By Ben Christopher

By 2014, California voters were sick of ballots larded up with too many measures, many of them highly technical, specific to one industry or difficult to understand. 

So state lawmakers changed the rules. While initiatives can only go before voters in November, a tweak to the election code gave the Legislature more time to hold public hearings on those upcoming measures, while giving initiative backers the chance to revise or remove initiatives later in the process. The goal was a more deliberative, thoughtful process with more room for compromise.

But one person’s “compromise” is another person’s “legal extortion.”

The most notorious example came in 2018 when the soda industry funded a ballot measure that would have made it much more difficult for local governments to raise taxes. They pulled the initiative — which then-Gov. Jerry Brown called an “abomination” — after lawmakers agreed to ban new local soda taxes for the next 13 years. 

Then in 2023, the Legislature passed a law allowing similar deal-making on referendums to overturn existing laws. It was immediately used to pull a fast food industry referendum off this November’s ballot, and used again by the oil industry to abandon its referendum to kill a ban on drilling near homes, schools and other sensitive areas.

Prior to this year, a total of nine measures had been withdrawn from the ballot after qualifying; the most for any single election was three in 2018.

But this year, five compromises were struck to pull measures off the ballot before the June 27 deadline. Business and organized labor made a deal to change a California-only state law that allows workers to sue their bosses over alleged workplace violations; business groups withdrew a measure to repeal the law completely. The governor’s office brokered pacts with the proponents so that they stood down on initiatives to fund pandemic preparedness through a tax on multi-millionaires and to expand state funding for health care for critically ill children. And after the Legislature passed a similar proposal, a nonprofit executive pulled his initiative to require a financial literacy class to graduate from high school. 

Separately, in a highly unusual and controversial decision, the California Supreme Court removed a sweeping anti-tax measure in response to a lawsuit by Newsom and legislative leaders.