SACRAMENTO — Ever since the near-collapse of California’s finances last year, angry voters have threatened to bolt for the ballot box and do something they’re convinced lawmakers can’t: make drastic changes to a state that’s fundamentally broken.

And indeed, Californians will face a crop of propositions in the voting booth this June, all of them promising change. But don’t expect dramatics like a constitutional convention.

Among the biggest decisions we’ll face this time: changing how we elect political candidates, tweaking car insurance rates and adding regulations for city-owned utilities. There’s another proposal that could be sweeping, someday — public funding for campaigns — but for now it’s a pilot program for one office.

As for those far-reaching issues you’ve been hearing about — water bonds, legalized marijuana and, maybe, rejiggered term limits — those will have to wait for November.

“We were sort of built up for something a bit more than were going to see” in this election, said Corey Cook, a political science professor at the University of San Francisco. “There was all this talk of massive changes, but mostly what were left with is pretty small potatoes.”

Here’s a quick rundown of the issues to help you cast your ballot — and interpret the commercials and mailers you’re already seeing.

Proposition 17

The question for voters may boil down to this: Do you trust the insurance industry? This proposition, funded by Mercury Insurance, is pitched as a boon for drivers: Anyone who goes five years without a 90-day lapse in coverage may keep their “continuous coverage” discount if they switch insurers. But the measure, in return, would allow surcharges for those drivers who haven’t had continuous coverage.

Consumer advocates have taken aim at the measure, arguing it would unfairly punish low-income drivers who may have struggled to pay for insurance continuously. But Mercury Insurance and other pro-business groups say it will help the 80 percent of drivers who have kept their coverage, allowing them to shop around for better rates without facing a penalty that currently is as high as $250.

Proposition 16

Another measure funded by a big corporation — in this case, Pacific Gas & Electric — Proposition 16 would require two-thirds approval from voters before a city or county can choose an alternate energy provider. Municipally owned utilities like Palo Alto’s and Santa Clara’s also would need permission to expand service into new territories.

PG&E has spent $28.5 million so far to frame the measure as a good governance issue, saying it will protect taxpayers from taking a loss on the often-volatile energy market. But environmental groups and other opponents argue PG&E’s real concern is for its shareholders: Without the limit, local communities are free to shop for power from sources besides the giant utility.

Proposition 15

While it would establish just a pilot program now, Proposition 15 could one day be seen as a watershed moment. In the meantime, all it would do is create a public financing apparatus for the secretary of state races in 2014 and 2018.

That public money would come from raising lobbyists’ annual state registration fees from $12.50 to $35. Lobbyists, not surprisingly, are opposed. And other critics warn that the program, if expanded, would cost too much in a state that’s already broke.

Proposition 14

The Legislature reluctantly placed this measure on the ballot as part of a tax-hike bargain last year with a politically moderate senator, Abel Maldonado, R-San Luis Obispo. If approved, it would create an “open,” or “top-two,” primary election system — paving the way, or so Maldonado hopes, for the election of more public officials whose stripes run down the middle.

In such a system, all candidates in races for the governor’s office, the Legislature and Congress — regardless of party — would be lumped together for the primary vote, with the top two vote-getters advancing to the general election.

Its backers, including Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, say it will ease partisanship. But opponents, mainly the two major parties, defend their right to choose their own nominees. And, ironically, they complain that third parties would be muzzled because they’d almost certainly never make it into the general election.

Proposition 13

This measure shares a number with the 1978 initiative that capped property taxes, but none of the controversy. It’s meant to rectify an inequity in how earthquake-retrofitted buildings are assessed for tax purposes.

Normally, retrofit work is exempt from reassessment, but that exemption expires after 15 years for unreinforced masonry buildings. This measure, which has no organized opposition, would close that loophole.
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Dana Hull and Sue McAllister of the Mercury News, and Steven Harmon and Josh Richman of Bay Area News Group contributed to this report.
Contact Denis C. Theriault at 916-441-4651 or dtheriault@mercurynews.com.

PROPOSITION 16: No

Pacific Gas and Electric, the sole sponsor of Proposition 16 and the largest for-profit private utility in the state, is manufacturing a populist cause to make it virtually impossible for public utilities, such as the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, to expand or add customers.

The result would be to reduce competition for private utilities like PG&E. This is an abuse and manipulation of the initiative process, and voters should reject it.

