California’s proposition 62, the “top two” method that put all candidates for congress and state office on the June primary ballot, and only permitted the top two vote-getters to be on the November ballot, only carried 6 counties (Butte, Nevada, Lassen, Kings, Imperial and Modoc). It lost in all the high-population counties, even though it had been endorsed by the Los Angeles Times, the San Jose Mercury News, the Sacramento-Fresno-Modesto Bees, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
Ballot Access News
Edited By Richard Winger
The passage of Prop 60 (the converse of Prop 62) has a great side benefit. It removes a severe ballot access restriction for third parties — the same one that denied Terry Baum a spot on the Congressional ballot.
It guarantees a spot on the general election ballot to every party’s highest vote-getter in the primary. Before, a write-in candidate had to receive at least 1% of the total previous vote to make the general ballot. Prop 60 makes this restriction unconstitutional.