the ballot. This all changed during when voters were granted the twin powers of initiative and referendum in a series of Progressive Era reforms meant to break the stranglehold the Southern Pacific Railroad had on state politics. The former power, initiative, allows us — the voters — to independently draft legislation to be put to a vote, and the latter, referendum, allows a “people’s veto” of any laws passed by the legislature.
These powers of “direct democracy” first appeared in California in 1898 when San Francisco and Vallejo were among some of the first cities in the nation to adopt them into their charters. The movement soon went statewide, and initiatives and referendums (and the ability to recall elected officials) were adopted into the California Constitution in 1911. Direct democracy, for better or worse, has since gone on to become a staple of Californian politics.
For this article, I will specifically focus on the workings of local ballot measures in San Francisco. The general procedures in other cities, counties, and even at the state level are broadly analogous. However, San Francisco’s status as the only combined city/county in California¹ and its history as one of the first cities to implement direct democracy means that there are quite a few quirks unique to SF.
The Five Types of Measures
Measures in San Francisco are all labeled “Propositions” when they appear on the ballot and are assigned letters starting from A every election². When talking about them collectively you can be refer to them either as “measures”, “initiatives”, or “propositions”. (Although, the term “initiative” is usually, but not exclusively, used to refer to measures placed directly on the ballot by voter petitions.) Despite being given a rather uniform treatment when they appear on the ballot, measures are actually comprised of five distinct categories. Those categories, in the order they appear on the ballot, are: bonds, charter amendments, ordinances (and referendums), declarations of policy, and recalls. Within a category, most measures are ordered by a random drawing³. All of the first four types can be placed on the ballot either by the legislative bodies or directly by the voters. Recalls are unique to voters; the Mayor and Board of Supervisors (BoS) have other means of removing officials for misconduct that don’t operate via the ballot.
Bond measures are where the city is seeking to finance capital-intensive public projects with loans from investors. Bonds are split into two categories: revenue and general. Revenue bonds are when repayments are only guaranteed from future revenues of the project the bond is financing (e.g. bridge tolls, sewage charges, hospital fees, etc) whereas general obligation bonds are guaranteed by general city revenues (i.e. future taxpayers are on the hook unless the city declares bankruptcy). Bond measures will always appear first on the ballot and will be in descending order of value (i.e. the bond involving the most money will always be Proposition A).
Charter amendments are amendments to the The Charter of the City and County of San Francisco. A city charter⁴ fulfills roughly the same role as a constitution, but at the city level. The SF Charter lays out the overall structure of the city government, the separation and limits of powers, and also contains a host of miscellaneous guiding principles and rules that previous voters felt were important to enshrine. The SF Charter is also the final arbiter of municipal law—any ordinances that contravene the charter will be declared invalid and automatically repealed.
Ordinances are your standard city laws and regulations. They are normally the product of the day-to-day legislating carried out by the Board of Supervisors. If you want to ban, tax, or legalize something, you probably want an ordinance. Since San Francisco laws are codified, new ordinances take the form of a proposed edit adding and/or deleting lines in one of San Francisco’s existing municipal codes.
Declarations of policy are really anything that doesn’t fit into one of the above categories. Want San Francisco to support a ceasefire in Vietnam (P 1967, G 1970)? Want San Francisco to take a stance against corporate personhood (G 2012)? Want San Francisco to promote car-first transit policies (L 2014)? Declarations of policy are a quirk somewhat unique to San Francisco. Initiative power in California has been interpreted by the courts to be a strictly legislative power that does not normally allow the voters to engage in (or interfere with) administrative or executive affairs. Furthermore, while the legislature has investigative powers to put advisory questions on the ballot, voter petitions are limited to actual law-making. Finally, local initiatives are supposed to impact only local affairs. However, these limits can all be ignored because the unique wording in SF’s charter has been read broadly to allow anyone with enough signatures to put whatever declaration of policy they want on the ballot. The flip side of this coin is that declarations of policy are also largely unenforceable. They’re de facto straw polls.
