Prop 1 Vote Remains Close: 91% Of The Vote In, Less Than 25,000 Difference

Following the most recent vote tabulations by the California Secretary of State’s office on Wednesday evening, Proposition 1 remained at virtual deadlock, with the yes vote narrowly ahead of the no vote 3,371,988 to 3,348,945, or 50.17% to 49.83%.

Proposition 1, if passed, would expand the state’s mental health infrastructure on a $6.4 billion bond. Propped up by Governor Newsom last year and into 2024, Prop 1 would not only enact the new bond that would create housing for veterans and build 10,000 beds for those undergoing mental health and addiction treatment, but it would also redirect funding from a previous proposition. The redirected funding, around $4 billion comes from Proposition 63, also known as the Mental Health Services Act. Passed by a narrow margin of 53%-47% in 2004, Prop 63 instituted a millionaire’s tax, or  a surcharge of 1 percent on the portion of a taxpayer’s taxable income that exceeded $1 million, that went into mental health services. Under Prop 1, new requirements on spending would be put in, which would redirect funding to housing and treatment for the most severely affected people with mental and addiction issues.

Only a few months ago, Proposition 1 seemed like it was going to pass. Polls showed it to be slightly up at the beginning of the year. But it soon began to trend downward as a growing number of people and groups found problems with it. In particular, the ACLU, the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, the League of Women Voters of California and Mental Health America in California found that Prop 1 would likely cost taxpayers $12 billion over the next three years as it is paid off and would siphon money from needed homeless projects.

Newsom , alarmed at the sudden closeness of the vote, began a huge statewide ad blitz to push his pet proposition. However, a growing red wave of voters was largely keeping up with any gains Newsom saw. Spurred by the Republican Primary, the Senate Primary, and the worry that a “yes” vote on Prop 1 was a vote for Newsom in the future, polls in the last few weeks showed that voters were split.

Initial results overnight showed that the “yes” votes were up by .5%. However, updates later into the week showed that the vote was now much closer, with less than 25,000 votes separating the two with only 51% of votes counted – 1,958,171 for the proposition and 1,936,817 against it. The latest update on Wednesday, which Prop 1 supporters had hoped to be the clinching moment for them, instead showed the race being just as close as before, with 3,371,988, or 50.17%, in favor and 3,348,945, or 49.83%, against.

Groups against Prop 1 come closer to conceding vote due to voting trends in remaining areas with uncounted votes

Despite the closeness of the race and 91% having already been counted, the group Californians Against Proposition 1 noted this week that Prop 1 was likely to succeed, as the yes side has kept a narrow but steady lead in the past week and because the areas where votes still need to be counted have voted largely in favor of Prop 1 already.

“We have bad news. We have been monitoring the vote counts as they come in at a high level of detail, every day, sometimes several times per day,” said the group this week. “The “yes” side of the vote has maintained a steady lead of 25,000 or more votes throughout the period of March 6-12. The more than 2.2 million votes counted after election day have come in at a rate of 50.8% “yes.” There are just 1.2 million left to count. Much of the uncounted vote will come from areas that have voted heavily “yes.”

“The final result will be painfully close. But a reversal of the outcome to a “no” vote would require final tallies that are mathematically highly improbable. As much as we wish we could see that, it is time to face the reality that Prop. 1 will pass. We tried hard to get the word out about the damage this measure will cause. It does not just ‘reform’ the mental health system, it reduces funding for mental health services by redirecting $1 billion per year.

“Prop. 1 could be a humanitarian disaster if it is not well managed. The incredibly narrow approval of Prop. 1 is the voters saying ‘do not let that happen.’ We know that many people who voted ‘yes’ on Prop. 1 thought they were doing a good thing. Before the vote, we found it easy to show people how Prop. 1 would actually hurt people, and that changed votes. But you have to talk to millions of people in California to influence an election. Our grassroots campaign was hard-pressed to compete with $20 million on the ‘yes’ side, a campaign so overconfident and overstuffed with cash that they ran a Super Bowl ad.

“Still, we almost won. Our message and our truth were that powerful.”

However, neither side has been officially declared a winner yet, with that decision likely to come  later this month or in early April at the latest. And even if Prop 1 does officially pass, many experts note that supporters like Governor Newsom will have a hard time claiming victory.

“He had been expecting to win by at least several points in the primary, not by a tiny fraction of one,” explained Stephanie Lewis, a pollster in Southern California, to the Globe on Thursday. “And he loves to say things like ‘the overwhelming majority of Californians’ or other little phrases like that when describing wins. He can’t here. One, the vote ain’t over. Two, while he can still say he won, he can’t say that the victory was by a wide margin. Nearly half the state said no to him and his policy here. We haven’t seen that kind of rejection like that against him.

“If you’re disheartened that Prop 1 passed, keep that in mind. The things he backs are becoming less popular, and this could lead to some more rejections of policies of his in the next few years. His popularity is going down, and votes like this help prove it. That will be hard to explain in a few years when he starts making more serious inroads into becoming president.”

Final tallies of the Prop 1 vote are to come out in the coming weeks.