San Francisco has a long and proud tradition of making life unnecessarily difficult for working class people, but with the passage of Proposition D, the city has managed to accomplish something truly impressive: making democracy itself less accessible while convincing voters that doing so was good government.
On November 3, San Francisco voters approved Proposition D, a ballot measure backed by Mayor Daniel Lurie that makes it significantly harder for ordinary residents to put legislation before voters.
Under the old rules, residents needed signatures from just 2% of registered voters to qualify certain local initiatives for the ballot. Under the new rules, that number jumps to 8%.
That's a 300% increase.
In actual human beings, that means going from roughly 10,600 signatures to 42,500. And unless you happen to have a few million dollars lying around, a professional political consulting firm on speed dial, and a small army of paid signature gatherers, good fucking luck.
The justification for this little exercise in democratic castration is that San Francisco has too many ballot measures. Apparently, asking residents to read a voter guide twice a year is such an unreasonable burden that the solution is to make it harder for them to participate in the political process at all.
Because nothing says democracy quite like deciding that the public has too much of it.
The campaign was packaged as part of Lurie's broader effort to "Clean Up City Hall," which is an excellent slogan if your definition of cleaning involves removing the public's ability to interfere with the people running the place.
And this wasn't some grassroots uprising of ordinary San Franciscans demanding fewer opportunities to vote on things.
The campaign supporting Propositions D, E, and F attracted approximately $13.5 million, with major financial backing from wealthy figures including Michael Moritz, Chris Larsen, and John Pritzker.
Think about the absurdity of that for a second. Some of the wealthiest people in San Francisco spent millions of dollars supporting a measure that makes it harder for people without millions of dollars to get their ideas onto the ballot.
And they called it reform.
Now, to be fair, San Francisco's ballot system has problems. Elections can be cluttered with confusing propositions, competing initiatives, and policy questions that probably should have been resolved by elected officials doing the jobs they're paid to do.
But the existence of a problem doesn't automatically make every proposed solution a good one.
If your house has a plumbing problem, you don't fix it by removing the toilet.
And if your democracy has too many ballot measures, you don't fix it by making democratic participation prohibitively expensive for everyone who isn't independently wealthy.
The practical consequences of Proposition D are pretty straightforward.
A billionaire-backed political organization can afford to hire professional signature gathrers, consultants, lawyers, and advertising agencies. A group of tenants organizing against a landlord, public school parents fighting budget cuts, or workers trying to protect their livelihoods can't.
You know that public bank idea that actually won in San Francisco, the passing of Prop D has made anything like that pretty much impossible.
You voted for the gutting of the ability to vote. Great fucking job, San Francisco.
