A California resident and one-time Republican presidential candidate has a radical plan to overhaul government in his state -- a ballot initiative that would increase the size of the state’s legislature to roughly 12,000 members.
John Cox, a San Diego County resident, says his plan is to divvy up the state’s 120 legislative districts into roughly 12,000 more community-based districts. The plan, he claims, would make California government more in tune with voters and less vulnerable to special interests.
Cox reportedly has cleared the first hurdle, getting state permission this month to collect signatures to get the initiative on the November 2014 ballot. But he still faces several other challenges in his bid to increase the size of the legislature for the first time since the late-1800s.
He will need to collect 807,615 valid signatures by May 19. And the initiative, if passed, could have to go before the state Supreme Court to become law, according to Bob Stern, who ran California’s non-partisan Center for Governmental Studies.
I think it's a pretty safe bet to say that if there's one problem that California (or indeed pretty much anywhere else) does not have, it's a shortage of politicians.
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