PG&E characterizes Proposition 16 as a “taxpayer protection” measure. Don’t be deceived. As former California Energy Commissioner John Geesman wrote in an April 11 column, the sole purpose of Proposition 16 is to “insulate PG&E from competition, permanently locking its business advantage into the state constitution.”

It would alter existing voting requirements, requiring a new two-thirds supermajority for local communities to expand public power, start up public power or buy power wholesale from independent operators. In short, PG&E wants to prevent consumers from getting electricity from alternative energy providers.

Voters should not be fooled by this attempt at winning a guaranteed monopoly for one firm.

PROPOSITION 17: No

Here we go again. California voters in 1988 approved fundamental changes in auto insurance to “protect consumers from arbitrary insurance rates and practices, to encourage a competitive insurance marketplace…and to ensure that insurance is fair, available and affordable for all Californians.”

Mercury Insurance, the state’s third-largest auto insurer, has been fighting for more than 20 years to undo that law. So we have Proposition 17, with Mercury Insurance as the lone sponsor.

This measure, under the guise of offering discounts to those who provide evidence of prior insurance (persistent coverage over time), would allow Mercury Insurance to charge others higher premiums.

As the courts have said, discounts for some are surcharges on others.

This practice was specifically prohibited under the 1988 law approved by voters, which says insurers may not use the absence of a prior policy as a factor in setting rates. There is a good reason for this provision: Higher premiums based on that factor would discourage the uninsured from getting insurance. And it would penalize some drivers – those attending college, doing an out-of-state stint in the military, losing a job, suffering temporarily from an illness.

Mercury has been sued for adding surcharges for customers who did not previously carry insurance or had lapses in their history of insurance coverage. The courts finally stopped the practice. The company came back with a proposal for a new law, but that, too was thrown out by the courts.

So Mercury Insurance is back with Proposition 17.

Don’t believe its propaganda.

Stand by the 1988 law that protects consumers, and turn back this self-serving measure sponsored by one firm.

TV political commercials have been downright boring lately. How many times can you watch GOP gubernatorial candidates Meg Whitman and Steve Poinzer endlessly bash each other for being “li-ber-al,” rolling the word off their tongues as you would “ped-o-phile” or “Tal-i-ban.”

Recently, however, Proposition 16 backers have come thundering across the vast wasteland, reaching into their deep pockets to bombard the airways on behalf of their Taxpayers Right to Vote Act.

Before I sorted through the messy details of this initiative, I was curious: Don’t taxpayers already have the right to vote? Is somebody trying to take that right away from us? Has Glenn Beck been right all this time?

But, no. Upon closer inspection it turns out that the Taxpayers Right to Vote Act is the most misleading ballot title since the California Marriage Protection Act of 2008 which in fact did nothing to protect marriage if you are gay.

Likewise, the Taxpayers Right to Vote Act takes away more than it gives.

Written and funded to the tune of some $30 million by Pacific Gas and Electric, Prop. 16 would require local governments to win the approval of two-thirds of the voters before providing electricity to residents through a local utility.

While PG&E concedes that many municipalities do hold elections to decide if they should get involved in the power business, it is demanding in this initiative that all citizens should be guaranteed a say in all cases. Sounds democratic, right? In theory, yes. In practice, PG&E understands that getting two-thirds approval on anything this side of motherhood is a steep mountain to climb and that requiring such a mandate would have a chilling effect on public officials, who lack the financial resources to face down a big bucks private utility.

The result: PG&E gets locked in as the provider and crushes any future competition.

We have already seen how this plays out. In Sacramento in 2006 and San Francisco in 2008, PG&E’s deep pockets helped defeat simple-majority ballot measures that would have allowed or expanded municipal utilities, according to media in those cities.

John Geesman, who served on the California Energy Commission from 2002-2008, sees it this way:

“If passed, Proposition 16 will actually result in less voting than occurs under existing law – at least that’s the strategy PG&E’s CEO, Peter Darbee, recently boasted about to Wall Street investors,” Gessman wrote in the Sacramento Bee.

“In Darbee’s words, `the idea was to diminish, you know, rather than year after year different communities coming in as this or that and putting this up for vote and us having to spend millions and millions of shareholder dollars to defend it repeatedly, we thought that this was a way that we could sort of diminish that.”‘

Aha. I see. So the Taxpayers Right to Vote Act is actually an attempt to prevent voting. Worse, it’s an exploitation of the initiative process by a greedy special interest group.

