Here’s Part 2 of our L.A. Taco Voter Guide, focusing on Proposition 6, a statewide measure that would recall a small gas on tax that funds road and infrastructure repairs.
[dropcap size=big]Y[/dropcap]ou can thank John Randolph Haynes for our wild proposition system. Haynes moved to Los Angeles from Philadelphia in the late 1800s, racked up a lot of money as a medical doctor, and with it, political influence. Haynes had an eccentric range of interests and ideas. He was an avowed socialist but also a supporter of eugenics, and a die-hard campaigner for direct democracy — a political ideal where people vote and draft legislation and policy themselves, not through elected representatives, aka politicians.
Haynes got the city of L.A. — and a year later in 1911 the state of California — to adopt direct democracy reforms, including allowing citizens to hold a recall vote to impeach elected politicians (Proposition 8 , 1911), and the statewide proposition system itself (Proposition 7, 1911), where citizens can write a proposed law, gather signatures from at least eight percent of Californians who voted in the last election, and put that proposition onto the ballot. Once voted into law by a majority of folks, such a proposition can’t be overturned by the state legislature, only by another citizen’s proposition or the California Supreme Court.
Just keep all this in mind, when you really stare down your ballot to make your choices, why year after year we vote on many serious but also silly and sometimes risky things — like repealing the so-called "gas tax" ... Here's Part 2 of our L.A. Taco voter guide, focusing on Proposition 6.