Investor Tim Draper Pushes Ballot Measure Splitting California Into 3 States (sfgate.com)

"One of several proposals aiming to split California into multiple smaller states has reportedly reached an important new goal thanks in large part to the efforts of its billionaire champion," writes schwit1. SFGate reports: Venture capitalist Tim Draper, who previously pushed a proposal that would split California into six states, says that his three-state proposal has enough signatures to qualify for the November ballot. On Thursday, Draper said in a statement that the "CAL 3" initiative has collected over 600,000 signatures from Californians who would like to see the state split into three. An initiative needs 366,000 signatures to appear on the ballot. "This is an unprecedented show of support on behalf of every corner of California to create three state governments that emphasize representation, responsiveness, reliability and regional identity," Draper said.
The U.S. Congress would still need to approve the change -- and it's probably useful to remember what happened when Draper tried splitting California into six states. He ultimately turned in 1.3 million signatures for a ballot measure in 2014, "only to see nearly half of them disqualified.

"He ended up about 100,000 short of the valid signatures he needed."

Comments

Ineffective government due to one party control

[drnb]

From tfa

"The reasoning behind the proposal is that California has gotten too big to be governed effectively"

Nonsense, the reason for this is to break up the largest Blue state to conservative's advantage.

Then why are the 3 subdivisions blue in nature? Its about increasing the proportion of blue in the Senate.

California lacks effective government because it is effectively a one party state, the legislature control by a (super)majority of very liberal democrats. There is no checks and balances of whatever dumbass idea they come up with. There is no forced compromise to moderate the stupidity. Until there is a political balance that forces more moderation and more compromise California will remain ungovernable, as will the 3 democrat controller subdivisions. We'll just have 3 dumbass legislatures that largely agree on things rather than the current. Little to no improvement.

Re: Senators

[thomst]

reanjr snarled:

No it isn't. If ten people live on a forested mountain, the one hundred people in the town in the next valley should not be able to vote to deforest the mountain.

You're conflating local governance with national governance - purposefully, I suspect.

Give California six senators and it's safe to predict that exactly none of them will vote to deforest Montana.

We are a republic. We are not a democracy. Democracies are stupid.

Given the outcome of the last national election - and the complete disfunction of the USA's national legislature - the available evidence suggests that republics are equally stupid ...

Re:Horizontal DIvisions

[careysub]

The man proposing this wants to apply the cracking and packing methodology of gerrymandering to the entire state to gerrymander the senate, which is otherwise impossible - something that has had the right-wing gnashing its teeth for years.

If you look at Draper's actual proposals they have this common pattern - a large majority of the blue urban areas along the coast get cracked out and packed into one state that is nearly 100% blue - this gets rid of most the state's blue majority.

The more rural, inland part of the state is then split into multiple states (down to two, from the previous five in his last scheme) each of which have a slight red majority. But each of these inland red states get a chunk of blue urban voters (for example Long Beach by itself gets carved out of the Los Angeles Metropolitan area) to provide the revenue to support the new red state - kind of like a hostage being forced to pay the bills of its captors. Because, heavens!, you can't expect these red counties who value their "freedom" to have to pay for their own services!

Result adding four new reliable right-wing senators to the Senate.