Recalls are a way for voters to remove officials from power. This applies not only to any official who occupies an elected position, but also to members of several appointed commissions.
The Initiative Process
I’ll first deal with the initiative process which allows measures to be placed directly on the ballot by signature petitions. In 1910, when San Francisco replaced its earlier ordinance-by-petition powers with the full-fledged power we know today and dubbed it initiative, it was described in the charter as such:
The registered voters shall have power to propose by petition and to adopt or to reject at the polls, any ordinance, act or other measure which is within the power conferred upon the Board of Supervisors, or any legislative measure which is within the power conferred upon any other Board, Commission or Officer.
The petition process is fairly uniform for all five types of measures. The only real differences lie in some of the legislative boilerplate you’re required to include on your signature forms, the exact amount of time you have to collect signatures, and the signature threshold your petition must exceed.
The first step in getting your measure on the ballot is to draft it. You’ll probably want to enlist the help of a legal professional with expertise in this area, but I’ve found nothing that would prevent you from writing it in crayon on the back of a bar napkin⁵. Once you (a registered San Francisco voter) file your measure with the Department of Elections⁶ you will be given an official title and summary and you will have around six months from that point to collect the required number of signatures from other registered San Francisco voters. At least four months before the election you wish your measure to appear on, you must submit your signatures to the Department of Elections for verification. If, after random sampling and potentially further verification, it’s certified that enough of your signatures are valid, then congratulations your measure will appear on the ballot.
For most items, the signature thresholds are set by the SF Charter and expressed in relation to the total number of votes cast for mayor in the most recent general election⁷. The thresholds for charter amendments and recalls are set in the California Elections Code and expressed as a percentage of all registered voters⁸. This distinction between votes cast for mayor and registered voters turns out the be significant⁹, because SF mayoral elections happen in odd-numbered years (never alongside any state or federal races) so voter turnout in those is usually only in the range of 35%–45%. Also note, because signature gathering is often done by paid organizations that charge per signature, you can essentially multiply these thresholds¹⁰ by the going per-signature rate to get the dollar cost of putting a measure on the ballot.
Measure Type | % threshold | 2022 threshold | Citation
---------------------------------------------------------------
Bond | 5% (m) | 8,979 | SFCC XIV
Charter Amendment | 10% | 50,384 | CAEC 9255c2
Ordinance | 5% (m) | 8,979 | SFCC XIV
Referendum | 10% (m) | 17,958 | SFCC XIV
Declaration of Policy | 5% (m) | 8,979 | SFCC XIV
Recall | 10% | 50,384 | CAEC 11221a5Signature thresholds for each measure type, percentages expressed in terms of mayoral votes are denoted with “(m)”, otherwise they are percentages of registered voters.
In the following sections, I’ll list details specific to each kind of measure
Bond Measures
Bonds are technically just a subset of ordinances that grants various city entities the right to sell bonds.
There’s also a clause in the charter that allows specifically for bonds for the acquisition, construction or completion of any public utility with a signature threshold of 15% of mayoral voters. I’m unclear if there’s any case petitioners might opt to use this clause. It predates the broad initiative power, and I think it might be vestigial.
Ordinances, Referendums, and Declarations of Policy
If your issues is so pressing that you simply can’t wait to appear on the next scheduled election, you may call for a special election to be held specifically to vote on your ordinance. This requires submitting signatures in excess of 10% of mayoral voters (double the normal threshold). The same is not true for declarations of policy. While declarations may appear on ballots for special election convened for other reasons, you can’t make the city organize an entire election just to waste our time voting for something that’s going to be non-binding anyways.
I should also note the details of referendums here. If the Board of Supervisors passes an ordinance you disagree with, you may, prior to its enactment, submit signatures in excess of 10% of mayoral votes opposing it. Enactment of the unpopular law will be suspended and the BoS will be forced to reconsider it. If they decide to do nothing or only partially repeal it, any surviving portion of the ordinance will be put to a vote at the next election. For example, a referendum was the source of 2018’s June Prop E challenging the BoS’s ban on the sale of flavored tobacco products.