PG&E isn’t the only one playing games.

Mercury Insurance is sponsoring Prop. 17, which would allow auto insurance companies to base their prices in part on a driver’s history of coverage.

What that means is that state law would be revised to allow insurers to attract new customers with discounts, as long as the drivers have been insured for most of the previous five years.

Sounds good, right? But critics say such a discount could mean higher rates for drivers who were not previously insured even if it was because they didn’t own a car, had a brief lapse in coverage or were away at college or in the military (although troops stationed overseas would be protected).

It would also gut Prop. 103, approved in 1988, which established a connection between policy price and risk.

I’m guessing two things would happen if this passed. (1) Mercury and other insurers would make a lot more money boosting rates for the previously uninsured than they would spend offering discounts and (2) the resulting higher prices would result in more uninsured drivers. Then everyone’s rates would rise.

Stay tuned: In November, we get to vote on the “Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010″ which Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley says ” …will not regulate, not control nor effectively tax marijuana in California.”

robert.rector@sgvn.com

Robert Rector is a former editor with the Pasadena Star-News and Los Angeles Times.

The competition is on this year to see which company — Mercury Insurance or PG&E — is responsible for the worst abuse of California’s initiative process. PG&E’s $28million assault on potential competition through Proposition 16 will be tough to top, but Mercury Insurance is doing its best. It’s pumping $3.5 million into the campaign to convince voters that Proposition 17’s change in insurance regulation is in their best interests.

Don’t believe it. This is yet another in a long line of direct attacks on Proposition 103, which California voters passed in 1988 to rein in abuses of the insurance industry. It professes to be in consumers’ interest, but it is anything but. Vote no June 8.

The basic premise of Proposition 17 is that it would allow auto insurance companies to offer a “continuous coverage” discount to new customers who switched from one insurer to another. Proposition 103 prohibits that practice.

But that’s not the provision that has riled consumer advocates. It’s a smoke screen for allowing insurance companies to substantially increase rates for drivers who, for whatever reason, allowed their insurance to lapse for more than 90 days. That could include a wide range of people, such as drivers hospitalized for a long period of time, military personnel or unemployed Californians who couldn’t keep up their premium payments.

Mercury says this would not happen because of competition.

But anyone who was around California before the passage of Proposition 103 knows the risk is not worth taking. Until that proposition passed, insurance companies often imposed high rates on drivers who had lapses in coverage, regardless of the reason. And drivers were trapped because insurance is mandatory for drivers in this state.

Mercury Insurance sells Proposition 17 as benefiting consumers, but it’s easy to see through the claim. Look at who’s opposing the proposition and who’s backing it.

Serious consumer protection groups such as Consumers Union and Consumer Watchdog are absolutely against Proposition 17. So is U.S. Rep. John Garamendi, the former insurance commissioner, who is a longtime advocate of insurance customers’ rights.

So who are the supporters? Mercury lists three so-called consumer groups, and the San Diego Union-Tribune tracked them down. Two, the Consumers Coalition of California and the California Alliance for Consumer Protection, are “basically one-person operations that have often taken pro-industry stances,” the Union-Tribune concluded. The third, Consumers First Inc., is “being paid $5,000 a month for its work on Proposition 17. ”

Some business groups are for the proposition, but not one legitimate consumer protection organization.

Californians like to romanticize the initiative process as direct democracy by the people. Proposition 17, like PG&E’s anti-competitive Proposition 16, is the opposite: a special interest scam that would increase corporate profits and potentially harm consumers. The only way to discourage this abuse of initiatives is for voters to give an emphatic no when the worst ones come along. Don’t miss the chance in this year’s primary.

Proposition 17, which will appear on the June ballot in California, could result in big changes for purchasers of car insurance in California. The proposition was written and funded by Mercury Insurance, California’s fourth-largest auto insurance company.

The proposition would allow auto insurance companies to charge customers more if they have never previously been insured. Proposition 17 also penalizes drivers who dropped coverage for more than 90 days over the last five years (with an exception for overseas military personnel) or who missed one insurance payment.  Those who stopped driving and didn’t need insurance would be required to pay up to $1,000 more for car insurance when they restarted coverage. Current California law prevents that surcharge.

