2: Power to the People- Recalls and Referendums

Introduction

In 1861, the Central Pacific Railroad of California was created by four men, Leland Stanford, Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker. Known as the Big Four, they spent $16,000 to start a company that would earn more than $200 million in profit over the next several decades (Starr, 2007). Together with the Union Pacific Railroad, the Central Pacific was commissioned by the federal government to complete a rail system connecting the Eastern and Western United States, thereby reducing the cross-country journey from six months to less than a week. With $15 million from the State of California and many millions more in federal loans, cash payments, and grants of land, the two railroads became the largest landowners in the West by the time Leland Stanford hammered the last railroad spike in the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah in 1869.

From the 1860s into the 1900s the railroads were king in California, with the Big Four operating 85% of the state’s transportation and controlling 10% of its land. Central Pacific solidified its power by manipulating newspapers with bribes and favors to editors, and by controlling the state’s political system through land deals with local officials, campaign donations and free rail tickets to legislators (Lawrence & Cummins 2020; Starr 2007). Its political power was so vast that at one point Leland Stanford was both president of the Central Pacific Railroad and Governor of California. While the state’s 1879 constitution created new regulations, including a Railroad Commission, the power of the Central Pacific remained great and when the Progressive movement came to California in 1900,[1] its proponents sought a variety of reforms to end this sort of political and economic corruption.

Progressives also believed that party politics, especially the urban political “machines” that gained loyalty from immigrant voters through offers of jobs and services, stood in the way of politically neutral solutions to public problems (Lawrence & Cummins 2020). The Progressive movement sought to protect and empower White middle class citizens, and to weaken the influence of political parties, large corporations, and labor unions on city halls and state capitols. In California, the most influential Progressive leader was Governor Hiram Johnson who sought to give power to the people by weakening the parties, businesses and unions through his support of constitutional amendments that established the state’s three tools of direct democracy, the initiative, referendum, and recall in 1911.

While the initiative process, which theoretically allows average citizens to put laws on the ballot for a direct vote by the people is the most well-known of the three, in this case study we consider the other two forms of direct democracy in California, the recall and the referendum. The case highlights the state’s reaction to a 2014 measles outbreak at Disneyland that eventually infected 300 people in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. Although the outbreak led to increased public support for vaccinations, and facilitated legislation that strengthened California’s childhood vaccination requirements, not everyone was happy with these new public health mandates. Opponents used the tools of the recall and referendum to make their voices heard. As you read this case study consider the rules of direct democracy, its original purpose, and how these tools are used by the public today. How might the recall and referendum affect the actions of elected officials? How much power do these tools give the public, and should they be reformed in any way?

Direct Democracy in California[2]

Before the Progressive movement, California’s government operated much like the national government with the legislative, executive, and judicial branches making, implementing, and interpreting the law, as well as serving as a check on one another. For example, we elect legislators who make most of the state’s laws. In addition, we elect twelve executive branch members, including the governor, whose agencies implement state law, policies, and programs. Finally, we elect judges who ensure that those laws adhere to the state constitution. With direct democracy, however, California’s government became more of a hybrid, with power shared between elected officials and the people, who have an enormous amount of power directly to voters who can make laws through the initiative process, or reject them through use of referendums, and can remove elected officials through the recall. Only 11 states allow the use of all three forms of direct democracy, and since 1980, Californians have used these tools, especially the initiative process, more frequently than any other state (Van Vechten 2019).

While direct democracy was designed by Progressives to curb the power of special interests such as corporations and labor unions, today both of these groups, along with ultra-wealthy individuals, can bankroll the process, getting nearly any issue they want—or elected official they don’t want—on the ballot. The process of getting on the ballot is similar for each form of direct democracy, beginning with paying $2000, drafting the text that will appear on the ballot, and then qualifying it by gathering the required number of signatures from registered voters.

