MORE ON: Election 2010

California has a long history of excruciatingly close state elections – contests for high office decided by a couple of percentage points or less. But in 160 years of electoral photo finishes, nobody has ever demanded a recount of the votes in a statewide race, historians say. We... + read more

Voters from low-income neighborhoods had a tougher time with the complexities of the ranked-choice voting system in November's election. That’s the bottom line of a California Watch analysis of voting data from the electoral district that arguably faced the most complicated ballot in... + read more

San Leandro Mayor Tony Santos was a big booster of ranked-choice voting, the controversial new system for conducting local elections in California. But after losing re-election by 232 votes in the sixth round of a computerized instant runoff, Santos says he realized, too late, that ranked-... + read more

Despite feeling generally enthusiastic about the November election, voters for the first time in one major California survey said they don't trust their fellow voters to make the right decisions. According to a survey released yesterday by the Public Policy Institute of California, less... + read more

You've heard this before, but just in case the point didn't register, the National Institute for Money in State Politics last week decided to beat you over the head with it one more time: Self-funded political candidates almost always lose. Despite spending more than a quarter-billion... + read more

As her campaign for governor collapsed around her, retired eBay CEO Meg Whitman kept up a cheery, optimistic front. Perhaps she really was optimistic. On Election Day, hours before California voters rebuffed the Republican challenger in favor of Democrat Jerry Brown, Whitman wrote her... + read more

The Supreme Court's landmark Citizens United ruling earlier this year helped major corporations and other interest groups spend more than $5 million on California's Senate race without disclosing their contributors, according to independent spending reports analyzed by the Center for... + read more