Those drivers who did maintain continuous auto insurance would be eligible for a continuous coverage discount, which they could keep if they changed insurance companies. Under current California law, drivers who switch insurance companies cannot receive the continuous coverage discount.

This is bad for consumers. My general rule is that if the insurance companies are spending millions on a ballot initiative, and Mercury is, then this is only good for them. Additionally, the insurance companies are trying to undermine the authority of the insurance commissioner. While I do not think the insurance commissioner should be an elected office, at least for now consumers get to have some say in who will protect them from the insurance companies. I am urging everyone to vote no on Prop. 17.

EDITORIAL By Guardian Staff Writers

The problem here is not just two awful laws – it’s the idea that a single company, with loads of cash, can utterly subvert the basic premise of Democracy

The California Democratic Party voted at its statewide convention April 17 to oppose Propositions 16 and 17. The San Francisco Chronicle — no friend of public power and consumer rights — endorsed strongly against both measures April 18. In fact, most major newspapers and civic groups have come out against what amounts to the most blatant attempt in California history by a pair of big corporations to buy favorable legislation at the ballot box.

And for Pacific Gas and Electric Co. and Mercury Insurance, none of that matters much.

This campaign is all about money — big gobs of money — and PG&E and Mercury have it and their opponents, so far, don’t. And if that doesn’t change in the next few weeks — if Democratic Party leaders, starting with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer — don’t immediately start making the defeat of these two measures a priority, California will send a signal to every big corporate interest in the world that its laws and policies are for sale.

Prop. 16 is being sold — in slick TV ads and mailers so deceptive they can only be called intentional lies — as giving the voters the right to have a say before local government gets into the business of selling electricity. The proposition, one PG&E flyer notes, “is our best protection against government spending your money to get into a business they [sic] know nothing about.”

Actually, government knows a lot about the electricity business. All over California, public power agencies offer better service and lower rates than the private utilities. Nationwide, residents of more than 2,000 communities have public power — and few want to give it up and return to buying electricity from private utilities.

But that’s not the point. Prop. 16 exists entirely because PG&E wanted to stop competition. The company is spending at least $35 million of its money to pass a law that would require a two-thirds vote (a nearly insurmountable obstacle) before any local agency can offer or expand local electricity service. The Chronicle, which has always opposed public power in San Francisco, argues that “Californians should be skeptical of any local government’s claim that it can deliver cheaper and cleaner power than an established utility. But they should be at least as wary when that monopoly utility wants to deprive them of that choice.”

Prop. 17 is another blatant single-interest measure, sponsored and underwritten entirely by one giant insurance company, to change the way car insurance is regulated in California. It would, among other things, allow insurers to raise rates for people who don’t already have coverage. Give up your car for a year (because you lost your job and couldn’t afford it, or decided that you could commute just as well by bicycle, or for any other reason) and the next time you buy insurance, your rates could soar — even if your driving record was clean.

The problem here is not just two awful laws — it’s the idea that a single company, with loads of cash, can utterly subvert not only the intent of California’s initiative law but the basic premise of Democracy. PG&E and Mercury were unable to get the state Legislature to do what they wanted, so they hired campaign consultants, paid millions for people to gather signatures on petitions, put the self-serving measures on the ballot, and are now flooding airwaves and mailboxes with well-crafted, effective lies. If they succeed, what’s going to stop every other sleazy big-money interest from doing the same?

Well, right now, nothing.

It’s absolutely critical, both for the issues of public power and consumer rights and for the fundamental notion that you can’t simply buy a new law, that Props. 16 and 17 are defeated. But we’re not seeing a lot of evidence that any of the most influential people in California are taking this seriously.

State Sen. Mark Leno has done tremendous work in getting the state party to oppose Prop. 16. Assembly Member Tom Ammiano has been working nonstop in Sacramento to try to get some money into the No on 16 coffers. San Francisco Sup. Ross Mirkarimi has led the statewide organizing efforts. And San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera joined a lawsuit to invalidate the law.

But in all the speeches and public statements that Pelosi, Boxer, Attorney General Jerry Brown, Lt. Gov. candidates Janice Hahn and Gavin Newsom, party chair John Burton, and others delivered at the state party convention, there was nary a mention of the fundamental importance of voting no on 16 and 17. None of the people who are capable of raising millions of dollars, the sort of money needed to defeat these measures, is making much of an effort to do it.

