By Daniela Perdomo, AlterNet.org

On Tuesday voters squarely rejected two corporate-backed measures that would have cost ordinary Californians millions of dollars.

Proposition 16, cleverly disguised as the Taxpayers’ Right to Vote Act, was placed on the state ballot as a constitutional amendment requiring a two-thirds vote to create public power districts or allow local governments to purchase their own renewable power. In other words, it was a way for electric utility behemoth PG&E to further protect its monopoly. PG&E saw such potential for its bottom-line that it spent $45 million to persuade voters to approve the measure. But 52.5 percent of California voters saw through the language and knocked it down.

Similarly, Proposition 17 was framed as an opportunity for auto insurance companies to overturn a state law that prohibits insurance companies from extending “loyalty discounts” to customers even if they switched insurance providers. While Mercury Insurance, which spent nearly $16 million on the measure, claimed this was a way to lower rates for drivers, consumer advocates were successful in making the case that in turn, existing consumer protections would be weakened and insurance companies would be able to charge drivers as much as double premiums for making late payments. Prop. 17 failed, too, with 52.1 percent of voters nixing it.

The success achieved by the underfunded activists at the opposing campaigns — No on 16 and Stop Prop 17 — is all the more impressive considering the minuscule amounts of money they spent relative to the corporations that financed the measures. Put simply, the myth-busting worked, even in the face of millions of dollars.

What makes the defeats of Props 16 and 17 especially interesting is that they took place in an election that had an appalling turnout — about one-third of voters came out — when corporate money normally has the most sway, says Rick Jacobs, founder and chair of the Courage Campaign, a progressive advocacy group in California with 800,000 active members. “But we saw that people are smart. They looked through the smokescreen these two companies were using and said no,” he says.

Jacobs believes the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling certainly affects voters’ views of corporate influence in elections. But he also thinks progressive groups worked to get the vote out in effective ways. His own organization produced a Progressive Voter Guide that was passed around by like-minded groups such as CREDO and MoveOn.org, and was downloaded by at least 100,000 people. (For perspective, Prop. 16 trailed by 185,000 votes; Prop. 17 by 156,000.)

“People actually shared information with each other, and tuned out the expensive ads, and said, ‘We’re going to trust each other,’” Jacobs says. This shows that “with targeted communication to people who actually vote, you can defeat these things.”

But this is only the first fight this year. In November, more moneyed interests will once again attempt to make a mockery of the democratic process in California and trample on progressives’ goals.

The Courage Campaign is already gearing up its fight against a still-unnamed measure that would indefinitely suspend California’s beacon Clean Energy law. To date, at least 15 oil companies have contributed $1.6 million to the effort. The three largest funders — Valero, Occidental Petroleum and Tesoro — all rank in the Political Economy Research Institute’s list of the top 100 corporate polluters in the country.

There aren’t any other major corporate-backed measures on the November ballot yet, but the budget process isn’t yet over in Sacramento, and this makes it likely that a slew of unpleasant initiatives may be added later on.

Activists are looking forward to the Tax Cannabis initiative being on the November ballot. There is hope that it will bring out a whole slew of younger, more progressive-minded voters. In fact, many precincts on Tuesday reported disappointed voters who had turned out to vote for the marijuana legalization measure.

The general election on Nov. 2 is now just five months away.

Daniela Perdomo is a staff writer and editor at AlterNet. Follow Daniela on Twitter. Write her at danielaalternet [at] gmail [dot] com.

By Timm Herdt, THE VENTURA COUNTY STAR

Joe Mathews, a New America Foundation senior fellow who studies and writes about direct democracy around the globe, believes this has been a history-making week in the world of ballot propositions.

“Proposition 16,” he said Wednesday, “belongs in the Hall of Fame Of all-time bad initiatives.”

Despite a $46.5 million campaign in support of an initiative written, sponsored by and almost entirely funded by Pacific Gas & Electric Co., California voters rejected Proposition 16 on Tuesday, 52.5 percent to 47.5 percent. It was turned down in 33 of the state’s 58 counties, most strongly in the heart of the Northern California utility company’s service area.

All this despite the fact that PG&E outspent the opposition by a ratio of 465-to-1.

It was one of two single-company-sponsored initiatives to go down. Proposition 17, sponsored by Mercury General Insurance Co. to the tune of $16 million, was defeated 52.1 percent to 47.9 percent.

Mathews said the results could have been foretold. “There’s not a long history of voters carving out specific protections for specific industries,” he said.

The most recent previous example, he noted, was voters’ rejection in 2008 of a T. Boone Pickens-sponsored initiative that would have authorized California to sell $5 billion in bonds to buy specific clean-fuel vehicles that would have been powered by a fuel sold chiefly by Pickens’ company.

Opponents of the measures celebrated Wednesday and praised California voters for their ability to evaluate the initiatives independently and not be swayed by the one-sided barrage of advertising funded by PG&E and Mercury.

“Voters are a lot smarter than self-serving corporations think or hope, or the political consultants who sell their services to these corporations claim,” said Doug Heller of Consumer Watchdog, the group that led the campaign to defeat Proposition 17.

Proposition 16 was sold to voters in relentless television and radio advertisements as the “Taxpayers Right to Vote Act,” and would have required local governments to first get approval from two-thirds of their voters before spending any public money to form a public power authority or create an electricity-buying cooperative for local residents.

But in remarks to investors this spring, CEO Peter Darbee said the objective was to dissuade local governments from even considering the idea. By diminishing the number of elections on such questions, he said, PG&E would save money over time by not having to wage repeated local campaigns to defeat such proposals.

The company could not persuade the two other in-state utility companies to go along with the campaign. Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric did not support Proposition 16.

PG&E officials laid out the costs of what they intended to spend on Proposition 16, and explained to shareholders that it would be a good investment of their money.

Richard Stapler, spokesman for the campaign to defeat Proposition 16, said it’s likely that Darbee spent much of Wednesday “reading and re-reading the golden parachute clause in his contract.”

For its $46.5 million, Stapler said, “PG&E bought half a generation of bad corporate image for itself.”

In a terse statement issued early Wednesday, the Proposition 16 campaign acknowledged defeat. “Though we believe people should still have a voice in their communities about whether local governments should spend taxpayer dollars to go into the retail electricity business, it’s clear that these issues will need to be addressed community by community,” the statement said.

Critics said one of the primary motivations of Proposition 16 was to prevent communities from taking advantage of a 2001 law that permits local governments to take advantage of a process called “community choice aggregation,” allowing them to form electricity-buying cooperatives to provide residents a choice in selecting electricity providers.

Marin County and seven of its cities have formed the first such entity in the state, San Francisco is poised to follow suit, and other jurisdictions are studying the idea.

Environmental groups say these cooperatives will stimulate green-energy production. Bill Magavern, director of Sierra Club California, hailed the defeat of Proposition 16 “because it would have thrown a huge obstacle into the path of affordable clean energy.”

Stapler, whose No on 16 group raised less than $100,000, said the only advertising it was able to afford was an e-mail blast to 300,000 high-propensity voters last week. It provided links to editorials from some of California’s major newspapers, all except two of which editorialized against the measure.

“It’s a huge testament to the fact that people were reading the newspaper and they were paying attention,” Stapler said.

therdt@VCStar.com