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And this points to why Reform and Savings is fighting to get on the ballot alongside the repealers.
"It's a political chess game between two factions," says Peter Keane, dean emeritus at Golden Gate University Law School. "What [Reform and Savings] is mainly looking for is to get more votes than the anti-death penalty initiative."
Since both appear headed to the ballot — each snagged the requisite signatures, Justice That Works gathering 8,000 more — it means that if both receive 50 percent "yes" votes, then the fight goes mano a mano. Whichever gets more votes, wins.
The trick to winning that strategy is changing the argument from the death penalty being about emotions to one that's about finances.
If both sides are offering the concept of savings — the bold print of Reform and Savings promises "tens of millions of dollars" while Justice That Works says "$150 million annually" — and not enough people read the fine print, then those persuaded by that will vote "yes" on both proposals.
What the Reform and Savings folks need, then, is for a revenge-seeker voting bloc to turn out and put them slightly over the edge.
November's voting booth may also be the scene of the other potential strategy, wherein voters pull the curtain behind them, plow through the front of the ballot, and blow a fuse at the Proposition section.
If there are two measures that seem to be about the same thing, voters will vote "no" on both, better safe than sorry.
"It would change the dynamic considerably if there were two competing measures on the ballot," says Quentin Mecke, the former San Francisco politico now serving as spokesperson for Justice That Works.
In this strategy, the role of Reform and Savings is to play defense by dragging both proposals down below 50 percent, keeping everything status quo until the next inevitable fight over the death penalty in 2020.
When I ask Ramos if either of these is the actual reason for trying to get on this year's ballot, he denies it, saying the proposal has been in the works since 2012. (Technically, Reform and Savings was submitted to the Secretary of State one month after Justice That Works, a hastiness that perhaps accounts for the sloppy copy.)
"We won [the battle over Prop. 34 in 2012] because we told the public we're going to fix the death penalty," Ramos says. But the close call also gave them a script to use during this bout.
"We're showing the counterargument of the finances," he says. "They can argue one side, and we can argue the other."
But the actual fight's about more than dollars and cents, and everyone knows it. At the end of our conversation, Ramos swerves into what he feels it's really about.
"All [repeal advocates] can talk about is finances," he concludes. "I would say, how can you put a price tag on a little baby girl or boy, on kidnap victims brutally murdered. Or a police officer killed in the line of duty. You can't put a dollar figure on that. You cannot."
Which takes us back to Berkeley Bowl, where the signature-hunter is doing a good job at filling that clipboard.
Snazzy headlines about "reform" sell; who doesn't want things to get better? So does the word "savings," especially now that Californians have heard for the past eight years about how the death penalty system is hemorrhaging more money than a Powerball winner.
He's getting his signatures, despite the proposal being unable to accomplish either goal it claims to, despite the viewpoints of the signee probably not being ideologically aligned. Because of the linguistic subterfuge, the proposal will make its way onto the November ballot, its worth to be judged by the general California electorate who are almost evenly split on what to do with the death penalty.
According to that Field Poll from earlier this year, 48 percent of Californians want to speed up the death penalty, and 47 percent want to abolish it.
Voters have already decided that the death penalty is broken, but will the fix come by ending it or by pushing the process into hyperspeed?
As the moral question is weighed, the gurney in San Quentin's unused death chamber collects dust. And the line of those waiting to get strapped on — 743 and counting — continues to grow.
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