• For an initiative, which will create a new law, the number of signatures is equal to 5% of the votes cast in the most recent gubernatorial election; if that new law is an amendment to the California Constitution, the number of signatures is equal to 8% of votes cast. For either one, proponents have 180 days to collect these signatures; in 2024 initiatives will need 546,651, and constitutional amendments will need 874,641 signatures of registered voters to qualify for the ballot.[3]
• For a referendum,[4] also known as a popular, petition, or protest referendum, which will nullify a law passed by the state legislature, the number of signatures required is equal to 5% of the votes cast in the most recent gubernatorial election, so 546,651 in 2024. Proponents have only 90 days to collect valid signatures to get a referendum on the ballot.
• For a recall, which will remove an elected office holder, proponents have 160 days to collect valid signatures. The number of signatures required depends on the official being recalled: for governors or other statewide officers, such as the California Attorney General, the number is equal to 12% of votes cast in the previous election for that office, and signatures must come from at least five different counties. For legislators and judges, the required number of signatures is equal to 20% of the votes cast in the election that put them in office.

The first stage of direct democracy that requires a large amount of money is signature gathering. The difficulty in collecting hundreds of thousands of signatures in a limited amount of time has led to an entire industry that includes professional signature gatherers—those folks in front of Target or Trader Joe’s who encourage you to sign their petitions, and who can earn up to $11 per signature (Van Vechten 2019). On average, it costs $3M just to gather the valid signatures to get a recall, referendum, or initiative on the ballot. Given all of this, it’s not surprising that 75 percent of attempts to use direct democracy fail at this stage (Lawrence & Cummins 2020).

If the proponents can gather the required signatures in time—known as qualifying—they move on to the campaign stage, where huge amounts of money are needed to persuade voters. Typically, both proponents and opponents of the ballot measure make use of TV, radio, and social media advertising as well as inundating voters with mass mailings, all of which can add up quickly. A pair of 2022 ballot initiatives related to sports betting, Prop 26 and Prop 27, were the most expensive in California history, costing over $463M. Regardless of the money spent, both sports betting initiatives ended up like 65% of ballot propositions: as failures (Lawrence & Cummins 2020).

Referendums do not fare much better than initiatives. For example, in over 100 years only about 50 referendum have made it to the ballot, with a success rate of about 42 percent. Note that, because a referendum seeks to keep a signed bill from becoming law, while the referendum process is underway the law does not go into effect, and because ballot measures are only voted on during a November general election, a referendum can delay a new law for up to two years. Some argue that the increased use of the referendum in recent years is a result of corporations trying to delay government regulation of their business practices, including those related to greenhouse gas emissions, worker safety, and environmental protection (Baldassare & Katz 2023).

Successful recall elections are even rarer than initiatives and referendum, particularly recalls of state legislators and governors, which are so uncommon that successes can almost be counted on one hand (Michelson et al. 2023). Although rarely successful, the recall has gained a higher profile in the past 20 years, largely due to the first-and-only successful recall of a California governor, Gray Davis, in 2003. It has been argued that using the recall is the only way that the Republican Party, with its declining numbers in California, could win the governor’s seat (Van Vechten 2023; Gumbel 2021). Governor Davis, a Democrat who had been re-elected in 2002, was never a charismatic leader, but several things made him particularly vulnerable to recall including a budget deficit, an electricity crisis that led to increased prices and rolling blackouts across the state, and the tripling of car registration fees, which angered many. In addition, a wealthy congressman energized the recall effort when he personally spent $1.6M to ensure enough signatures were gathered to get the recall on the ballot (Van Vechten 2023). In the end, voters recalled Gray Davis, and had to choose from 135 candidates to replace him. The most well-known of these was actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who won the governor’s seat with 49 percent of the vote.

