Vote Yes on
California’s Prop 50
It Will Authorize Temporary Changes
to Congressional District Maps
October 9, 2025
California county elections officials have begun mailing vote-by-mail ballots for the November 4, 2025, Statewide Special Election, and ballot drop boxes are now open throughout the state. Voters can track their ballot by signing up at wheresmyballot.sos.ca.gov. Register to vote or update your voter registration at registertovote.ca.gov. Check your voter registration status at voterstatus.sos.ca.gov. For more information, including the nearest ballot drop boxes and polling places to you, see countyofsb.org/164/Elections.
At a certain point, every lobster trapped in a pot as the water begins to boil must wonder whether it’s too late. Tragically, we, as a nation, now find ourselves asking the same question. For the lobsters, the answer is always the same — yes, it’s too late. But for us as Americans — and more immediately as Californians — we still have a fighting chance.
A chance to do what? To tip the scales back? To restore checks and balances? To return to a government of constitutional law, not martial law? All of the above.
That is why the Independent is recommending — most urgently — that you vote Yes on Prop 50 in California’s special election on November 4, less than a month away.
On the ballot, Prop 50 is formally called “The Election Rigging Response Act.” We could more accurately call it: “The Temporary Emergency Gerrymandering Act.”
If passed, Prop 50 would allow California to bypass its nonpartisan commission that redraws congressional districts’ boundary lines. The commission, mandated by our state’s Constitution, was approved by voters in a 2008 election.
If Prop 50 is passed, the Governor and Legislature would be allowed to redraw — or gerrymander — the map to create five additional congressional districts that would favor Democratic candidates based on party registrations.
Yes, this is political gerrymandering, just as its critics claim. And it sets aside, for five years, the reform-minded nonpartisan commission.
But sometimes, in desperate times, desperate acts are needed. And we believe desperate times are upon us.
President Donald Trump has called on Republican governors across the country to redraw their own congressional maps, giving him and his MAGA movement the safe buffer needed in the midterm elections of November 2026 to continue his control over Congress. Texas was the first to answer his call.
Right now, Republicans enjoy only a precarious three-vote advantage in a bitterly divided Congress. Typically, in the mid-term elections, the president’s party suffers a shellacking. In Trump’s first term of office, for example, Republicans lost 40 Congressional seats — an epic rout.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott has already — with great fanfare and melodramatic resistance — redrawn the Lone Star state’s congressional district lines to create what he hopes will be five additional Republican seats. Other Republican states are in a hurry to follow suit.
California’s Governor Gavin Newsom responded to Texas by unveiling a competing gerrymandering plan of his own. But unlike Texas — where the governor is imbued with unilateral authority — Newsom needs a vote of the people to set aside the constitutional amendment that instituted an independent commission of private citizens in 2008. Hence Proposition 50
For the record, the Independent strongly endorsed the reform measure. So in this context, there’s nothing light, flippant, or heedless about our recommendation to make such a major change off course.
Elections have consequences. The side we back doesn’t always win. That’s life. We have lived through many Republican administrations with all the usual grumblings but never have we come close to our current situation.
It appears to us that the real agenda of this President of the United States and his MAGA movement is to inflame our already divided country, celebrate chaos, destroy our institutions, and stamp out contrary thought. If we don’t agree with him, we don’t belong here.
The remark by France’s absolute monarch Louis XIV “L’etat, c’est moi,” springs disturbingly to mind. Only the French could give the sounds of dictatorship a charming ring. But the only ringing we hear from our burgeoning dictator are alarm bells.
This past week, the president and his “secretary of war” convened a gathering of 800 of the nation’s highest-ranking military leaders in one room and put them on notice that they needed to be on guard against what they called “the enemy from within.” Trump suggested that U.S. cities — such as Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, and Washington D.C. — were “dangerous cities” and should be used as “training grounds” for our military.
The people living in these American cities are “no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.”
Trump’s rhetoric has always been confoundingly inflammatory. Was he to be taken literally or merely seriously? Trump has put that question to rest.
It’s both.
Not since the Civil War and its festering aftermath have we witnessed such a display of military might on American soil.
No other president — in this century or the last — has been so eager to dispatch American troops — U.S. Marines and members of the National Guard — to occupy the streets of American cities.
It’s notable that all the mayors of the cities involved are Democrats. And it’s notable that all the cities have large populations of non-white residents.
“The enemy from within?”
What does this have to do with Prop 50? Everything.
Right now, Trump enjoys absolute control of the White House, Congress, and the Senate. And with few notable exceptions, he holds absolute sway over the Supreme Court.
The five additional Democratic congressional seats Newsom hopes to harvest will not be enough by itself to shift the balance of power in the House. Other Democratic states will have to join in. Some already are. But without the five additional Democratic seats that California — one of the two largest states in the union — promises to deliver, the chances of any success are grimly remote. Without Prop 50, we will all end up like the lobster in the pot.
A recent New York Times poll showed 44 percent of respondents supported what Trump was trying to accomplish but that many were troubled by how he did it. That means more than half the country does not agree. When asked to volunteer what they thought the single most pressing problem was, more than 30 percent said our political system was broken. No other issue — not even the economy — came close to that number.
We share many of the concerns raised by critics of Prop 50. Truly, we sympathize. But Prop 50 will expire in 2030 when the state’s nonpartisan citizens committee will be reinstated and charged once again with drawing the district lines for future elections. But with no other credible check to a government that’s currently so unhinged and unbalanced, we support a Yes vote on Proposition 50 with great enthusiasm.
