Too Many Ballot Measures: Why San Francisco Needs To Fix Its Charter

Tired of ballots crammed with dozens of measures you barely understand? You're not alone.

Every election, our ballots are bloated with local propositions—often 15 or more in a single election! They touch on everything from housing and transit, to street trees, to police staffing, and overtime or retirement benefits for EMTs and nurses. We're asked to weigh in on confusing and highly technical issues that shouldn't need our vote at all. After all, didn't we elect people to handle this?

This chaos of constant ballot measures isn't just tiring, though. It's also hurting our city and wasting millions of dollars. But it doesn't have to be this way. Let's fix it.

Ballot Overload

San Francisco's ballots have become notoriously overcrowded. In November 2024, San Franciscans faced 15 local measures, while voters in nearby Oakland had just 3 and San José only 1.

This glut of propositions leaves voters with homework that other cities simply don't require.

What's worse, many of these propositions didn't even need to be on the ballot in the first place. According to SPUR, a local good-government group, "Since 2015, 29% of measures submitted to San Francisco voters required no voter approval and could have been adopted legislatively."

In other words, our ballots are cluttered with work that City Hall should have done itself.

GrowSF started because we were fed up with this ballot chaos. Every election, we brace ourselves for the marathon of reading through dozens of pages of fine print, trying to decipher legal jargon and conflicting claims from competing campaigns. But you shouldn't need a secret decoder ring to understand what you're voting on!

Why Does SF Legislate at the Ballot Box?

There are three structural flaws in San Francisco's laws that makes it easier to legislate at the ballot box than in the Board of Supervisors chambers:

1. A minority of Supervisors (4 out of 11), or the Mayor alone, can place measures directly on the ballot, bypassing the usual legislative process.
2. The signature requirement to qualify citizen initiatives is absurdly low: just 2% of registered voters compared to up to 20% in other California cities (With around 500,000 voters, that's just 10,000 signatures).
3. A state law intended for large counties with many cities also applies to SF by itself. This allows a simple majority of Supervisors to introduce charter amendments, akin to constitutional amendments, without consent of the Mayor.

Passing a law is supposed to involve working it through the Board of Supervisors with hearings, public input, and amendments, leading to a majority vote plus the Mayor's approval (or a veto override). That process is designed to encourage debate, compromise, engagement with experts, and careful refinement of policy. But our system provides a tempting shortcut: a minority of Supervisors, or even just the Mayor alone, can put new laws on the ballot, bypassing the usual legislative process. No majority, no hearings, and no experts required.

State law lets counties propose charter amendments with a simple majority. That makes sense because those counties include many cities, each with different interests that must be negotiated. But San Francisco is unique: we are the state's only combined City & County, yet the same rule still applies to us. And since our Supervisors represent individual neighborhoods rather than whole cities, a small group of parochial interests can control the process and rewrite San Francisco's constitution without a Mayoral veto or the normal legislative process.

But it's not just those flaws. The signature requirement to qualify citizen initiatives is absurdly low: just 2% of registered voters. Other cities across California require signatures from 8% to 20% of their electorate to qualify. This means that any half-organized group in San Francisco can gather enough signatures to put their half-baked ideas on the ballot.

In short, it's easier to lob a proposal onto the ballot than to govern through City Hall. As SPUR observes in its "Charter for Change" report, "the charter allows shortcuts not found in other cities," encouraging political fights at the ballot box instead of negotiated solutions in City Hall.

By the Numbers

Since 1996, when San Francisco adopted its current charter, voters have been asked to vote on 403 different local ballot measures. Some of those were legally required to go to the ballot, like the 46 bonds and 46 taxes we've voted on. But what about the rest?

San Francisco voters have been burdened with deciding on 29 meaningless "policy declarations" that have no force of law, 152 charter amendments, and 120 ordinances that skipped the legislative process. The 120 ordinances came from...

The four from the Ethics Commission followed their legitimate lawmaking process, but the other 116 skipped the normal legislative negotiation process. That's a lot of laws passed without the usual debate, hearings, or expert input.

A Higher Bar

San Francisco needs to raise the bar for putting measures on the ballot. Not only do we have too many ballot measures, but once they're passed they're locked in and unable to be modified by our elected officials. The only way to fix a ballot measure is to pass a new one later, creating a vicious cycle of more and more measures piling up.

So instead of making our most hard-coded laws the easiest to pass with the least oversight, we should flip the script. Let's make it harder to put measures on the ballot, and easier for our elected officials to govern through City Hall.

Here are some key reforms that we think San Francisco needs:

1. Raise the threshold for qualifying citizen initiatives from 2% to at least 10% of registered voters, in line with other California cities.
2. Require a majority of the Board of Supervisors (6 out of 11) plus the Mayor's approval to place any measure on the ballot, ensuring broader consensus and consent of both branches of government.
3. Prohibit measures that have no legal requirement to be on the ballot (like regular ordinances) or which have no legal effect (like policy declarations). This would still allow citizen signature initiatives, but would prevent the Board of Supervisors from using the ballot as a political tool for symbolic gestures.

By enacting these reforms, San Francisco can restore some much-needed sanity to its governance. We'll still have ballot measures—but far fewer, and they will require more scrutiny and debate. Meanwhile, our city government can become more nimble and cohesive. As SPUR succinctly put it, San Francisco needs to "resolve issues through leadership rather than at the ballot". It's time to stop the ballot chaos.