Recall efforts in California increased after 2003, especially at the local level. One reason is likely the relative ease of the state’s recall process. For example, while eight states require an official to have engaged in criminal activity to face recall, California requires only a stated reason—and any reason is sufficient (Van Vechten 2023). Further, the process of recall and replacement is completed in one election. First, is a simple yes or no ballot question, “Shall [the official] be recalled from office,” next is the special election question, which is the list of candidates vying for office if the majority votes yes on the ballot question. Getting on the ballot as a possible replacement for a recalled official simply requires a filing fee ($4,200 to run for governor in 2021), and fewer than 100 nomination signatures. Note that the official being recalled is not eligible to run in the special election.

Like the initiative and referendum, recalls can be very expensive. More than $200M was spent in the 2021 recall election of Governor Gavin Newsom, yet the campaign was an abject failure as 62 percent of voters rejected the recall—the same percent that had put Newsom into office in 2018 (Van Vechten 2023). It is likely that proponents would not have gotten the Newsom recall on the ballot had it not been for the Covid-19 pandemic, which led a state judge to provide a 4 month extension for signature gathering. The Newsom recall experience, growing use of the referendum, and continuing complaints about the initiative have led to a number of calls to reform California’s direct democracy. We will discuss these ideas after exploring the rise of the anti-vaccine movement and the case of Disneyland’s measles outbreak.

Vaccine Hesitancy and Refusal

Despite overwhelming support from the medical community, vaccine hesitancy and vaccination opponents have existed since the first vaccines became available. The modern anti-vaccination movement began to flourish in 1998, with the publication of an article by Andrew Wakefield linking Mumps/Measles/Rubella (MMR) vaccines with autism (Gullion, Henry, & Gullion, 2008; Kata 2012). Critics of Wakefield’s work quickly raised concerns about the size of his research sample, the lack of a control group, and the article’s over-reliance on parent’s personal opinions rather than data; later, numerous studies discredited Wakefield’s claims, and the journal that published the article, The Lancet, retracted it (Aylesworth-Spink 2016). However, it took several years for researchers to test and debunk Wakefield’s original findings, and by that point many parents had grown suspicious of vaccines.

Interestingly, wealthier, better educated parents are actually most likely to hesitate or refuse vaccinations (Esquivel 2014; Gullion, Henry, & Gullion, 2008; Keneally 2019; Oster & Kocks 2018). This is often seen among those seeking more natural parenting styles (Gullion, Henry, & Gullion, 2008), and may also be because these parents are more likely to have the time and resources to search the internet for vaccine information; unfortunately, the internet is often filled with misinformation about healthcare, and vaccines in particular (Kata 2012; Larson, Gakidou, & Murray 2022; Gullion, Henry, & Gullion, 2008). Research has found that factors related to vaccine hesitancy include low levels of confidence in the medical and scientific community, lack of trust in government and public health departments (Kata 2012; MacDonald and the SAGE Working Group 2015), and perhaps most important is the parent’s trusted networks: when their friends and information networks discourage vaccinations, parents are far less likely to vaccinate on the recommended schedule (Brunson 2013).

The power of personal networks is clear in Southern California where several wealthy schools and communities, including Los Angeles’ Westside, and South Orange County, have experienced low vaccination rates (Esquivel 2014; Karlamangla & Poindexter 2017; The Hollywood Reporter 2014). Much of this has been attributed to Dr. Robert Sears, a pediatrician in the wealthy coastal city of Dana Point, who wrote a popular 2007 book suggesting an alternative schedule for childhood vaccinations (Esquivel 2014). Parents report sharing the book and referring vaccine hesitant friends to Dr. Sears who has publically told parents that high vaccination rates among most of the public means that individual families can forego vaccinating their own children with few risks; in other words: if everyone else is vaccinated, your kids can remain unvaccinated. This argument has led to outrage from many in the medical field who note that, once the vaccination rate for diseases like measles dips below 93%, outbreaks like the one at Disneyland are far more likely (Bharath 2018; Esquivel 2014).

