By Mark Z. Barabak, Times Staff Writers and Robert Salladay, Times Staff Writers|November 08, 2005
California's special election battle, the costliest campaign in the state's long history of do-it-yourself democracy, roared to a close Monday with a freewheeling day of north-to-south appearances by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his political foes.
Stumping from Chico to Del Mar, the governor borrowed a line from his Hollywood days. "Tomorrow is judgment day," he told senior citizens at a Del Webb retirement community in Roseville, outside Sacramento. "Tomorrow we are going to make a decision: Does the state move forward or does it move backward?"
Labor leaders, who have been at the fore of opposition to Schwarzenegger and his political agenda throughout the year, continued their attacks on the governor for calling the vote.
"This election was absolutely unnecessary," Martin Ludlow, leader of the Los Angeles County Labor Federation, told reporters at a labor rally in Burbank. "There isn't a single thing on this ballot that actually moves the state of California forward."
Polls will be open today from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Eight statewide measures are on the ballot, along with a smattering of local contests. Voters in San Diego will choose a new mayor. San Franciscans will consider a gun ban. Residents in the Los Angeles Unified School District will vote on Measure Y, a $4-billion school construction bond issue, and L.A. residents in two council districts will decide their representatives.
Voters will be trudging a well-worn path to the polls. The election marks the sixth statewide vote in just over 3 1/2 years; it was barely two years ago that Californians ousted Democrat Gray Davis and replaced him with Schwarzenegger in the movie star's first run for public office.
The governor called today's election in June, after he and Democrats in the Legislature failed to agree on the expansive agenda Schwarzenegger had outlined in January during his State of the State address. Though polls showed that voters never warmed to the special election, Schwarzenegger insisted that it was necessary to take his case to the people, in the manner envisioned by Hiram W. Johnson, the father of the state's initiative system.
Three of the measures that voters will decide were promoted early on by Schwarzenegger as part of his "year of reform" agenda. Those initiatives -- Propositions 74, 76 and 77 -- would make it more difficult for teachers to obtain job tenure, change the budget system to give the governor more say over spending and give a panel of retired judges the right to decide state political boundaries, a job now done by lawmakers.
