2026 CAA Voter Guide for Livability

Prop D quadruples the signature gathering threshold and makes it harder to place measures on the ballot, while also limiting the mayor’s and Board of Supervisors’ ability to place measures on the ballot. Increasing the signature threshold from 2% to 8%, or 42,500 signatures, will make it impossible for citizen-led, grassroots organizations to qualify a measure. Citizen initiatives have increased the minimum wage, taxed large corporations evading their fair share, provided free legal aid for anyone facing eviction, banned corrupt contributions to city hall politicians, established rent control, and funded schools, childcare and affordable housing. Prop D would raise the price tag for neighborhood groups, labor unions and community advocates, while wealthy interests would still be able to finance large signature-gathering campaigns.

San Francisco has one of the strongest mayors in the country, and Prop F would further consolidate the mayor’s power and remove important checks and balances between the executive and legislative branch of local government. Prop F would expand the mayor’s authority to unilaterally hire and fire department heads and city commissioners and would allow most commissioners to be removed at will. Working class communities rely on department leaders and commissioners willing to stand up to poor policy choices, but Prop F would make it easier to be fired for disagreeing. No mayor—moderate or progressive, popular or unpopular—should have too much power. Prop F would lead to less trust in local government and make the city less transparent and less accountable to the needs of local residents, especially marginalized groups.

Prop 39 sets dangerous new barriers that will make it harder for eligible voters in California to vote. Currently, election fraud is extremely rare, and voters’ identities are already verified when they register. However, Prop 39 seeks to amend the California Constitution to impose strict new ID requirements for in-person voting, and demands matching ID numbers (last four digits of their identification number) on their mail-in envelope. This exact match requirement is particularly hard for Asian immigrants whose names do not easily translate into English or typical American naming conventions that are required for identification forms (e.g., having a two name first name or a hyphen between names, etc.). Valid ballots can also be thrown out for other minor mistakes, such as entering a digit incorrectly. Under the guise of “election security,” Prop 39 effectively imposes a new hurdle on Asian-American, naturalized, and elderly voters—groups that already rely heavily on mail-in voting and experience higher rejection rate. When eligible members of our community are barred from voting due to a technical error, our entire community loses its voice on the issues that matter most.

The billionaires who oppose Prop 40 (above) spent millions to get Prop 41 on the ballot to confuse voters. Prop 41 is an anti-wealth tax measure that would make it significantly harder for Californians to raise money for safety net programs. Prop 41 would require recurring audits of special taxes and implement stricter rules to prevent new taxes from bypassing California’s archaic spending limits. Prop 41 is bankrolled by billionaires to kill Prop 40 and avoid paying a sliver of their $1,000,000,000+ net worth to help the rest of us. In reality, Prop 41 will curtail voters’ ability to approve new revenues critical to fund programs that support low income, working class families including affordable housing, healthcare, and public transit. California already has safeguards in place to ensure accountability of public funds. If Prop 41 receives more votes than Prop 40, it effectively prevents the billionaire tax from taking effect.

The billionaires who oppose Prop 40 (above) put Prop 42 on the ballot to confuse voters. Prop 42 would prevent California from taxing people with $1,000,000,000+ to fund life-saving services. California is set to lose tens of billions of dollars in federal funding every year for healthcare and food assistance while the wealthiest Californians will receive even larger tax breaks. Prop 42 would cause millions of Californians to lose healthcare and go hungry by blocking Prop 40, which taxes billionaires to fund healthcare. Prop 42 also blocks future taxes similar to Prop 40 (Billionaire Tax Initiative). Removing these tools ties our hands when we try to fund life-saving services responsibly and fairly. Retroactive taxes are especially effective at preventing the wealthy from dodging taxes. Prop 42 is funded by about a dozen billionaires who want to distract us from their enormous riches that could be used to support the basic needs of millions of people, including many monolingual Chinese immigrants.

Prop 43 makes it harder for communities to fund the services they depend on while weakening our voice at the ballot box. Prop 43 would require a two-thirds supermajority to pass local special taxes, a tool that communities have used to raise millions for critical public investments, including affordable housing, child care and early education, public schools, transit, healthcare, and immigrant and language-access services. Raising the bar from a simple majority to two-thirds supermajority means a determined one-third minority can block investments neighborhoods need, handing outsized power to the wealthiest and most anti-tax voters. For example, Prop 42 would have invalidated initiatives like ‘Baby’ Prop C, passed by voters in 2018 to provide affordable child care and early education to San Francisco families, because it cleared the simple majority, not supermajority threshold. Prop 43 would lock in a rule that favors well-resourced opposition over popular community priorities, making it harder to build the schools, housing, and services that help everyone thrive.

Prop 44 would put the community clinics that immigrant and working-class families depend on at risk of cutting services or closing their doors. Under the guise of “accountability,” it forces nonprofit community health centers to spend at least 90% of their revenue on a narrow definition of “mission” care. However, the services that make care reachable for our communities, including interpretation, patient navigation, transportation, and community outreach, are exactly the services most likely to be labeled “administrative” and squeezed out. The clinics serving monolingual Chinese immigrants will face steep fines simply for providing these types of community support. Prop 44 forces a lose-lose choice on our community: either we are stripped of our essential culturally-relevant services or we lose the clinics providing community support.