{"id":482845,"date":"2026-10-02T15:08:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-02T15:08:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/482845\/"},"modified":"2026-10-02T15:08:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-02T15:08:10","slug":"tilting-california-voters-toward-raising-local-taxes-often-involves-tricks-manipulation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/482845\/","title":{"rendered":"Tilting California voters toward raising local taxes often involves tricks, manipulation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"opinions.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This commentary was originally published by CalMatters.
By Dan Walters<\/p>\n

California\u2019s Nov. 3 ballot con\u00adtains 14 statewide ballot mea\u00adsures and five of them pertain to taxes, including the much-debated Proposition 40, which would tax the wealth of the state\u2019s billionaires.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, local ballots are also heavily loaded with mea\u00adsures that would either raise taxes to benefit school districts or local governments or autho\u00adrize the issuance of bonds that require new taxes to repay.<\/p>\n

The California Taxpayers As\u00adsociation has counted 273 such measures that, if all passed, would levy $3 billion a year in direct taxes on retail sales and property, and sanction $19.5 billion in bonds, with interest costs of more than $1 billion a year.<\/p>\n

The largest tax measure asks voters in San Francisco and four other counties to hike sales tax\u00ades by nearly $1 billion a year to bolster public transit services.<\/p>\n

In the last decade, a flurry of local sales tax measures has raised rates to over 11% in some jurisdictions. The biennial del\u00aduge of local tax and bond mea\u00adsures draws heavy campaign spending by proponents and opponents and some question\u00adable gamesmanship by the local agencies that propose them.<\/p>\n

Under the guise of \u201cinforma\u00adtion,\u201d it\u2019s not unusual for them to<\/p>\n

spend taxpayer money on brochures and other forms of communication that approach out-and-out advocacy, often hiring professional campaign consultants to prepare the ma\u00adterials and otherwise use tech\u00adniques that tout the supposed benefits that taxes or bonds will provide.<\/p>\n

If it crosses the line, an \u201cin\u00adformation\u201d campaign violates a state law that declares, \u201cAn of\u00adficer, employee, or consultant of a local agency may not expend or authorize the expenditure of any of the funds of the local agency to support or oppose the approval or rejection of a bal\u00adlot measure, or the election or defeat of a candidate, by the voters.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, prosecutions for vio\u00adlation are as rare as the prover\u00adbial hen\u2019s teeth, although the Fair Political Practices Com\u00admission does crack down when instances are brought to its at\u00adtention.<\/p>\n

Another technique officialdom uses to tilt tax elections in its favor is to pretend that ballot measures are not, in fact, tax increases.<\/p>\n

Last month, the state Court of Appeal upheld a lower court\u2019s finding in Riverside County that the Hemet Unified School District misleadingly declared in the language of a $225 mil\u00adlion bond issue that it would not raise taxes. The declaration hinged on the new measure continuing property taxes that had been collected for a previ\u00adous ballot measure, but both courts rejected that rationale and ordered that the language be altered.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile the full text of the measure may accurately explain the true nature of Measure I,\u201d the appellate court ruled, \u201cthe term \u2018no-tax-rate-increase,\u2019 on its face, connotes such a conclu\u00adsive meaning, that voters are likely to find it unnecessary to read the full ballot materials, erroneously believing that \u2018no-tax-rate-increase\u2019 has the plain meaning their tax burden will not increase.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe impact of such terms in ballot titles and questions has previously been addressed and found impermissible where the terms constitute advocacy or partiality \u2026 Replacing \u2018no-tax-rate-increase\u2019 with \u2018rate-exten\u00adsion\u2019 would be accurate, neutral, and does not mislead voters into believing their tax burden will not increase.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also noteworthy that Hemet Unified\u2019s board of trust\u00adees voted on Aug. 12 to place the bond issue on the November ballot but gave the public just five days to submit arguments on the issue. Compressing the time for opponents to respond is another common technique employed to tilt the game.<\/p>\n

Tricking voters is election fraud as onerous as stuffing bal\u00adlot boxes. Unfortunately, while officials may be a bit embar\u00adrassed if caught, such behav\u00adior does not invalidate a ballot measure that voters pass.<\/p>\n

It should.<\/p>\n

Dan Walters is one of most deco\u00adrated and widely syndicated col\u00adumnists in California history, au\u00adthoring a column four times a week that offers his view and analysis of the state\u2019s political, economic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This commentary was originally published by CalMatters.By Dan Walters California\u2019s Nov. 3 ballot con\u00adtains 14 statewide ballot mea\u00adsures…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":482846,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8],"class_list":["post-482845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=482845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/482845\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/482846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=482845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=482845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=482845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}