Colorado Politics

California voters pass redistricting ballot measure

Voters on Tuesday approved California Democrats’ effort to block President Trump’s agenda by increasing their party’s numbers in Congress.

The Associated Press called the victory moments after the polls closed on Tuesday night.

The statewide ballot measure will reconfigure California’s congressional districts to favor more Democratic candidates. The Democratic-led California legislature placed the measure on the Nov. 4 ballot, at Gov. Gavin Newsom’s behest, after Trump urged Texas and other GOP-led states to modify their congressional maps to favor their party members, a move designed to keep the U.S. House of Representatives in Republican control during his final two years in office.

Proposition 50 was the sole item on the statewide, special-election ballot Tuesday. Supporters hope the ballot measure would be a referendum on Trump, who remains unpopular in California, while opponents call Prop. 50 an underhanded power grab by Democrats.

Supporters of the proposal had the edge going into Election Day. They vastly outraised their rivals, and Proposition 50 led in recent polls.

California voters have been inundated with television ads, mailers and social media posts for weeks about the high-stakes election, so much so that only 2% of the likely voters were undecided, according to a recent UC Berkeley poll cosponsored by The Times.

“Usually there was always a rule — look at undecideds in late-breaking polls and assume most would vote no,” said Mark DiCamillo, director of the survey by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies. “But this poll shows there are very few of them out there.”

Minutes after polls opened, Trump posted on Truth Social that the “Unconstitutional Redistricting Vote in California is a GIANT SCAM in that the entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED.”

The president, who has not actively campaigned against the proposition aside from a few social media posts, provided no evidence for his allegations. His Department of Justice has said it was sending monitors to polling locations across the state.

Secretary of State Shirley Weber pushed back at Trump’s claims along with similar ones made by the president’s press secretary.

“If there are irregularities, what are they? Why won’t they identify them? Where exactly is this fraud?” Weber said in a statement. “Ramblings don’t equate with fact.”

Voters, some in shorts and flip-flops, waited in line for 30 minutes or more outside a voting center in Huntington Beach on Tuesday afternoon.

“Vote no, don’t ruin Huntington Beach!” one man shouted as he left the center.

The conservative seaside city would fall into a new congressional district that includes Long Beach, but no longer keeps some Republican-rich communities to the south. The politically divided district is currently represented by Dave Min, D-Irvine, but is designed to become a safer seat for Democrats under the new districts created by Proposition 50.

Huntington Beach resident Luke Walker, 18, spent time researching the arguments for and against Prop. 50 and came down against it because he believes the redesigned districts will ignore residents’ voices.

“You look at the people who will be voting and I don’t think they’ll be properly represented in the new state lines,” Walker said, who predicted that if the ballot measure passes, it would lead to more division. “It’s going to cause more of a rift in society. People are going to start disliking each other even more.”

Californians have been voting for weeks. Registered voters received mail ballots about a month ago, and early voting centers recently opened across the state.

More than 7.2 million Californians — 31% of the state’s 23 million registered voters — had cast ballots as of Tuesday morning before the polls opened, according to a voting tracker run by Democratic redistricting expert Paul Mitchell, who drew the proposed districts on the ballot.

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