Six Californias

Article IV, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution outlines the procedure for the admission of new U.S. states. It reads:

New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.

There are several precedents for the partition of states:

• Vermont, admitted in 1791, was created from territory to which a disputed claim was asserted by New York. (It had formerly also been claimed by New Hampshire, but that claim had been given up in 1782. Vermont had already been under a de facto separate government for over a decade.) New York's legislature consented in 1790.
• Kentucky split from Virginia in 1792. Virginia's legislature consented to the partition when the Articles of Confederation were still in effect, but then the new Constitution of the United States superseded the Articles and the legislature's consent was passed again.[3]
• North Carolina ceded territory to the federal government which became the Southwest Territory and five years later in 1796 became the state of Tennessee;
• Georgia ceded land that later became part of Alabama.

Two instances were a result of slavery:

• The 1820 Missouri Compromise balanced the number of free and slave states by splitting Maine from Massachusetts in 1820 and admitting Missouri in 1821. However, the partition of Maine from Massachusetts had been proposed well over three decades earlier for reasons other than slavery.
• West Virginia was admitted to the U.S. as a separate state in 1863 when the Union-loyal Restored Government of Virginia broke from Virginia after Virginia joined the Confederate States of America in 1861, though most of the new state's counties had in fact supported secession.

California has been the subject of more than 220 proposals to divide it into multiple states,[4] including at least 27 serious proposals.[5] Several of these attempts proposed the creation of a State of Jefferson that would span the contiguous, mostly rural area of southern Oregon and northern California.

Six Californias was introduced in December 2013 by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper.[6][7] California Secretary of State Debra Bowen approved Draper to begin collecting petition signatures in February 2014.[8] The petition needed to submit sufficient valid signatures of registered California voters by July 18, 2014, to qualify as a November election ballot proposition.[9] As the petition deadline drew closer, Draper suggested that the initiative would be postponed to 2016, since that would allow more time to educate the public on the initiative.[10][11]

On July 14, Draper announced that the proposal received 1.3 million signatures, enough to qualify for the ballot, and began submitting them to elections officials.[12][13] Had sufficient signatures been verified, per California law, it would have qualified for the November 2016 state ballot. On September 12, 2014, California state election officials announced that based on random sampling of the submitted signatures, only an estimated 752,685 signatures were valid, which was insufficient not only to qualify the initiative for the ballot, but also to trigger a complete verification of all submitted signatures.[14]

These estimated valid signatures were 66.15% of the 1,137,844 submitted signatures.[15] At least 807,615 signatures, 70.98% of the submitted signatures, had to be valid for the measure to qualify for the ballot. At least 767,235 signatures, 67.43% of the submitted signatures, had to be estimated to be valid in order for the petition to qualify for a second mandatory phase to review all of the submitted signatures, not just random samples.[16]

Also on September 12, 2014, the campaign announced its intent to "... conduct a review of the signatures determined to be invalid by the registrars in several counties to determine if they were in fact valid signatures." [17] To qualify for a full check of all signatures in all fifty-eight counties, the review must find about 450 wrongly invalidated signatures among those submitted in the fifteen counties that sampled 3% of the total signatures submitted in each of those fifteen counties. As of November 17, 2014, the campaign has not updated its web site with information about the results of their review of the supposedly invalid signatures.

Opponents of the initiative filed a complaint with Secretary of State Debra Bowen on July 17, 2014, asking her office to investigate allegations of voter fraud. The complaint, filed on behalf of the OneCalifornia committee formally opposing the Six Californias initiative, follows reports that signature gatherers for Six Californias claimed that those who signed "would be opposing the Attorney General of California's intention to split the state into six states" – the exact opposite of the petitions intentions.[18] Signature gathering for Six Californias was carried out by Arno Political Consultants.[19] The campaign for Six Californias also paid $51,000 to Crowds on Demand, a service that sends paid actors to form crowds at gatherings such as political rallies.[20][21] Organizers for Six Californias stated Crowds on Demand provided personnel for signature gathering.[22]

The measure outlined the proposed new states, then established several procedures within the state government and all the counties to prepare California for the proposed split. The proposal would then have needed the approval of voters in California, the Congress of the United States (per Article IV, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution), and the California State Legislature.[9]

Proposed states

Map of the Six Californias

  Jefferson

  North California

  Silicon Valley

  Central California

  West California

  South California

Six Californias would have divided the state's 58 counties among six new states: Jefferson (based on the historic State of Jefferson proposal), North California, Silicon Valley, Central California, West California, and South California.[9]

