Money and CA Propositions

Money and CA Propositions
Paul Ivanov’s Journal
thoughts about democracy, technology, science, and life

Since tomorrow we’ll be having another one of those practice democracy drills here in California, I thought I’d put together a few bar charts.

There are five propositions on tomorrow’s ballot. In researching them, Lena came across the Cal-Access Campaign Finance Activity: Propositions & Ballot Measures.

Unfortunately, for each proposition, you have to click through each committee to get the details for the amount of money they’ve raised and spent. Here’s a run-down in visual form, the only data manipulation I did was round to the nearest dollar. Note: no committees formed to support or oppose Proposition 13.

It could just be my perception of things, but I get pretty suspicious when there’s a ton of money involved in politics, especially when it’s this lopsided. Let me write it out in text, so that the search engines have an easier time finding this. According to the official record from Cal-Access (Secretary of State), there were $54.4 million spent in support of various propositions, most notably $40.5 million on Prop 16, $8.9 million on Prop 17, and $4.6 million on Prop 14. Compare that with a “grand” total of less than $1.2 million spent to oppose them, with a trivial $78 thousand (!!) to oppose Prop 16’s $40.5 million deep pockets.

The only thing I have to add is you should Vote “YES” on Prop 15, because Larry Lessig says so, and so do the Alameda County Greens (http://acgreens.wordpress.com/)!