Props. 16 and 17 can be defeated. All it takes is a massive campaign to educate voters in a low turnout election about what these two measures actually are. But if the state’s political leaders allow these two measures to pass, California in 2010 will go down in history as the most corrupt and ungovernable state in America. And it’s very close to happening.

Merry Hyatt’s initiative to require Christmas caroling in California’s public schools was a misguided response to a fabricated problem.

Her drive didn’t come even remotely close to gathering enough signatures to put the measure on the statewide ballot. The petitions barely topped 2,000 names, which wouldn’t even be enough to recall a Redding city councilor, while Hyatt needed more than 400,000.

And voters should consider that a gift. They won’t have to waste their time sorting through one more bad initiative.

That said, just in case a weak thread of doubt lingered in anyone’s mind, the Christmas-carol measure — and the contrast between it and the equally bad measures that do make the ballot — is clear evidence of the rot infecting the initiative system.

The initiative as we know it in California was created 99 years ago by Gov. Hiram Johnson and supported overwhelmingly by the populace as a means to fight the influence of special interests. Onto that noble rootstock, however, the very same special interests have grafted their own tree, whose fruit we see in every election.

Take this June’s ballot, which includes five measures for the voters’ consideration.

The first three — Proposition 13 through 15 — were placed on the ballot by the Legislature. As constitutional issues, they require the voters’ say-so.

Two measures are actual initiatives, where signature-gatherers stood in front of post offices and grocery stores and hustled to gin up interest. But does that mean they sprouted out of grass-roots demand for change? On the contrary.

Proposition 16 is a venture of Pacific Gas & Electric Corp., which has poured tens of millions into a campaign to toughen the votes required before local governments form or expand municipal utilities. Though PG&E’s glossy mailers cast it as a measure to protect taxpayers, its sole purpose is to protect PG&E stockholders and reinforce the utility’s monopoly.

Proposition 17 is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mercury General Corp., an insurance company that has poured more than $3.5 million so far into the effort to change car-insurance regulations. It would allow insurers to reward drivers for maintaining continuous coverage, by any company, and on the flip side charge more for past lapses.

Maybe these measures are even good ideas, but what’s driving them is their sponsors’ business strategies, not the people’s voice.

Does California need a mandate for Christmas carols in schools? No, but it certainly does need reform that will restore the initiative as a tool for the public interest instead of the special interests.

REDDING, CA — Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the giant Northern California utility company, is about to test one of the central axioms of initiative politics. It goes like this: You can defeat almost any ballot proposition by spending really big money against it, because people are generally inclined to vote “no” when they are confused, but it’s much harder to pass a proposition no matter how much you spend.

Make no mistake, PG&E will spend whatever it thinks it will take to pass the innocuous-looking Proposition 16, a June ballot initiative that would require a two-thirds majority of local voters before any local government could set up a publicly run utility to sell electricity.

For PG&E feels threatened these days, even under siege. There’s a move for San Francisco, the company’s hometown, to declare itself electrically independent. There’s a similar possibility in Marin County, just north of San Francisco.

The South San Joaquin Irrigation District would like to provide power for Manteca and other cities. Altogether, such moves are afoot in more than 40 locales around California.

Essentially, these areas appear en route to setting up arrangements called community choice aggregations (CCAs), where cities and districts buy power from generators and sell it to local residents at prices of their choosing, transmitting the energy they obtain over the power grid owned and operated by big utilities like PG&E, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric.

Plainly, PG&E does not want to become something akin to a common carrier that mainly supplies transportation, but if that gradually happens, it would largely be the big utility’s own doing.

For PG&E was a prime backer of the disastrous state deregulation plan adopted in the late 1990s with approval from then-Gov. Pete Wilson. That plan saw PG&E and other utilities sell off many of their most significant power plants to the generating companies that now can sell to CCAs at negotiated prices.

CCAs also are a means of encouraging more “green” power than traditional utilities now provide, with some cities wanting to set up new solar arrays, biofuel facilities, wind farms and more.

All it takes now for a CCA to go forward is a few votes by city councils and district boards. That’s not enough of a barrier to suit PG&E. So it spent $3.5 million to qualify Proposition 16 for the ballot, put another $18.5 million into its effort in the three months after the measure was certified and will spend more than $35 million before primary Election Day in June.

