California State Legislature

How can Calif

The United States has one of the lowest voter turnouts among established democracies. In a healthy democracy, high voter turnout results from the ability of voters to elect candidates who reflect their views. In many countries voting is compulsory.

By contrast, the U.S. single-seat, first-past-the-post, winner-take-all electoral system greatly limits voter choice and representation — a disincentive to vote — especially when combined with campaign finance laws that give disproportionate influence to big money.

Many who do vote, go to the polls primarily to vote for what they are against.

California’s failed top two experiment has only made this worse, limiting voters to only two choices in the general election, and making primary ballot access more difficult and expensive. This reduction in choice has led to historically low voter turnout. When few eligible voters participate and elect our representatives, the legitimacy and representative nature of our democracy is diminished.

Much electoral reform debate focuses upon who should draw the lines of districts, and how to make district elections competitive. But competitive districts don’t mean representative elections, and single-seat, winner-take-all district elections are not capable of representing the diversity of California voters.

I support the use of multi-seat districts with proportional representation for the state legislature, and ranked-choice voting for single-seat statewide executive office. I also support a larger legislature, which will allow for results to be more proportional and reflective of California’s diversity.

California currently has by far the lowest per-capita state representation in the United States. The number of seats in the California state legislature was set in 1879 when California’s statewide population was approximately 865,000. Today, more people live within a single State Senate District and are represented by a single State Senator. As of 2017 the state population is over 39 million — almost a million people per State Senate district – and yet the number of seats has never been increased.