The California ballot proposition system, instituted in 1911, was meant to be a form of direct democracy where ordinary voters could bypass the legislature and go directly to the voters via an initiative. What we have now is far from that.
Big money and well-funded special interests force propositions on the ballot, and propositions are sometimes quite deliberately worded to do the opposite of what they imply. This is not democracy in action and worse, there could be dozens of them on the ballot in November. Our current proposition system is broken, easily gamed, and too often does the opposite of what it was intended to do. It needs to be changed.