The Mouse gets the Measles

In December 2014, amidst the crowds and long lines that are ubiquitous at Disneyland during the winter holidays at least one person infected with the measles virus visited the park. While public health officials were never able to identify this person, their active case of measles set off an outbreak that spread to 147 people across seven states in the U.S, and into Mexico and Canada (CDC 2015; Doll & Correira 2021). The Canadian Public Health Agency traced this outbreak to 150 cases of measles in Canada in 2015 (Doll & Corrieria 2021). Among U.S. patients, more than 75 percent were unvaccinated, and nearly all of those infected in Canada were part of a religious community that refuses vaccinations. In the U.S., 20 percent of those who contracted the disease had symptoms severe enough to require hospitalization.

Governments have long used the public schools as a vehicle to vaccinate the majority of the public, thus gaining what is known as “herd immunity,” which involves vaccinating a large enough percent of the population to stop the spread of contagious illness, thereby protecting overall community health (Gullion, Henry, & Gullion, 2008; Morens, Folkers, & Fauci 2022). When the 2014 measles outbreak started at Disneyland, the state of California had among the most lax childhood vaccination requirements in the country. All states allow medical exemptions for mandated school vaccines, and most states allow religious exemptions, however, California was one of only 20 states that also allowed for parental personal belief exemptions (Chandler 2015). The Disneyland outbreak highlighted the increased use of vaccine exemptions in California as kindergarteners were twice as likely to have received exemptions in 2014 as in 2007 (Esquivel 2014). As noted earlier, it was among Whiter, more affluent communities that vaccine hesitancy and refusal rates were highest. For example, while the state average for kindergarteners with personal-belief exemptions was just 3.1 percent, nearly 10 percent of kindergarteners in Orange County’s Capistrano Unified School District had personal-belief exemptions; in some schools in the district more than half of students had vaccine exemptions. Contrast these numbers with vaccination rates in Santa Ana Unified, a working class, Latino/a/x/e community just 20 miles away, where the personal belief exemption rate was .2%.

As public health professionals would predict, the lower level of vacations led to increased rates of disease. Outbreaks of measles, thought to have been eradicated in the U.S. in 2000, started to flare again within the decade, including 667 reported cases in 2014 (Clemmons, Wallace, Patel, & Gastañaduy 2017). Other diseases that had long gone dormant have been reintroduced in the U.S. as well, including whooping cough (Liu & Ringel 2015), and polio, a very serious illness that once caused thousands of cases of childhood paralysis each year. While eradicated in the U.S. more than forty years ago, the polio virus was found in New York City wastewater treatment systems after an unvaccinated man was paralyzed by the disease in 2022 (Greenblatt 2022).

Disneyland’s 2014 measles outbreak, coupled with lower rates of vaccination among California children led to quick action from State Senator Richard Pan, a pediatrician, and sponsor of Senate Bill (SB) 277, which allowed only medical exemptions to vaccine requirements (Willon & Mason 2015; see California Senator video, below). Many proponents of SB277 pointed out that before a vaccine was introduced in 1963, more than 3 million people in the U.S. contracted measles each year, nearly 50,000 were hospitalized and 400-500 died annually (CDC 2015). The virus is airborne—passed through coughs and sneezes—but can also live on surfaces for up to 2 hours (Glenza 2015; see Shots in the Dark, below). Measles is among the most contagious diseases in circulation; an estimated 90% of unvaccinated individuals who come in contact with it will become sick. Due to the Disneyland outbreak, which spread across the U.S. and into both Mexico and Canada, California’s Assembly and Senate overwhelmingly passed SB277, and Governor Jerry Brown signed it into law just six months after the Disneyland outbreak.

This was not the end of the story, however, because while the medical community applauded SB277 as a perfect example of the role of public health mandates safeguarding community health, vaccine opponents were incensed (Lin 2015; Willon & Mason 2015). Opponents of SB277 flooded the state capitol in protest, and Senator Pan received death threats (Chabria 2015). California’s system of direct democracy allowed these angry voters to take their case against SB277, and Senator Pan, directly to the voters. Within a month, opponents, who were a coalition of Christian conservatives, liberal vaccine skeptics, and civil libertarians concerned about government overreach, began circulating a petition to recall Senator Pan, and sought to put a referendum on the ballot to overturn the law. Remember that California’s direct democracy allows the public to vote to recall an elected official for any reason, provided they can collect enough signatures within a 160-day period, and for a referendum, opponents can put a law on a statewide ballot if they can gather the required signatures in 90 days.

