By now registered voters in California should have received the official state election guide for the June primary. However, if you’re looking for information about most major candidates for statewide office, you won’t find it in this strange document. You won’t even find a clearly labeled list of who’s running.
What the guide does
include are campaign statements from more than a score of candidates running
for governor, attorney general and other important statewide offices. Most of these people are political unknowns
and have virtually no chance of winning. There are also a few who do have broad name
recognition but not because they have distinguished themselves as office
holders or leaders. One, for example, is
Orly Taitz, who identifies herself as a lawyer, dentist, and former real estate
agent. Taitz, who was born in the Soviet
Union, is best known for her campaign to remove President Obama from office
because she believes he was born in Kenya and is controlled by the Chicago mafia.
Clearly she has the kind of keen legal mind that qualifies her to be state
attorney general, which is the office she’s running for.
Why does Taitz merit
a paragraph in the voter guide and not Kamala Harris, the widely respected
incumbent? The reason is a wacko scheme
passed by California voters designed to curb campaign expenditure excesses. Couple that with a new open primary law and you have a recipe for electoral
confusion.
So here’s the
picture: The campaign expenditure law
requires candidates to declare whether or not they will comply with certain spending
limits. If they accept the limits they
become eligible to buy space in the voter guide for their campaign statements
and also get an asterisk by their name. Those
who don’t agree are on their own and don’t get an asterisk. Major candidates and
incumbents, of course, can usually raise significant amounts of money so they don’t typically volunteer to limit expenditures.
The problem is that
under the new open primary system there are no longer separate primaries for each party. All candidates for an office are lumped together on the ballot. However, the voter guide, one of the tools people use to decide how to vote, not only bans campaign statements by candidates who've declined expenditure limits, it doesn’t even prominently list all the contenders. For example, you might
want to look in the guide to check whether Jerry Brown, the incumbent governor,
is running again. He is, but because he
doesn’t have a paragraph in the guide, it takes a concerted effort to find the
answer. The only place Brown’s name
appears is at the bottom of page 22 in the list
that identifies who has or hasn’t volunteered for spending limits.
You might say it’s
just tough luck if Brown wants to spend more money than the limit and forego a
paragraph in the voter guide.
However, the tough luck actually goes to voters who want to know, among other things, how many people are running for a particular office and what their names and party affiliations are. This is the kind of information that isn't provided in the television spots "rich" candidates like Brown can afford by choosing not to limit their expenditures.
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