Giving some idea of how little appeal this measure has to others: PG&E as of April 15 was the sole funder of Proposition 16.

Presenting itself as a benevolent giant, PG&E has already used a spate of colorful mailers to call the proposition a matter of fairness. “We believe our customers should have a say in determining whether or not their local government spends public money to take on the risks of the power business,” says company spokesman Andrew Souvall. “We want to give people more control over how their tax dollars are spent.”

But the initiative worries even well-established public utilities. Palo Alto, for one, worries it might not be able to seek new power sources without laborious public votes that would require two-thirds majorities that are always difficult to obtain. In Lodi, where the publicly owned utility is a century old, city officials worry they won’t be able to serve newly annexed areas.

Council members from more than a dozen cities label the measure “an attempt by PG&E to create a monopoly.”

As for giving taxpayers more say, they warn that if this passes, a simple majority of voters would set perpetual two-thirds-vote requirements for all future attempts to establish public power agencies.

City officials may be vocal in opposing the measure, but they can’t spend any taxpayer dollars against it, while PG&E has no limits on its spending under both federal and state law.

It’s one of two self-serving propositions this spring, each placed on the ballot by companies that stand to benefit most from them. The other is Proposition 17, sponsored by Mercury Insurance, allowing insurance companies to charge more for auto insurance bought by drivers who have not had continuous coverage up until the time they buy a new policy.

In both cases, the companies are testing that old axiom about yes votes being hard to come by, trying to pass propositions while outspending their opponents by factors of 1,000-1 or more.

If they succeed, they will surely provide fodder for the many critics of the initiative process who say it should be altered to reduce or eliminate the influence of big money on public policy.

E-mail tdelias@aol.com. For more columns, visit californiafocus.net.

Days ago, the California Department of Insurance cracked down on an insurance company that has been overcharging motorists for 15 years. The company, Los Angeles-based Mercury Insurance, wrote and is bankrolling Proposition 17.  Mercury wants you to believe that its measure will save everyone money.

When was the last time an insurance company spent $5 million on a ballot initiative to lower your rates?

In fact, Mercury’s Prop. 17 gives insurance companies the power to raise rates for millions of Californians. That is why you should vote no.

This deceptively written initiative would allow insurance companies to surcharge people who have not been previously insured – even if they are perfect drivers but never owned a car. Prop. 17 also penalizes anyone who had to drop coverage for more than 90 days over the past five years or who missed one insurance payment.

These surcharges are illegal in California today: The voters banned them in 1988. But in states that have laws similar to Prop. 17, the surcharges can raise the price of car insurance by 200 percent or more, adding thousands of dollars to the annual cost of insurance.

We must stop Prop. 17 because, if it passes, everyone will pay more:

People who use mass transit for a period of time. Ditto for college students who don’t need a car until the summer. Or people who, in this horrible economy, simply can’t afford to pay for insurance even if they are good drivers. Prop. 17 would even punish Californians who serve in the military stateside and must interrupt their coverage while in boot camp.

Californians are rightly suspicious when big corporations try to manipulate the initiative process for their own self-interest: Prop. 17 is one of two special-interest initiatives funded by big corporations on the June ballot. (The other is PG&E’s Proposition 16.)

Mercury has proved that it cannot be trusted. Arguments about 17 made by the company and its paid spokespeople have been repeatedly reviewed and rejected as false by the courts and state regulators.

And just last week, the insurance commissioner brought an administrative lawsuit against Mercury alleging that it had engaged in 55 practices that are illegal in this state, victimizing thousands of Californians. Investigators discovered that Mercury did not give customers the discounts they were entitled to and overcharged people just because they were self-employed, worked out of their homes, were waitresses or had health problems. The company even broke its own pledges to regulators that it would stop violating California laws. The company faces tens of millions of dollars in fines. Mercury Insurance’s sponsorship of Prop. 17 is like Bernie Madoff backing a ballot proposition claiming to protect investors.

The last thing California families can afford right now is an initiative that makes insurance companies less accountable for their actions and leads to more uninsured motorists and skyrocketing auto insurance premiums. That’s why Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, veterans groups and seniors all agree: Vote no on Prop. 17.

For more information, go to: www.stopprop17.org.

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Harvey Rosenfield is founder of Consumer Watchdog and author of the insurance measure Proposition 103 passed by voters in 1988.