Six Californias
[5] Several of these attempts proposed the creation of a State of Jefferson that would span the contiguous, mostly rural area of southern Oregon and northern California.
[6][7] California Secretary of State Debra Bowen approved Draper to begin collecting petition signatures in February 2014.
[8] The petition needed to submit sufficient valid signatures of registered California voters by July 18, 2014, to qualify as a November election ballot proposition.
[10][11] On July 14, Draper announced that the proposal received 1.3 million signatures, enough to qualify for the ballot, and began submitting them to elections officials.
Opponents of the initiative filed a complaint with Secretary of State Debra Bowen on July 17, 2014, asking her office to investigate allegations of voter fraud.
[9] The state of Jefferson would have been created from the far north part of California, bordering Oregon, consisting of fourteen counties: Butte, Colusa, Del Norte, Glenn, Humboldt, Lake, Lassen, Mendocino, Modoc, Plumas, Shasta, Siskiyou, Tehama, and Trinity.
North California would have consisted of thirteen counties: Amador, El Dorado, Marin, Napa, Nevada, Placer, Sacramento, Sierra, Solano, Sonoma, Sutter, Yolo, and Yuba.
It would have consisted of the fourteen counties north of Los Angeles and south of Sacramento: Alpine, Calaveras, Fresno, Inyo, Kern, Kings, Madera, Mariposa, Merced, Mono, San Joaquin, Stanislaus, Tulare, and Tuolumne.
[2] In addition, California's charter counties would have been allowed more power over municipal affairs that currently may be controlled by city governments.
The areas most affected would have been required to make decisions including school funding, health and social services, water management, and the handling of prisons.
Each new state would have also been faced with new budgets, establishing methods of revenue, funding infrastructure, public employee compensation, and new, revised or discarded laws.
Furthermore, Draper, as the appointed "Agent of the State of California" for the purpose of defending the proposal in court, may not actually be able to do so because of both the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Hollingsworth v. Perry; and Article II, Section 12, of the California Constitution that prohibits any constitutional amendment that names a specific individual to hold a particular office.
[2] The report by the California Legislative Analyst's Office specifically named several other major issues that could have been affected by the decisions made by the leaders of each new state: crime, public safety and gun control/ownership; economic development; the environment; public employee pensions; laws related to marriage and family; taxes; and transportation and other infrastructure.
These differing policies would have in turn eventually result in long-term demographic and economic changes, as various groups of people will want to migrate to those new states with laws more favorable to them.
[24] Tim Draper indicated that the initiative was motivated by the belief that California is ungovernable as is with legislature unable to keep up on issues in all the state's regions, especially in areas such as job creation, education, affordable housing, and water and transportation infrastructure.
Rodota stated: "Every day this measure marches its way toward the ballot it damages the California brand as the nation's economic powerhouse.
"[32] In an opinion piece in the U-T San Diego, Maviglio and Rodota wrote that if the measure passes, it "will set in motion the most bureaucratic, costly, paper-pushing process in our history ... we'd spend years doing nothing more than rewriting laws, duplicating government offices, and spending billions of dollars unnecessarily.
[33] The segregation of the incomes and tax bases led to criticism that the proposal is merely a money and political power grab for Silicon Valley and California's other wealthy areas.
"[35] Brendan Nyhan said that the idea would be unlikely to pass Congress due to disruption it would cause in the political balance of the U.S. Senate, as well as other sticking points.
[8] Opponents said that the initiative was a thinly disguised Republican power play aimed at diminishing the electoral votes that have historically gone to Democrats in California.
[36] In a survey of the California congressional delegation, The Hill found that the Democrats opposed the proposition, while the Republicans were generally divided.
