Editing Blog/2024-11-08/Brown M&Ms (section)

== California Prop Traps ==

One recent occurrence that I was thrilled about was in the voting for Measure L and Measure M in San Francisco. SF has a long history of these dual propositions where one kills the other, or where both need to pass, or whatever. The former is usually retaliatory and the latter is usually because some kinds of props need 2/3rds and some need 1/2.

The dual propositions have all sorts of strange effects: people don't realize, or they read it and don't understand. One half passes but its required other half fails. Or one kills the other accidentally (based on the amount of support).

The latest in this genre are Measures L and M. L is one of the usual progressive mad-at-the-world "let's tax Uber/Lyft to fund Muni" measures. M purports to be a "let's streamline taxes" measure. It has some weird bits where the top Gross Revenue Tax (which I abhor) actually goes up over time. And then it has the magic: if it gets a single vote more than L, it kills L.

Since "In this house we believe" L is the devil we didn't look too closely at it since everything aligned. The actual clause was at the bottom of the full text of Measure M in the "Conflicting Clauses" section that read:

{{Blockquote
 |quote=Section 14. Conflicting Measures. If both this ordinance and another ballot measure or measures imposing, amending, or repealing a San Francisco tax measured by gross receipts appear on the same ballot, and this ordinance obtains more votes than the other measure or measures, the other measure or measures shall be deemed to conflict with this ordinance. In such case, the provisions of this ordinance shall prevail in their entirety, and the provisions of the other measure or measures shall be null and void.
 |source=Text of Measure M<ref>{{cite web
 | url         = https://www.sf.gov/sites/default/files/2024-08/Legal%20Text%20--%20Changes%20to%20Business%20Taxes.pdf
 | title       = Legal Text: Changes to Business Taxes
 | publisher   = City and County of San Francisco
 | date        = August 2024
 | access-date = November 8, 2024
 | format      = PDF
}}</ref>
}}

From here, we can see that it's just to not accidentally stack propositions on top of each other in ways that they can't actually resolve the rules. It's a good idempotence mechanism and is properly engineered. It also has the good exit-clause mechanism in there for the Mayor to choose not to put it into practice if it would be risky for the finances of the city, and also an override for the Board of Supervisors to push it back into play if the Mayor does that.

Fortunately, I usually read the ballotpedia summary, the SF Chronicle Voter Guide, and this time the GrowSF guide (previously others like the SPUR guide) and they did mention that.

Many other people understood that they hadn't read it quite carefully enough:
{{Blockquote
 |quote=I think there’s room for improvement when it comes to the on-ballot presentation of directly competing propositions, like D/E and L/M.

I don’t remember reading anything about a vote for M potentially killing off L. I thought I had a solid grasp of the ballot measures; clearly I didn’t, but it sounds like I wasn’t alone.

Speaking as an idiot, I’d like to see the ballots further idiot-proofed, perhaps with bolded text indicating how a proposition’s passage might affect another. This might also discourage the practice of creating propositions meant to ensure another’s failure by confusing voters, as happened with Prop E in reaction to Prop D.
 |source=/u/ALOIsFasterThanYou (201 votes)<ref name="reddit_comment_did_not_read">{{cite web
 |url=https://old.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/1gm858s/san_francisco_rejects_munifunding_measure_despite/lw0q8nc/
 |title=San Francisco rejects Muni-funding measure, despite a 56% vote
 |last=/u/ALOIsFasterThanYou
 |date=2024-11-07
 |website=/r/sanfrancisco
 |access-date=2024-11-08
}}</ref>
}}

While an additionally last set believed that they had!
{{Blockquote
 |quote=I read a lot and consider myself well informed. I didn’t know this.
 |source=/u/turnleftnoright (72 votes)<ref name="reddit_comment_unaware">{{cite web
 |url=https://old.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/1gm858s/san_francisco_rejects_munifunding_measure_despite/lw0x08f/
 |title=San Francisco rejects Muni-funding measure, despite a 56% vote
 |last=/u/turnleftnoright
 |date=2024-11-07
 |website=/r/sanfrancisco
 |access-date=2024-11-08
}}</ref>
}}

This isn't the first time this has happened. In 2016, San Francisco had two ballot measures that were similarly linked: Proposition K (that created an additional sales tax) and Proposition J (that allocated that tax to homelessness services and Muni)<ref>[https://webbie1.sfpl.org/multimedia/pdf/elections/November8_2016.pdf SF Voter Information Guide, Consolidated 2016 General Election]</ref>. Prop J allowed the Mayor to shut it down if he thought it couldn't be funded. What inevitably occurred is that [https://ballotpedia.org/San_Francisco,_California,_Homeless_Services_and_Transportation_Funds_Amendment,_Proposition_J_(November_2016) Proposition J passed] and [https://ballotpedia.org/San_Francisco,_California,_Sales_Tax_Increase,_Proposition_K_(November_2016) Proposition K failed]. Who are these people who wanted to allocate a tax but didn't want the tax? It probably was quite a lot of people, based on the fact that the best informed folks on Reddit didn't see this coming for L and M.

In truth, poor information transmission like this is a bit unfair and not quite in the keeping of the spirit of democracy, but also it does have the effect that those who put in a little bit more of work to find things are able to take better positions. It's a strange vote-scaling factor.

In my case, I posted each proposition position we took in a Slack thread with my friends for informative reasons so I can see that I averaged 1-3 min for each proposition, but 6 minutes for Prop M (the one with the idempotence clause) and 5 minutes for Prop O. Overall, I'm quite happy with both the outcome ''and'' the fact that I read enough to reach the right conclusion!