Edwin and Joyce Koupal and their People’s lobby technically “failed” three times in their efforts at California-wide direct democracy before passing their first successful ballot initiative, the Political Reform Initiative of 1974. Yet from each loss, the Koupals learned important lessons they applied to later efforts. One of the lessons they learned was the importance of keeping it simple.

Their first campaign to get enough signatures to recall Gov. Reagan helped them refine the skills needed to gather large numbers of signatures using volunteers, and it showed them that even though they failed to get enough signatures for a recall, with little money they could get enough signatures to put an initiative on the ballot.

Their second campaign was an attempt to deal with what was then the serious issue of smog in California. Here they violated the important rule of “keep it simple” in the signature-gathering phase. They were trying to gather two signatures from voters to put both an anti-pollution state constitutional amendment on the ballot, as well as an anti-pollution law. The effort confused potential signers, preventing the Koupals from getting enough signatures to put either measure on the ballot.

Learning from this mistake, their third attempt was the single omnibus Clean Environment Act. This time with a single petition to gather signatures for, they were able to qualify for the ballot despite spending almost no money. Of course, this time they had broken the “keep it simple” mantra in the construct of the initiative. It was a complex piece of legislation that dealt with a whole range of environmental and campaign reform issues. This caused several problems. First, it made it hard to quickly explain to voters. Second, it allowed the opposition to attack it based on its weakest links, most confusing and  least popular provisions. (In ballot initiative campaigns, the most unpopular, weakest link is almost always what the opposition will go after to bring the whole initiative down.) Finally, by dealing with so many issues at once, the legislation brought together a diverse coalition of big spending corporations and special interests that each had a financial stake in making sure the whole law failed for different reasons. While this was the first proposition the People’s Lobby got on the ballot, it suffered solid defeat at the hands of the voters.

The Koupals eventually did win big by bringing together a solid group of allies on a single, easy to understand issue which had broad popular support. In the grand tradition of progressive ballot initiative reformers, the issue was corruption in politics. With then-California Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown and Common Cause, the People’s Lobby crafted the Political Reform Initiative of 1974. The coalition got early buy-in from many of the important left-leaning groups at the time, including the NAACP and Sierra Club.

The proposition was a fairly easy to explain, direct assault on the corrupting influence of money in our politics at a time when the Watergate scandal was unfolding. It did things like require full disclosure of large contributions, prohibit contributions from lobbyists, limit campaign spending, require disclosure of potential conflict of interests and change signature requirements. This time the proposition won in a landslide. Unfortunately, Ed Koupal, sick with colon cancer, died only a few years later in 1976.

In politics in general, the motto “keep it simple” is just general good advice. In the ballot initiative process, it is critical. An initiative once put on the ballot can’t be changed and must be wholly rejected or approved. If you can’t easily explain to people what you want to do, you have almost no chance of convincing them to support you.