I know little of California politics. How do these propositions work / not work ? 60% voted yes, 7M people. For a yes/no vote like this, what’s even the point of holding such a referendum if its result is not guaranteed to be implemented? Apparently it complied with federal law, but was held back because of… I don’t really understand what, but feels undemocratic for the result to be just ignored.

This one is, IMHO, particularly meaningless.

It allows the California legislature to adopt permanent DST, if the federal law allows it. But the federal law currently allows seasonal DST or permanent standard time, not permanent DST.

Perhaps, it's useful because 1949's proposition 12 adopted DST in California, but it was superceeded by federal law in 1966; and maybe it wasn't clear if the California legislature could legislate against the will of the people as expressed in 1949; in general, the CA legislature can't overturn voter propositions.

There was an interesting "hack" of changing time zones at the time change points instead of trying to adopt permanent DST, instead of a trigger law for if/when federal law allows permanent DST.

And politicians are that short sighted that didn’t see this coming? If it only allows standard time as the only permanent one and we wanted a permanent why didn’t they just offer the one that would work?

> California had a ballot referendum for permanent DST back in 2018.

No, it didn’t.

It had a legislatively-referred statute proposition (neither an initiative, which is a law proposed by the voters, nor a referendum, which is a voter-initiated exercise moving a bill already passed by the legislature to a vote of the people) to both align California law with federal law on Daylight Savings Time (since a prior voter initiative technically locked California into both having a DST switch and having a particular DST period which was no longer the standard federally-allowed period, and the legislature cannot change laws passed by voter initiative without securing the approval of voters) and allow (but not require) the legislature to make further changes to the DST period as long as they were within federal law, including either permanent standard time or permanent DST (but the latter only if federal law was changed to allow it.)

See, https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_7,_Legislativ...

I am sure those words mean something to lawyers. To me, it's still just ignoring an overwhelming voter mandate, but with a lot of extra complicated steps.

The only voter mandate was to align California DST transition in law with federal law (because of the Supremacy Clause, this was already reflected in practice, as federal law superceded state law anyway); the ballot measure allowed the legislature to make further changes as long as federal law allowed, but did not direct any such changes, and it was very clear when we voted on it that we weren’t voting for any specific changes.

So, no, there was no voter mandate that was ignored. The legislature asked for some cleanup and discretionary authority, and the voters said yes. That's it.

Washington state passed permanent DST into law, but there is a federal law on the books saying they need federal congressional approval before they can implement it, so we are just waiting on them. We could actually just get rid of DST without federal approval, but no one really wants that.