Recalls
Recalls will always trigger a special election, unless there’s already one scheduled in the next three to four months.
Besides all elected officials, you can also recall the City Administrator, and any member of the Airports Commission, the Board of Education, the Community College District board, the Ethics Commission, or the Public Utilities Commission. In the process of updating this guide, I wrote a Twitter thread about the history of the recall power in San Francisco.
The Legislative Path to the Ballot
Unlike the initiative petition process, handling of the different types of measures varies greatly on the legislative side. I will break down how each one makes it to the ballot, and also the reasons why we’re required to put these measures to a vote in the first place (or why we might choose to).
Bond Measures
Let’s start again with bond measures. The process by which San Francisco can issue debt is mostly dictated by state law. Chiefly, there is a long-standing control on municipal debt in the CA Constitution that dates all the way back to the first major constitutional rewrite in 1879¹¹. Under Article XVI § 18, two-thirds voter approval is required before municipalities can incur general obligation debts or liabilities that will not be covered by the current year’s revenues. Section 18 limits not just traditional bond financing but can also affect agreements such as leases and sales contracts. Determining what qualifies as “Section 18 debt” is the subject of over a century of case law, but the quick gist is that it covers any obligation that future tax payers can’t easily weasel out of.
Additionally, the SF Charter (SFCC IX) adds majority voter approval requirements (absent some exceptions) for any revenue bonds and lease financing agreements.
Revenue bonds can be placed on the ballot by a majority vote of the Board of Supervisors. However, the California Government Code (CAGOV 43607–43608) requires a two-thirds approval vote by the BoS, at two separate hearings, to put any general obligation bonds on the ballot.
Charter Amendments
The CA Constitution (Article XI) allows the Board of Supervisors to propose charter amendments and requires all amendments to be ratified by majority voter approval. The exact procedure is defined by the California Government Code (CAGOV 34458) and the Board’s own Rules of Order. Similar to the normal legislative process, amendments are first introduced by a sponsoring supervisor, referred to the appropriate committee for public hearing, run by the mayor for comment, amended based on feedback, and eventually ratified by a majority of the BoS to be put before the voters.
Charter amendments can never appear on special elections, and certain charter amendments can only appear on statewide general elections (i.e. even years in November)
Ordinances
Given that ordinances are the types of laws that the Board of Supervisors can normally pass in the ordinary course of their day jobs, you might wonder why they would want to put ordinances on the ballot at all.
The first reason is that while you normally need six (of eleven) votes to pass legislation at the board, you only need four supervisors to put an ordinance on the ballot. The mayor can also unilaterally put ordinances on the ballot. Ideally, this provides a relief valve for when some of those involved feel the normal legislative process is working against the will of the voters. Cynically, this means whenever politicians don’t like the answer from one parent (their colleagues), they can go running to the other parent (the voters). As far as I’ve found¹², the ability for the mayor or a minority of the board to propose ballot measures is unique to SF’s charter. In other Californian cities, you need a majority vote of the legislative body to put an ordinance on the ballot.
Even when there are enough votes to pass an ordinance normally though, there are still reasons the supervisors might want to (or have to) submit measures to the ballot. For one, there is the charter rule that any ordinance enacted by the voters can only be changed by the voters. If the supervisors want to modify any ordinance passed at the ballot, they have to send it back to the ballot¹³. Another requirement that arises often is, due to Prop 13 and its kin, all tax increases are required to be put to a vote¹⁴. While all taxes require at least majority approval, special taxes(taxes earmarked for a specific purpose instead of going to the general fund) in particular require a full two-thirds voter approval¹⁵. Finally, even when they aren’t required to, the supervisors can always voluntarily punt on decision-making and choose to have a contentious piece of legislation decided by the voters.
Declarations of Policy
Last, and certainly least, the supervisors are also free to put declarations of policy on the ballot via the same procedures as ordinances. There’s really not much else to say.
