The biggest news about the slate of propositions on he California ballot this year was that there were quite a number of expectations defied.

None of the big infrastructure measures fell. In fact, most passed with comfortable margins. The conventional wisdom was that voters were going to be too wary of big-ticket spending to give the measures their okay. The other conventional wisdom was that there was just too much information to absorb about all of the infrastructure measures. The thinking seemed to be that all of the measures would cancel each other out.
On the other hand, none of the other measures on the ballot did well — except for Proposition 83, which never had any significant opposition. The two biggest-ticket measures, Propositions 86 and 87, failed at the polls by significant margins. The parental notification and eminent domain measures, Propositions 85 and 90, which were both expected to pass, failed as well.

Dan Morain of the Los Angeles Times, who covered the money side of the ballot measure campaigns, pointed out in a November 9 article that in almost all of the campaigns, the side with the most money to spend won. In the case of Proposition 87 alone, both sides spent more than $150 million, making the alternative energy initiative by far the most expensive ballot measure in US history.

Lots of last-minute money has been pouring into the No on 90 campaign. According to an article in today’s Sacramento Bee, a joint labor-management committee of the State Building and Construction Trades Council has given $1 million to No on 90.

An attorney for the group is quoted as saying, “Because the threat to infrastructure development is so big from Prop 90, the group decided this was the one place they wanted to spend money. This fund has never contributed to a campaign before. Nothing like this has ever come along.”

Most of the Yes on 90 money in the last month has continued to come from committees affiliated with real-estate developer Howard Rich, as well as from small individual contributions.

The race for controller, normally not what would be called a contentious struggle in California politics, continues to be one of the big campaign cash magnets this year.

Team 2006 (an independent expenditure committee formed by a group of casino-owning Southern California Native American tribes) and tax-preparation software firm Intuit have given over $2 million to Republican Tony Strickland.

The Ventura County Star and the San Francisco Chronicle report that Democratic candidate John Chiang has gotten a lot of late cash, with the Morongo Band of Mission Indians Native American Rights Fund giving almost $337,000 for radio ads in support of Chiang, and $1.9 million coming to his campaign coffers from Working California, a coalition of labor unions and Asian-American business groups.

An article in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times examines the role of so-called 527 committees (named after the section of the Internal Revenue Code that governs their tax-exempt status) in this year’s election. 527 committees are known as “issue advocacy groups” because their ostensible purpose is to advocate on behalf of or in opposition to political issues rather than to advocate the election or defeat of a specific candidate, a distinction which allows 527s to avoid filing campaign disclosure reports with the Federal Election Commission. Probably the two best-known 527 committees are Swift Boat Veterans and POWs for Truth, which spent $22.5 million in 2004 on TV ads and other material opposing John Kerry’s presidential bid; and MoveOn.org, which spent $21.5 million in 2004 on TV ads and other material opposing George W. Bush’s re-election campaign.

According to the Times‘ analysis of federal campaign finance reports, 527 committees have spent upwards of $300 million to influence the outcomes of various races and measures in this election. The main example closest to home is the significant amount of money that’s being spent by 527 committees on behalf of Proposition 90, although unregulated money is also being spent by 527s on behalf (or, more frequently perhaps, in opposition to) of many other ballot measures and statewide and congressional candidates.

In the Political Muscle blog, the Los Angeles Times‘ Robert Salladay highlights a new (and evolving) campaign finance database and website, MAPlight.org, which has been assembled by TakeBackCA.org. The group describes itself as “a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to educating Californians about the impact of special interests and tested, proven alternatives to special-interest influence.” So far, the MAPlight site is limited to the 2003-2004 legislative session, with plans to exapnd the coverage.

The documentation for the database says that it will detail (1) how each state legislator voted on each of the 5,000 bills in the 2003-2004 California legislative session; (2) all campaign contributions made to each legislator from 2001-2004, categorized by the interest or industry of the contributor; (3) supporters and opponents of each bill, and the industries and interests those supporters and opponents represent; (4) a description of each bill; (5) and the full text of each bill, including committee reports and amendments.

On a related note, Salladay complains that in order to do campaign finance research,

[p]olitical reporters have to create their own databases, download what is available through the Secretary of State’s website, then manually enter any cross-matching information. It’s a time-consuming process to find out how much money a lawmaker has received from a certain industry, and match those contributions to a lawmaker’s votes in the Legislature. Multiply that by 120 lawmakers, and it’s a nightmare.

It’s true that researching campaign finance data has never been easy, and there’s no excuse for it not being easier — other than the fact that there are multiple special interests with a significant investment in it not getting any easier. This pattern dovetails with the pernicious trend toward the concealment of government information that is legally supposed to be freely and publicly available, along with the watering-down of open-government laws like the Freedom of Information Act, the Brown Act, and the California Public Records Act.

For concise and clear lists of who has contributed to the 13 qualified ballot measures this campaign and in what amounts, visit out Hot Topics pages for each proposition.