While much attention has been focused on the dying paid sick time campaign, there’s another local ballot initiative hard at work attempting to make the ballot. A new political committee, Citizens for an Ethical Orange County, is seeking to repeal a portion of the Charter of Orange County to change elections for charter offices from nonpartisan to partisan elections and removing run-off provisions.
The initiative will need 34,694 signatures minimum to qualify for the ballot. According to the Supervisor of Elections Office, the law states that “A petition seeking to amend or repeal the Charter of Orange County shall be signed by ten (10) percent of the county electors in a majority of the commission districts as of January 1 of the year in which the petition is initiated, in this instance January 1, 2012.”
The initiative was launched back in October hoping to collect a majority of petitions at the polls. This means the campaign is about halfway through the 180 day deadline to collect the necessary signatures to qualify the measure for the ballot. With just 3 months left to collect petitions, the campaign has 13,672 valid petitions and has submitted 15,745 petitions to the Supervisor of Elections office, yielding a valid rate around 87%.
Citizens for an Ethical Orange County is currently funded entirely by the new Orange County Tax Collector Scott Randolph and the local Orange County Democratic Party, where Randolph also serves as party chair. Reports show Randolph’s political committee, Voters for Change, and the Orange County DEC as the only contributors.
This could be one reason why many Republicans have rallied against the measure, despite strong GOP support in the past.
But the initiative recently saw a shift as former judicial candidate Eric DuBois took over as the new campaign Chair. DuBois feels good about making the ballot and sees an opportunity to change message and refocus the issue as good for Orange County and voters, not for one political party over the other. The website for the campaign has already updated with new language and framing of the issue.
DuBois is also focusing on escalating the issue and raising the public awareness on partisan elections. He sees it as a way to change the low turnout that has plagued local elections held in August instead of November, hopefully allowing more voters to have a say in their local government.
But will the olive branch come too late for the GOP to jump on board? Only time will tell – and the initiative is on the clock needing at least 20,000 more petitions in the coming weeks.
Many years ago, the initiative to create non-partisan elections was hotly contested by Democrats and Republicans, working together, who realized that this is a way for political officials to “hide” their values from the electorate. Sadly, neither party focused on the impact for VOTERS, that we would cut participation by voters more than 50% because of State Laws which mandate that non-Partisan elections are to occur in August in the Primary calendar. Consequently, all County elections in which there are fewer than two candidates are decided in August when most voters believe that PARTIES are picking their candidates. This aberration of the calendar has disenfranchised nearly all the voters in one year or another. If we want real democracy, we must return local elections to November, when most voters are at the polls.