Details
California voters decide questions that most states leave to legislators. Getting one of those questions onto the ballot is a signature-gathering exercise with thresholds set by the state constitution, and the number required depends on what the measure is trying to do.
Two kinds of initiative, two different thresholds
An initiative statute changes ordinary California law. An initiative constitutional amendment changes the state constitution itself, which is a higher bar and much harder to undo afterwards.
According to the California Secretary of State, for the current cycle an initiative statute requires 546,651 valid signatures and an initiative constitutional amendment requires 874,641.
Those numbers are not arbitrary and they are not permanent — they are recalculated after each gubernatorial election, so a threshold quoted from an old cycle will be wrong.
They only appear at general elections
Since July 2011, initiative measures appear only on statewide general election ballots. A qualifying measure does not go to the next available election; it waits for the general.
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Who administers it
The Secretary of State runs the process, and maintains an Initiative Coordinator for procedural questions. The governing authorities are California Constitution, Article II, Section 8(b) and Elections Code section 9035.
Valid signatures, not collected signatures
The threshold counts valid signatures. Signatures are verified by county elections officials, and a meaningful share of any raw total is rejected — duplicates, unregistered signers, mismatched addresses. Campaigns therefore gather well beyond the headline number, and a measure announcing that it “has enough signatures” has not necessarily qualified.
What this means when you read a measure
Two things are worth checking before you decide how to vote. First, which kind it is: a constitutional amendment can only be changed by another vote of the people, while a statute can sometimes be amended by the Legislature depending on what the measure itself allows. Second, what it actually amends — the ballot label is a summary, and the operative text is the part that becomes law.
Local measures are a separate system
City and county measures qualify under their own local rules and thresholds, administered by the county elections office rather than the Secretary of State. A local measure on the same ballot did not go through the process described here.
Signature thresholds are recalculated each cycle. Check the Secretary of State for the figures applying to the measure you are looking at.