Six Californias

Six Californias was a proposed initiative to split the U.S. state of California into six states. It failed to qualify as a California ballot measure for the 2016 state elections due to receiving insufficient signatures.

Venture capitalist Tim Draper launched the measure in December 2013. He spent in excess of $5 million trying to qualify the proposition for the ballot, with nearly $450,000 for political consultants.^[1] Had the measure passed, it would not have legally split California immediately; consent would eventually need to be given by both the California State Legislature and the U.S. Congress to admit the new states to the union per Article IV, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution. Rather, the measure would have established several procedures within the state government and its 58 counties to prepare California for the proposed split, and instructed the Governor of California to submit the state-splitting proposal to Congress.^[2]

The proposed states would have been named Jefferson, North California, Silicon Valley, Central California, West California, and South California. Draper's stated reasoning for the proposal was that the state is too large and ungovernable, and he therefore wanted to split California to produce six smaller and more efficient state governments.

Opponents argued that it would have been a waste of money and resources to split California and create these new governments. Critics also charged that this was a money and political power grab designed to separate California's higher-income communities from lower-income areas, and to diminish the state's reliability as a predominantly Democratic Party-supporting "blue state".