You don’t need to be a policy wonk to see that San Francisco has a ballot measure problem.

Each election it’s the same: measures and poison pill countermeasures, poorly written ideological slop, vanity efforts from politicians that accomplish little, piles of wasteful political mailers at your doorstep and a voter guide the length of “Ulysses” that still struggles to sufficiently explain the fine print.

Savannah Stokes cast her and her father’s ballots outside S.F. City Hall on Election Day, Nov. 5, 2024.

The good governance think tank SPUR calculated that 29% of the local measures that have appeared on San Francisco ballots since 2015 didn’t need to be there; they could have been enacted legislatively if elected officials had done their jobs.

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Meanwhile, a recent poll from the Public Policy Institute of California found that 80% of voters are fed up with long, confusing ballots. And that was just in response to statewide measures.

San Francisco gets an unprecedented double dose of ballot chaos.

Voters here will have to sort through 10 local measures in November while Oakland will have only two. In November 2024, the tally was 15 to 3. San Jose, meanwhile, had only one.

Some may rationalize this as a quirk of San Francisco’s civic character. But the truth is decidedly less sexy; the City Charter is uniquely permissive in allowing measures to qualify.

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San Francisco is the only city in California, for instance, where the mayor can unilaterally put an initiative on the ballot.

The system creates much bigger problems than the annoyance of a long ballot and a recycling bin full of mailers.

Politicians can and do manipulate the initiative process for selfish ends — to boost their public profiles and to sidestep........

© San Francisco Chronicle