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California has a very long sample ballot for a very simple election

Published on 29 Comments on California has a very long sample ballot for a very simple election

I got my sample ballot yesterday and it was about a hundred pages long. wtf? We're voting for a president, a senator, and a couple of other smaller offices. What's all this stuff for?

It turns we have a lot of people who want to be your next president:

I don't know who any of these people are, either. But it's nothing compared to the hordes of folks who want to become a senator:

If I were voting purely on occupation, I'm not sure who I'd go for. Maybe the social entrepreneur? Or the aviator/educator/entrepreneur?

Anyway, multiply this by a dozen or so, because every political party gets its own set of pages even though the primaries are identical for everything except president and party central committee. And that's only after you've waded through 20 or 30 pages of instructions, a bunch of candidate statements no one will read, and a local initiative to change the way Irvine elects councilmembers. Plus there's a postcard at the end to request a translation in Spanish, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, Persian, Tagalog, Japanese, Hindi, Gujarati, and "accessible." But at least we're not Los Angeles, which is required to provide its election booklet in 20 different languages.

29 thoughts on “California has a very long sample ballot for a very simple election”

  1. iamr4man

    Considering Kevin’s previous post I wonder how many people who want to vote for the President will vote for the guy whose name, apparently, is “President”.

  2. Yehouda

    Can somebody run for both senatorial positions?
    There are many shared names between the lists.

    I would have put each vote on a separate page. The way it is now make it extremely easy to make a mistake.

  3. rick_jones

    I thought Newsom appointed someone to keep Feinstein's chair warm, so from whence comes the "United States Senator Partial/Unexpired Term" election?

    https://ballotpedia.org/Filling_vacancies_in_the_U.S._Senate references https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/vacancies-in-the-united-states-senate which does have

    If the vacancy occurs more than 148 days before the regular primary, the election is held the following November. If the vacancy occurs within 148 days before the primary, the vacancy election is held at the second November election after the vacancy occurs.

    But in this case that overlaps completely with the "regular" election for that Senate seat, no? So why the almost certainly confusing duplication?

  4. cmayo

    lol, Steve Garvey.

    He'd probably have better luck if he'd listed his occupation not as professional baseball representative, but as a Los Angeles Dodger. He was good, too. It would get him far more votes than any Republican deserves to get.

    1. treeeetop57

      Given the rivalry NoCal feels with SoCal, listing himself as a Dodger would probably lose him more votes in NoCal than it would gain him in greater LA. And it wouldn’t help him in San Diego, where people who remember him as a Padre might feel some connection to him.

      (As someone who’s lived nearly all my life in SoCal, but went to college in NoCal, my impression is that the No/So rivalry is entirely one-sided. NoCal folks feel like they are in competition with SoCal. SoCal folks aren’t even aware of the rivalry.)

      2. illilillili

        The Bay Area does not feel in competition with LA County. We pity you. Especially those of us who once lived there.

  5. kaleberg

    Do you remember the special election after Gray Davis left office, the that Arnold Schwarzenegger won? I happened to be passing through LA around then. The LA Times had a special election insert with maybe a hundred candidates. Towards the end it listed candidates with "no information supplied". Maybe you can pull it from some archive somewhere. Having huge numbers of candidates seems to be a California tradition.

  6. ProgressOne

    Strange that it lists "Party Preference" for Senate candidates. Seems it should say you belong to a party, or you don't. If you don't, then you are an Independent.

    3. treeeetop57

      There are two categories of “Decline to state” among the Senate candidates in the booklet the Secretary of State sent out. “Decline to state” full stop and “Decline to state qualified party.”

      Some people say they belong to a party that is not recognized as a qualified party by the state of California.

  7. Salamander

    Does it really make sense to let just any Tom, Dick, and Harriet get onto the ballot? Seems like a much, much higher threshold of validated signatures ought to be required. After all, that's how CA got Ahnold.

  8. realrobmac

    It's been said that a lot of ballots look to voters like a complicated civics test they are bound to fail. In my FL district our ballot often has the following:
    * Three or more proposed amendments
    * Names of a bunch of judges, and you are asked if they should be retained in office
    * Governor
    * State agriculture commissioner
    * US Senator
    * US Rep
    * State Senator
    * State Rep
    * City Commission
    * County Commission
    * County Sherriff
    * School board member
    * Tax Assessor
    * Soil and water commissioner

    I am a fairly informed person and I will never have an opinion on all of this stuff. Who does?

    2. emjayay

      It used to be more complicated but now you can just vote for every Democrat and be confident that they are 100X better than the Republican (or fake Green or whatever).

      I see that on the California ballot there can be about a million people running for one office as a Democrat. How does this happen? Obviously something should be tightened up in the method of getting on the ballot.

      Maybe someone who knows will explain how it works there and save me a lot of Google time.

      1. treeeetop57

        The problem in California is that local offices (cities, counties, school districts, judicial offices, etc.) are officially non-partisan, so you can’t just vote for the R or D in the general election. Usually, it’s fairly well publicized who belongs to which party, but it’s not listed on the ballot. The difficult one for me is usually the judges, which are very poorly covered and for which campaigning is remarkably low-key.

        I usually depend on the endorsements of the local Stonewall Democratic club, but sometimes even they don’t bother to endorse judicial candidates. In those cases, I vote to retain anyone appointed by a Democratic governor and vote to not retain those appointed by Arnold, Pete Wilson, or Deukmajian.

    3. HokieAnnie

      That's where the google comes into play, also reddit and X. I basically want to know who is a wacko and not accidentally vote or a wacko.

  9. azumbrunn

    Let's cut to the chase and say it as it is: California primaries are the biggest political fuck up probably worldwide ever.

    They made it as stupid as they possibly could. Does anybody officially take credit for it? It would be truly an act of courage!

  11. Five Parrots in a Shoe

    Kevin, I remember in 2003, during the recall election, you wrote that California had a "piddling" 135 names on the ballot for governor. I can't quote the whole sentence, but I remember you used that word.

  12. johnbroughton2013

    The filing fee is $3,480 (2% of the first-year salary of the position you're filing for). For that amount of money, you get your name on 20 million or so ballots. - https://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/statewide-elections/2024-primary/2024-united-states-senator.pdf

    For the candidate statement, the cost is $25.00 per word, not to exceed $6,250.00. - https://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/statewide-elections/2024-primary/senate-candidate-statement-package.pdf

    So, for less than $10,000, just about any 30+-year-old citizen of the U.S. can make a statement to every voter in California.

  13. illilillili

    > a bunch of candidate statements no one will read

    I read the candidate statements. Not having a candidate statement is a good way to ensure i don't vote for you.

  14. Salamander

    Okay, California is just too big. I know, this has been said before. But it's getting more serious. Have a nonpartisan (unicorn??) commission break it up into 3-5 separate states. It would be good for the nation, too.

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