In the end, while opponents of SB277 needed 35,926 signatures to put Senator Pan on a recall ballot, they could not meet that goal and submitted no signatures by the December 30^th deadline (White 2015). Similarly, opponents only gathered about 60% of the 365,880 signatures needed to force a referendum on the new restrictions (McGreevy 2016). Both efforts by opponents of SB277 had failed, which Senator Pan hailed as a victory for science and public health and an important success for the health of California children (McGreevy 2016; White 2015). Importantly, public health officials credit SB277 with sparing Californians from subsequent major outbreaks of measles (Krishnakumar & Karlamangla 2019; Oster & Kocks 2018). For example, in 2019, the number of cases in the U.S. topped 750, but California had only 42 cases, which is attributed to its high vaccination rate of 97 percent.

Regardless of this success, opponents continued to fight vaccine mandates. By 2017, school and public health officials noticed a marked increase in the number of vaccine medical exemptions being issued by doctors (Karlamangla & Poindexter 2017). While some of this increase may have been attributable to parents who had previously used the personal belief exemption, at some schools the numbers of medical exemptions were well above the 3 percent that might have been expected—in several schools 20+ percent of students had medical exemptions. Public health officials were alarmed to find doctors advertising their willingness to write exemptions for children with minor ailments that would not typically be affected by vaccines (Karlamangla 2018). All of this led the California State Medical Board to investigate more than 50 physicians—including Dr. Sears of Dana Point, who was put on a 35-month probation for exempting a 2-year old from all vaccinations without reviewing the child’s medical records.

As a consequence of what he viewed as a loophole in SB277, Senator Pan introduced another vaccine bill, SB276, in 2019. The new bill sought to increase the regulation of medical exemptions issued by doctors. In an interview about SB276 Senator Pan foreshadowed future events just six months before the Covid-19 pandemic began, saying, “’We talk about the four horsemen of the apocalypse: death, war, famine, plague and disease. Yet people don’t really believe in infectious disease anymore, and that’s foolish’” (Ho 2019).

Again in 2019, vaccine opponents targeted Senator Pan, including an incident in which an SB276 opponent livestreamed himself arguing with and then pushing the senator (Gutierrez 2019; Ho 2019). The man was arrested on assault charges, and Senator Pan faced another recall attempt that argued his sponsorship of SB276 was an act of treason. Again, however, the recall attempt went nowhere and SB276 was signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom (Cole 2019). While the Covid-19 pandemic created additional arguments over vaccination requirements, both SB277 and SB276 remain California law, and the Covid-19 vaccine was not added to the list of required childhood vaccinations (Lambert 2023).

Time for Reform?

California’s tools of direct democracy have been a hallmark of the state’s political system for over 110 years. These tools continue to be very popular with the public: A 2023 survey found that 79 percent of voters think that the referendum is a good thing (Baldassare 2023), and a 2021 survey found even more support for the recall, at 86 percent (Baldassare 2021). However, there are many criticisms of the system. While the Progressive reformers of a century ago expected direct democracy to curb the power of political parties and other moneyed interests, the reality is that the process has become so expensive that corporations, labor unions, and wealthy individuals are more likely to use it successfully than are average voters.

This has led to public concerns that special interests have too much control over California’s direct democracy. As noted earlier, vast amounts of money are spent by proponents and opponents to get proposals on the ballot and during the campaign season. Not surprisingly, the role of money, especially in signature gathering to get referendums and recalls on the ballot, are among the features people most want reformed, for example, some have suggested requiring a certain percentage of signatures to be collected by unpaid volunteers (Baldassare 2021; Baldassare 2023).

