Sixty-two people in Alpine County.

Under California Elections Code §9118, a county initiative petition must be signed by voters not less in number than 10 percent of the entire vote cast within that county for all candidates for Governor at the last gubernatorial election. Reaching it obliges the board of supervisors to act.

The last gubernatorial election was November 8, 2022. It was a top-two general, so the vote cast for all candidates is the sum of the two on the ballot. Ten percent of that county total, rounded up, is the threshold.

The numbers are set by statute, published by the state, and verifiable at any county elections office.

The limit matters too. Ten percent qualifies a measure. It does not pass one. Winning a majority at the ballot is a separate and much larger problem, and nothing on this page addresses it. See what else we concede.

California is the first node, not the boundary of the idea. What generalizes is the method: find the number that a statute already sets, the one that obliges a local body to act, publish it, and organize at that scale. What does not generalize is §9118 itself.

Citizen initiative powers are not universal. By the National Conference of State Legislatures' count, 24 states plus the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands have a statewide initiative process, and 23 plus DC and the Virgin Islands have popular referendum. Where those powers exist, the thresholds are set by that state's own code and computed from its own election records. They are not 10% of a gubernatorial vote just because California's are.

In states without citizen initiative, the levers are different rather than absent: public comment, recall, charter amendment, budget hearings, candidate filing, and the ordinary business of a board that a handful of people attend. The claim underneath this page never depended on initiative existing. An organized few decide everywhere. Where formal levers are fewer, that is more true, not less.

The constraint we hold ourselves to: no state gets a number here until it is derived from that state's official election data.

No estimates, no interpolation, and no carrying California's formula across a state line. A threshold that cannot be checked at a county elections office is worth less than no threshold at all. Each state node publishes its own, sourced the way this one is.