We will soon enter election season, when many California city, county and school officials try to trick voters with deceptive tax and spending measures.
The complex proposals are often well-intentioned and good policy. The problem is that local officials are so vested in the outcome that they are frequently incapable of providing voters the impartial descriptions they deserve.
Most significantly, local officials skew the 75-word ballot summaries to mislead voters into supporting the measures. In a 2020 editorial, we detailed some of the deceitful tactics.
The Alameda County Civil Grand Jury took it a step further, conducting a detailed analysis of ballot wording for five measures from prior elections. The takeaway for voters: Don’t trust the summaries to fairly tell you what the measures do. The wording, often the only thing many read, is supposed to be impartial. It isn’t.
That’s because it suffers from what the Grand Jury aptly calls “proponent bias.” It’s usually written by the same people who craft the measures, often with assistance from consultants hired at taxpayer expense to help ensure success at the polls.
As a result, “Ballot questions too often fall short of what voters have a right to expect in terms of transparency and impartiality, even when satisfying minimum legal standards,” the 2020-21 Grand Jury concluded.
The problem is not unique to Alameda County. Rather, misleading ballot wording is common for local government measures throughout the Bay Area and California.
The Grand Jury did not consider the merits of the measures it reviewed. The only issue was whether the ballot summary was accurate and impartial.
What the jurors found matches our experience: Local officials complain that the state’s 75-word limit is too restrictive for them to fairly portray the measures, yet they use precious space for politically slanted appeals rather than providing useful information.
For example, the ballot wording for general tax measures, for which the money can be spent on any legal purpose, often deceptively implies that funds will go to specific programs perceived to be more popular with voters.
The money will go to provide “essential services,” homeless housing, quality education, mental health programs, job training, pothole repairs, 911 emergency response, youth violence prevention programs … the list goes on. Yet, in the cases examined by the Grand Jury, the ballot measures contained no requirements that the money would be spent for those purposes.
One common deceit identified by the Grand Jury is the ballot-wording claim that a tax measure will remain in effect “until repealed by voters.” What nonsense. That suggests that there is some sort of repeal mechanism in the measure. There isn’t. Those taxes are permanent. (And, by the way, “permanent” is only one word.)
Local tax-measure ballot wording usually emphasizes that the money cannot be “taken by the state.” Of course it can’t. It’s a local measure. Meanwhile, the measures, which usually identify the amount of the proposed tax increases, often fail to state the current levels so voters know the total they would pay.
The Grand Jury found that glaring omission in a sales tax measure and in a real estate transfer tax they examined. And they found similar deception in a measure raising council salaries by what turned out to be 75% — a number conveniently missing from the ballot wording.
So how is this abuse possible when state law requires the ballot wording to be “true and impartial”?
First, as the Grand Jury noted, the city attorney or county counsel reviewing a measure is also “duty bound to represent the government entities proposing the measures involved. Hence, they also act, by necessity, as advocates for the proponents of a measure.”
Second, when ballot language is challenged in court, legal precedent gives officials who drafted the wording “considerable latitude,” and changes can only be ordered “upon clear and convincing proof that the material in question is false, misleading or inconsistent with (legal) requirements.”
Simply put, when those drafting measures are motivated to have them pass, “it is only natural that the question will be written in the most favorable terms possible,” the Grand Jury concluded. “… (T)here do not appear to be any advocates for transparent and neutral language.”
When we review ballot measures this election season, transparency will be a key criterion. But voters will be the final backstop. Don’t be fooled by this charade.