Conclusion
Hopefully after reading this you feel a little better armed to go vote on the local propositions at our next election, which always seems to be right around the corner in SF. Maybe you’ve even been inspired to write and circulate your own initiative. At the very least I hope you learned some trivia to bore people with at the next party you attend. There’s of course still much more that could be said about SF ballot measures (I didn’t even get into deadline quirks!), and I myself am always learning new bits of minutiae. I’ll save those for another time though. If you’ve got questions, comments, or just want to nerd out about local politics, you can find me on Twitter: @mosheroperandi.
Links to Further Reading and Other Resources
SF Department of Elections has some good resources if you want to learn about deadlines, the submission process, or just want a sneak peek of what might be appearing on the next ballot.
The Initiative and Referendum Institute has a good history of the initiatives in California.
The Public Policy Institute of California has an excellent report that details the history of initiatives, their powers, and how they’ve been used in practice.
Ballotpedia also has good resources collecting and summarizing the laws governing the initiative process generally and local initiatives in particular.
The SF Public Library maintains a searchable database of past San Francisco ballot measures.
Footnotes
[1] SF’s status as a combined city/county is why we use the county-level term “Board of Supervisors” for our city council.
[2] I really wish SF prop lettering would reset on a slower cycle like state measures do. As it works now, 2018 had a noteworthy Prop C in two separate elections, so we’ve had to invent monikers like “Big C” and “Baby C” to cut down on confusion.
[3] An exception to the completely random order is when two competing measures address the same topic they’ll be placed consecutively on the ballot after the first letter is assigned.
[4] A city does not need to adopt its own charter. There are default state laws for the management of general law cities. Only one in four CA cities is a charter city.
[5] Case in point: a submission this year to acquire Alcatraz doesn’t fall far from bar napkin quality. The City Attorney nonetheless dutifully titled and “summarized” it.
[6] It is also still a requirement that you publish your “notice of intention” in your local newspaper.
[7] Notably, the criteria for “last mayoral election” ignores special elections, so the 2019 signature thresholds were based on the essentially unopposed reelection of Ed Lee in 2015, not the hard-fought 3-way race we saw in 2018 following his death. The 2019 election turned out to be even more humdrum than 2015, so the thresholds actually dropped slightly. 2023 is not shaping up to be exciting either. It’s been a golden decade for folks who want to propose their own laws on the cheap.
[8] In another fit of SF exceptionalism, we have different thresholds for charter amendments. The normal signature threshold is 15% of registered voters, but the threshold for combined cities-and-counties (only SF) is 10%.
[9] In addition to basing its thresholds off only mayoral voters, SF also has lower percentage thresholds than found elsewhere. Of the ten most populous CA cities, seven (San Diego, Fresno, Sacramento, Long Beach, Oakland, Bakersfield, Anaheim) use the state default threshold: 10% of registered voters. San Jose requires 5% of registered voters. Only Los Angeles also uses mayoral voters as threshold, but requires a healthy 15%.
[10] In reality, you want to aim a little higher than the threshold, since some of your signatures will likely be invalid, and the Department of Elections will subject your signatures to further scrutiny and delay if, after sampling, they think you have less than 110% of the required total.
[11] Fiscal prudence was in vogue at the time of the redrafting as Californian municipalities were busy trying to bankrupt themselves financing massive railroad, canal, and turnpike boondoggles in the hopes of attracting growth and prosperity.
[12] Admittedly, I only checked a few other city charters for major cities. There are some 90+ charters I haven’t read. If you know of other cities that have allow non-majorities to put ordinances to a vote, I’d love to know!
[13] Technically an initiative ordinance’s text can delegate authority to the supervisors to modify some or all of its text, but this is not the norm.
[14] This need to vote on taxes has also lead to decades of arguments in court and at the ballot over which government charges are “taxes” versus which are “fees” (charges to cover cost of providing some service)
[15] Unless those special taxes were put on the ballot by a voter petition. In which case, they only need to be approved by a majority, as decided by a recent string of cases.
