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Comment by Simulacra | Hacker News Reader

For those of us who are not familiar with California's proposition system, have there been others like this that have been successfully challenged in court?

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A big example would be Prop 8. After courts ruled there was a constitutional right for gay marriages, a slim majority voted to pass an amendment to the state constitution banning gay marriage. This was ruled unconstitutional by a federal court. It was really weird because at the time, gay marriage was not a constitutional right nationally, so the federal courts were essentially ruling "gay marriage doesn't need to be allowed in your state, but if it is, you can't take away the right".

The most famous ballot prop ever struck down was Prop 187, passed (overwhelmingly) in 1994 and struck down as unconstitutional.

"Overwhelmingly" is a stretch, I'd say. According to Wikipedia,[0] it passed with 58.93% of the vote.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_California_Proposition_18...

59-41 is an 18% swing, and would be considered an overwhelming majority in most political endeavors. Both modern and contemporaneous accounts of that particular election refer to the results as such, but feel free to attach whatever modifier you wish.

Idk. For me, if I had 20 friends, and 12 agreed to do something, I wouldn’t say they “overwhelmingly agree”. I’d just say a majority. But politics is on a much bigger scale.

Your friends are more likely to agree with you (and each other) on things because that's one of the reasons you're friends. I can think of very few things, other than the basics like "murder is bad", that 58% of the general public agrees on.

We're not even at 59% for "ghosts don't exist": https://today.yougov.com/topics/lifestyle/articles-reports/2...

Nit pick...but in a binary decision (yes/no), the margin is only 9% as every loss on one side is a gain on the other.

For example, a 9% swing results in a tie.

as far as votes go, anything over a 1-2% margin is usually considered "overwhelming"

Sort of OT, but it's interesting to consider that on the net, Prop 187 might have actually been a positive thing for non Americans: better benefits for immigrants will generally lead to further restrictions on immigration, since the cost per immigrant goes up (and people complain about "immigrants stealing American tax dollars").

Sure, having benefits is nice, but most illegal immigrants aren't coming to the US for the benefits, so if their options are "less are allowed, but the ones that are allowed get benefits", and "more are allowed, but no benefits", almost all non-Americans would chose the second (because America even without benefits would be a massive increase in their quality of life [0]).

[0] - Or it wouldn't be a increase in quality of life, in which they wouldn't come either way. I just have a hard time thinking of many people (compared to the size of the "always better" and "always worse" groups) whose quality of life in America without benefits would be worse relative to their home country, but better than their home country if given benefits (those that are normally given to Americans) in America.

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