On July 16, Supervisor Hillary Ronen, who has represented the Mission, Bernal Heights, and other neighborhoods since 2017, announced that she’d had it.
In a blistering public letter to board president and mayoral candidate Aaron Peskin, Ronen abruptly quit her post as chair of the board’s Rules Committee.
It was a swift and angry reprisal after Peskin overruled her to place a police pension measure on the city’s November ballot.
Ronen, who is termed out after this year and has not announced plans to run for other public office, tried to squash the plan – her prerogative as the Rules Committee chair – citing fiscal irresponsibility in the midst of a budget crisis.
When Peskin scheduled extra meetings to push the proposal forward despite her opposition, Ronen called it quits, excoriating Peskin for “undermining the credibility of the […] Board.”
“I believe your leadership of the Board during this time is setting a sad and dangerous precedent for the future of this body,” she wrote.
Ronen, who remains on the board, has also considered rescinding her endorsement of his mayoral bid. Peskin did not respond to questions. Ronen’s office said she was not available to comment.
City lawmakers blow up at each other from time to time, but Ronen’s knives-out maneuver laid bare tensions underlying San Francisco’s dependence on voters to make public policy.
Not only do San Franciscans often have to sort through complex legislative issues of housing, pensions, criminal justice, and much more, but, as Ronen noted in her letter, putting issues on the ballot can be a way to score political points. Ronen called the pension measures “politicized legislation that does not serve the public interest.”
With direct democracy, voters often end up doing legislators’ work for them or settling their scores.
‘Masterful user’ of measures
Aaron Peskin is “the most masterful user of ballot measures in San Francisco,” says San Francisco State University political science professor Jason McDaniel, who is studying the effect of ballot length on voter behavior.
But Peskin has plenty of company. In 2022, Mayor London Breed and the board couldn’t settle on a plan to streamline affordable housing development. Breed put her version on the ballot, and Sup. Connie Chan soon followed with a slightly different version. Voters rejected both.
For the March 2024 ballot, Sup. Matt Dorsey ended up campaigning against his own measure after other supervisors added amendments that he objected to. (Voters rejected it.)
So far five measures have qualified for November, and three more are listed as “potential” measures. But many more are coming, including a spate of charter amendments that the supervisors approved earlier this week.
It all adds up to a blockbuster ballot that includes, of course, a highwire presidential race, California initiatives and open seats, a regional affordable housing bond, and for San Francisco, the mayoral race, six supervisor races, the majority of the Board of Education, and more.
That’s a big reason so many ballot measures are also heading our way: Turnout is expected to be massive.
In San Francisco, all it takes is four of 11 supervisors to place a measure on the ballot. The mayor can do so unilaterally. (Amendments to the city charter have a higher bar, requiring the nod of at least six supervisors.)
This ease of access partly explains why SF votes on so many singular questions: Should we overturn a citywide ban on e-cigarette sales? (‘No,’ said 81 percent of 2019 voters.) Should the city rename a sewage plant after George W. Bush? (No again, by a 70-30 split.)
There’s a third route for a measure: a public group can get an issue on the slate by collecting signatures from just 2 percent of SF registered voters, just over 10,000 people, which is why SF will vote this fall on a tax on ride-hail companies that would help fund Muni. (For charter amendments, it’s 10 percent.)
This ease of access partly explains why SF votes on so many singular questions: Should we overturn a citywide ban on e-cigarette sales? (“No,” said 81 percent of 2019 voters.) Should the city rename a sewage plant after George W. Bush? (No again, on a 70-30 split in 2008.) Should 16-year-olds vote? (This one has failed multiple times but will almost certainly come up again.)
Voters say they want to preserve direct democracy, even when they hate the length of the ballot itself. “We’re getting what we want, even though we don’t really want it,” says McDaniel.
‘Embedded in SF’s DNA’
Department of Elections boss John Arntz once told SFGate that San Francisco averaged 20 ballot measures per year between 1960 and 2010. The average has since declined a bit, although the city fielded a whopping 25 questions in November 2016.
Until 2007, a minority of four supervisors could submit a proposal as late as the day before the ballot was locked down. That year, voters adopted Prop C, requiring supervisors to submit initiatives at least 45 days in advance and hold at least one public hearing.
In 2011, Sup. Scott Wiener, now a state senator, floated a measure to let lawmakers amend proposed initiatives later in the process. He called it a way to fix simple errors, but critics framed it as a sneaky political back door, and voters turned it down. (Wiener also later tried to increase the number of voter signatures to get a public measure on the ballot. Ironically, that proposal never made it to the ballot.)
Egon Terplan, a San Francisco policy strategist and senior fellow at UC Berkeley, tells The Frisc the ease of ballot access in SF is by design. “It’s embedded in San Francisco’s DNA,” says Terplan. “The assumption is that if you end up with a Board of Supervisors who are corrupt, then you have to get issues to voters, who are presumably less corrupt.”
The suspicion is rooted in California politics of the early 1900s. In response to widespread corruption in past legislatures, the state’s 1911 legislative session gave voters the power to make law via ballot initiative.
California cities followed suit. “Progressives believed that more democracy was the best way to prevent […] political corruption and corporate rule,” writes historian Glen Gendzel.
The SF Department of Elections is asking voters to opt for electronic voter guides this year. The print version ‘will be very long.’
“When we ask voters if it’s a good thing to make policy at the ballot box, most say it is,” says Mark Baldassare, a researcher and pollster at the Public Policy Institute of California.
In a 2022 survey, 67 percent of Californians said it’s good to make law directly; only 33 percent said the system needs “major changes,” although a plurality (48 percent) supported “minor changes.”
However, PPIC polling also shows that California voters are unhappy with long ballots and having to decide complicated issues, with more than 90 percent of those surveyed saying they at least “somewhat” agree that initiatives are too complicated.
Beware the false consensus
This paradox can undermine civic engagement, says Baldassare: When voters feel like they don’t understand an issue, the default is often to vote “no.” This false consensus means potentially giving up on laws that are worth more consideration.
But ballot reform faces a high hurdle in convincing voters to curtail some of their own power, says SFSU’s McDaniel. And in SF and elsewhere, politicians are happy to have a platform either to sidestep compromise and tough negotiation – the core of making legislation – or to cloak political gifts to certain constituents as issues for voters to decide.
The SF Department of Elections is asking voters to opt for electronic voter guides this year. The print version “will be very long,” the department says, with some understatement, on its web site.
If you don’t opt out, expect delivery around late September.
