In 2020, Californians will decide a veto referendum to repeal Senate Bill 10 (SB 10), which would make California the first state to end the use of cash bail for all detained suspects awaiting trials. Instead, SB 10 would institute a system of risk assessments to determine whether a detained suspect should be granted pretrial release and under what conditions.

 

California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed SB 10 on August 28, 2018, and the veto referendum to overturn the bill was filed on August 29. The American Bail Coalition, a nonprofit trade association, organized the political action committee Californians Against the Reckless Bail Scheme to advocate for the veto referendum. The PAC had raised $3.00 million as of September 30, 2018, with the next campaign finance report due on January 31, 2019. The top-ten donors to the committee were bail bond businesses, owners of bail bond businesses, or companies that provided services or insurance to bail bond businesses.

 

On November 20, 2018, proponents reported filing 576,745 signatures with election officials. At least 365,880 (63.44 percent) needed to be valid for the referendum to appear on the ballot. On January 16, 2019, the office of Secretary of State Alex Padilla reported that an estimated 80.69 percent of the signatures were valid, putting the targeted law, SB 10, on hold until voters decide the bill’s fate in 2020.

 

In the California State Legislature, one Republican supported SB 10, while most Democrats (67 of 81) voted to pass the bill. Some organizations, including the ACLU of California and Human Rights Watch, that oppose the existing structure of cash bail also testified against SB 10, taking issue with how risk assessments were going to be implemented and used. John Raphling, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, said, “We will not be joining the bail industry’s efforts, but we are not fighting for SB 10. We have a different vision of how to reform the pretrial detention system.”

 

Besides the Cash Bail Referendum, Californians will also decide a ballot initiative designed to amend or repeal several criminal sentencing and supervision laws passed during the second tenure of Gov. Brown (2011-2019). As of January 2019, three citizen-initiated measures had qualified for the ballot. The number of citizen-initiated measures on the 2020 California ballot will be set 131 days before the 2020 general election, which is June 25, 2020.