Another complaint is that the ballot language for both initiatives and referendums can be confusing, and competing ballot propositions make things worse. The referendum can be particularly confusing as proponents of a referendum ask you to vote “no” on the new law, and opponents persuade you to vote “yes” (Baldassare 2023). These campaigns, which often involve technical issues such as insurance regulation, leave voters unsure about the consequences of voting for (or against) the referendum. Naturally, people are more likely to vote “no” when faced with confusing or contradictory campaign messages. Further, as discussed above, there are increasing concerns that industry has used the referendum to delay implementation of regulations, even when they are popular with the public and the referendum is likely to fail.

For recall elections, a majority of voters support reforms that limit recalls to only instances of illegal or unethical conduct by elected officials (Baldassare 2021; Van Vechten 2023). Other suggested reforms include increasing the number of signatures required, holding a separate election to choose a successor if the recall is successful (Van Vechten 2023), or replacing the two-part ballot with a single ballot question that asks, “Which of the following candidates should complete the current term,” with the incumbent on the list of candidates (Nava 2022). The biggest concern with the recall, however, involves its potential for an undemocratic result. Consider the following example: Assume that on the first ballot question, 51 percent vote “yes” to the recall, while 49 percent vote “no” —this slim majority is enough to recall the official. On the special election question, which is the list of candidates vying for office, the winner only needs a plurality to win. This means that if there are many candidates, someone with 25 percent (or less) of the vote could replace an official that 49 percent had voted to retain. That is not at all a democratic result.

Conclusion

Six years before the Covid-19 pandemic made vaccines a high profile political issue, a measles outbreak at Disneyland led to legislation that strengthened California’s childhood vaccine requirements. Using the tools of direct democracy, opponents of vaccine requirements attempted to overturn the legislation and oust its author from the state senate. Neither effort was successful, raising questions about the use of these tools.

This reading, which highlights the use of referendum and recall illustrates several of the system’s weaknesses, including the power of moneyed interests, some of direct democracy’s odd and confusing rules, and the fact that neither the recall nor the referendum are very successful. However, after eleven decades direct democracy remains a popular and lasting legacy of California’s Progressive Movement, even while its flaws are more and more clear.

Questions to Consider

Progressive reformers expected direct democracy to give power to the people. Using what you have learned about the way the system works today, explain whether or not you think this is true.

How does this reading affect your opinions on the recall: Now that you know more about it, do you think it is effective or not, and why? Should it be reformed, and if so, in what ways?

How does this reading affect your opinions on the referendum: Now that you know more about it, do you think it is effective or not, and why? Should it be reformed, and if so, in what ways?

The most famous recall election in U.S. history is that of Governor Gray Davis (see Direct Democracy in California, above). Davis’s recall led to the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2003, and came less than a year after Davis had been re-elected to his second term. In what ways might the fear of being recalled change the behavior of elected officials? Note that recalls of local officials such as city council members and mayors have increased since 2003.

Video/Podcasts

CA State Senator Richard Pan explains his sponsorship of SB277. Sacramento Bee. (2 minute video)

Ruining it for the Rest of Us: Shots in the Dark. Susan Burton. 2008. This American Life. (22 minute podcast) December 19, 2008

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NOTES

[1] In 1885 the Central Pacific merged with and renamed itself the Southern Pacific Railroad.

[2] Most research has been done on initiatives, so this look at recalls and referendum is somewhat unique; for more information on the initiative, please see the Initiative and Referendum Institute (http://www.iandrinstitute.org/)

[3] Numbers come from the California Secretary of State Statewide Initiative Guide, 2024. https://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/ballot-measures/pdf/statewide-initiative-guide.pdf

[4] A compulsory, or legislative referendum is a law brought before voters by the state legislature, therefore it does not require voter signatures. Typically these are either constitutional amendments, which always require a popular vote, or bond measures which seek to raise more than $300,000.