Proposed state	Estimated population[2]
Jefferson	949,409
North California	3,820,438
Silicon Valley	6,828,617
Central California	4,232,419
West California	11,563,717
South California	10,809,997

The California Legislative Analyst's Office, in a report that covered a wide variety of impacts, noted a wide disparity of incomes and tax bases in the proposed states. The report estimated that the state of Silicon Valley would have the nation's highest per capita personal income (PCPI) whereas the state of Central California would have the nation's lowest PCPI. During the two-year period between passage of the measure, the 24-member Commission would have had to decide how the California state resources would be divided and how the present debt would be distributed between the six states. The areas most affected would have been required to make decisions including school funding, health and social services, water management, and the handling of prisons. Each new state would have also been faced with new budgets, establishing methods of revenue, funding infrastructure, public employee compensation, and new, revised or discarded laws. Most likely, many issues would have had to be resolved by the courts.[2] The Huffington Post further published a map detailing how splitting California would result in these separate rich states and poor states.[25]

Vikram Amar wrote a preliminary analysis of the difficulties that the Six Californias measure would face. His piece, published by the law group Justia, raised several constitutional questions on the proposal, including whether the people of a U.S. state can authorize such a split by popular initiative, and whether several new states can be validly created under Article IV by splitting the territory of a single existing state. Furthermore, Draper, as the appointed "Agent of the State of California" for the purpose of defending the proposal in court, may not actually be able to do so because of both the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Hollingsworth v. Perry; and Article II, Section 12, of the California Constitution that prohibits any constitutional amendment that names a specific individual to hold a particular office.[24] Amar also wrote that the measure might be blocked by the California courts on grounds that it is a revision to the California constitution instead of an amendment. A proposed revision to the California constitution, a change that substantially alters the state's basic governmental framework, must originate from either the Legislature or a constitutional convention, not from a ballot initiative.[26]

A prior study by the state assembly report would allow for multistate reorganization of the university system, and any other present state function. It would be the job of the 24 member commission to decide.[2] If the university system were to split, a report identified a potential increase in tuition for current Californians who attend a University of California campus, particularly residents in California's most northern state of Jefferson who would not have a single UC campus in the state. Based on the report's findings, Six Californias could result in over 60% of California students being classified as out-of-state, costing Californian families $2.5 billion more per year.[27] California's prison system is also unequally spread out. If the prison system were to split, the new urban states of Silicon Valley and West California would each have to construct several new prisons since most of the current ones in California are located in the rural areas. California's current water and water rights issues would also have to have been resolved among the new states. The California, Hetch Hetchy, Los Angeles, Mokelumne, and other major aqueducts will cross the new state lines. If not reorganized into a multistate function, this will result in the new states of Silicon Valley and West California having to heavily rely on importing water from the other states.[2]

The report by the California Legislative Analyst's Office specifically named several other major issues that could have been affected by the decisions made by the leaders of each new state: crime, public safety and gun control/ownership; economic development; the environment; public employee pensions; laws related to marriage and family; taxes; and transportation and other infrastructure.[2] Each new state could adopt different laws, either stricter or more lenient, on those issues than what California currently has on the books. These differing policies would have in turn eventually result in long-term demographic and economic changes, as various groups of people will want to migrate to those new states with laws more favorable to them.[2]

Vikram Amar agrees there are governance problems in California. The demographic, cultural, political and economic differences between the urban and rural areas of California are obvious, as are the tensions between the major urban areas of San Francisco and Los Angeles. However splitting California is a radical change, and a major question is whether the newly formed poorer states can make it without the tax revenues from the major metropolitan areas. The political makeup in Washington D.C. at the time of approval, may determine the success or failure of six Californias. Twelve Senators would result from six Californias, as well as a probable change in total house House seats and their electoral votes. According to Amar, "we could expect four [Senators] (from Silicon Valley and West California) to consistently be Democrats, and four (from Jefferson and Central California) to lean Republican, with the other four (from Northern California and South California) harder to predict".[24]

Cal 3's planned states

  Northern California

  California

  Southern California

A subsequent Draper initiative to divide California was launched in August 2017. The measure was titled by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra "Division of California into Three States",[38] though it is commonly known as Cal 3. On June 13, 2018 it was announced that among the 600,000 signatures the initiative had received there were more than the 365,880 valid signatures needed, and the initiative would be put to the vote in November 2018.[39] However, in July 2018, the California Supreme Court pulled it from the ballot for further state constitutional review.[40]

• Initiative text
• Ballotpedia page on the initiative