Election Reform - Businessman wants to expand the California legislature

Restoring Democracy To California

• A flawed plan to restore democracy to California may appear on the 2014 ballot.  Flawed, but at least someone is trying to do something to end the corruption of our elections.

A San Diego businessman is campaigning to expand California’s 120-member legislature to the size of a small town.

John Cox’s Rescue California was approved Thursday to circulate petitions for a ballot measure that would expand the state’s Assembly and Senate to a total of 12,000 members. Assembly members would represent 5,000 people and senators would represent 10,000 people.

State Senators in California currently represent roughly 950,000 people, meaning they and counterparts in Texas have larger districts than members of the U.S. House. Roughly 475,000 people live in each California Assembly district reports the Washington Post.

The group says its proposal targets special interests.

“One of my favorite expressions is we don’t elect policy leaders in the legislature, we elect professional fundraisers,” Cox, 56, told the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Cox was also once president of the Cook County Republican Party in Illinois and the first Republican to formally seek the party’s 2008 nomination for president of the United States, according to NBC’s San Diego affiliate.

The proposal to expand California’s legislature may seem like it would make representation unrealistically local, but there are members in other states with fewer residents.

• In New Hampshire, the state with the largest legislative body with 390 members in the lower chamber. Each House member represents about 3,300 people.
• In Vermont, each district houses roughly 4,175 residents with 150 members in the lower house. In no state, however, do members of the upper chamber represent fewer than 10,000 residents, as is proposed under the plan.
• Senators in North Dakota represent roughly 14,890 residents and has 47 members.
• Even larger sates like Pennsylvania have better representation.  Their lower house has 203 members with each district representing a modest 62,128 people.
• In Indiana their 100 member lower house represents 65,846 people per district. 

Under the California proposal, every hundred legislators would elect one among them to represent their interests in the state capital— thus maintaining a 120-member body in Sacramento. To qualify the measure for the ballot, the group will have to collect 807,615 signatures from registered voters by May 19.

Pennsylvania House of Representatives
Insanity.  In California each of the 80 Assembly members represents a massive and unmanageable 475,000 people. But in the lower house of Pennsylvania (above) there are 203 members with each district representing a modest 62,128 people.

California - The best legislature money can buy.
Because of the huge size of California's legislative districts our "representatives" are totally bought and paid for by special interest Billionaire Cartels of big business and labor.  Millions of dollars are spent by corrupt special interest groups looking to buy their very own legislator.
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If you reform the State Assembly with some level of higher membership and smaller districts then the average person will be able to run for office without mountains of corrupt campaign money.
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My suggestion is cap Assembly seats at 100,000 people - about the size of a small city.  Running for the Assembly would be much like running for a local city council seat.  This would grow the California Assembly from 80 to about 360 members.
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This is neither a liberal nor a conservative idea.  This is about bipartisan democracy and legislators as free from the corruption of big money as possible.