BWAHAHAHA. This is excellent news. Billionaire Tim Draper's ballot initiative to split California into six tax-dodging, Senate-grabbing states just got tossed after the signature verification process showed they didn't get enough actual legitimate signatures.
The proposal to divide California into six states failed to make it onto the 2016 ballot, California’s secretary of state office said Friday.
The measure required about 807,000 signatures to quality, and despite proponents turning in more than 1 million signatures earlier this summer, a random sample conducted by counties found that not enough signatures were valid to meet the threshold to qualify.
Venture capitalist Tim Draper, the billionaire behind the proposal, spent $5.2 million to try to get the proposal on the ballot while opponents spent $10,000.
Draper swears this isn't over, but Californians aren't all that interested in giving billionaires their own island in the middle of their state to evade taxes, so I expect he will revive it.
He really should pay attention to what we all say about professional petition gatherers. They're terrible at what they do. Assuming he paid around $5 per signature, he blew $1.5 million or so on bogus ones.
He'd have been better off giving that money to a school district or just sending it to the state of California.
