On a warm Thursday afternoon, residents picnicking and walking their dogs in the Mission Dolores neighborhood shared mixed emotions about San Francisco’s famously long ballots.
Bayview resident Ashley Thompson, 65, said she didn’t think her June ballot was too long. When asked about the signature gathering that’s part of the process of getting measures on the ballot, she said she likes to support the people being paid to gather them.
Nancy Gutierrez, 27, who lives in the Mission, thought otherwise. The ballot “was pretty long, a lot of words you have to read again and again.” But she did sign petitions aimed at increasing taxes on the wealthy.
Alec Denton, 30, said he thought the June ballot was “a little long” but followed with a key question: “What would you cut?”
Mayor Daniel Lurie is looking to address the length of ballots in San Francisco by changing how initiative measures make it in front of voters in an election. As part of his campaign to reform city hall, he is proposing three amendments to the city charter, including a measure that would raise signature requirements for getting initiatives on the ballot.
His ballot measure committee is raising and spending millions of dollars to persuade voters to approve these amendments. The campaign in favor of the Fix Our Broken Ballot Process Initiative Act argues that the city’s ballots are bloated and confusing, and that the easy process of putting measures on the ballot effectively punts issues to voters that should be handled by elected officials. Critics are concerned that making that process more difficult will benefit wealthier people and organizations with the resources to meet the higher threshold for ballot approval.
A majority of likely California voters who participated in a 2024 Public Policy Institute of California survey said that they appreciate the power to affect public policy through initiatives. But over two thirds believe there are too many initiatives on their ballots, and 87% agreed that wording on the ballots was “often too complicated and confusing.” In San Francisco, voters weigh in on many more measures than voters in other California cities.
Currently, an initiative proposal needs at least 10,600 signatures to appear on the ballot, representing 2% of registered San Francisco voters. Under the proposed measure, the required number of signatures would quadruple to 8%. Measures would need 31,900 more signatures than they do now.
San Francisco has the lowest requirements in the state to get initiatives on the ballot. In other large California cities, measures need between 5% and 15% of eligible voter signatures to get on the ballot.
Lurie says ‘San Francisco needs a reset’
In a post on X in March, Lurie announced his three proposed charter reforms as a way to help San Francisco “reset.” He called the current process for getting measures on the ballot too “easy” and said it makes it so that “our elected officials don’t have to do their jobs.”
Interestingly, he’s putting his proposed reforms directly in front of voters in the form of ballot measures. This is because changes to the 548-page city charter, which voters enacted in the late 1800s as the city’s constitution, require voter approval. Changes to the charter require 50,000 voter signatures to qualify for the ballot.
Besides increasing the threshold for signatures needed in the initiative measure process, Lurie’s proposed ballot changes would also narrow who can propose initiatives without signatures.
In San Francisco’s current charter, the mayor, a six-member majority vote of the board, or four board members without full board approval can put a local ordinance measure on the ballot without requiring voter signatures. The charter amendment would eliminate the mayor’s ability to unilaterally submit an ordinance for ballot consideration and make it so that only a six-member majority of the board could do so going forward.
On its website, the charter reform campaign, called Clean Up City Hall, states “confusing ballot measures trap the city in ineffective policies for decades,” and explains what it hopes the three proposals will accomplish: “With these reforms, we can remove the barriers that prevent City Hall from delivering for residents instead of insiders and special interests.”
Shorter ballots could improve participation in elections. Jason McDaniel, an associate professor of political science at San Francisco State University who specializes in local politics, said it could help voters weigh in more carefully on what is presented to them. McDaniel has endorsed the mayor’s charter reform campaign.
“There are limits to the quality of democratic decision-making being made on these ballot measures, especially when you have a ton of them on the ballot,” said McDaniel. He explained that the longer the ballot, the more likely voters “roll off” and fail to vote on every item.
But critics of these changes say, instead, that making it more difficult for measures to qualify for the ballot is a threat to direct democracy and favors special interests. Signature gathering, for example, is already costly. In 2024, the average cost of attaining one petition signature in California was about $15.
Increasing the required number of signatures by more than 30,000 would create a financial squeeze for smaller organizations that want to propose a measure on the ballot, said Kim Tavaglione, Executive Director of the San Francisco Labor Council. Tavaglione participated in the city’s 31-person Charter Reform Working Group in 2025, which gathered city officials, civil society leaders, and business leaders from around the city to assess the San Francisco city charter and its processes and make recommendations for improvements. She disagreed with the petition to change the ballot measure process, calling it “Trump-esque.”
“It really takes democracy away from everyday working people and puts it in the hands of the rich and the shameless,” Tavaglione told the San Francisco Public Press, because special interests and wealthy organizations or individuals would be able to afford the higher costs of placing measures on the ballot. She said the changes would “make it near impossible for everyday working people to put something on the ballot.”
Lurie’s charter reform campaign responded to this concern by stating that San Francisco’s signature threshold is the lowest in the state and that increasing it would “ensure well-thought out, quality measures can move forward while limiting ballot overload.”
“This measure preserves the public’s ability to place initiatives on the ballot while bringing San Francisco’s signature requirement closer, but still below, the state average,” Clean Up City Hall said in an email.
Increasingly expensive campaigns shape SF ballots
Campaign spending has reached record highs in recent years, and this includes the millions of dollars spent on signature-gathering for potential ballot measures.
Two measures on the June ballot showcase the growing influence of wealthy donors on the ballot initiative process. For example, this year’s Yes on Measure D campaign, which advocated to increase taxes on businesses with executives who make 100 times more than their workers’ median income, raised almost $3.4 million, mainly from labor unions, and spent $240,000 on petition signatures.
The opposing Yes on C, No on D campaign, which aimed to raise the threshold for a business to qualify for tax exemptions, received $6.6 million and spent nearly $400,000 on circulating its petition. Major corporations contributed funding to this campaign, including Visa Inc., Google, Meta and PG&E.
Voters knocked down both measures in the June election.
Meanwhile, Lurie’s campaign to reform the city’s charter has already amassed over $8.6 million and spent $4.3 million on circulating all three proposals.
The funding for the three-pronged campaign has come primarily from individual donors. The top four contributions so far have come from venture capitalist and San Francisco Standard co-founder Michael Moritz, Hyatt heir and investor John Pritzker, Ripple co-founder and crypto billionaire Chris Larsen and his wife, philanthropist Lyna Lam.
Mayor Lurie may want shorter ballots, but that might not happen this year. The Department of Elections and the Board of Supervisors will continue to approve measures and charter amendments for the November ballot through the end of July. Lurie’s two other charter amendments are also pending signature verification by the Department of Elections. One would give the mayor more oversight power over commissions. The other would extend the powers of the city controller and increase the amount that can be spent on contracts without board approval.
At least six measures that gathered signatures this summer are being considered to appear on the ballot in November.