Even though in my opinion it ought to cost $200,000, the state has thankfully raised the fee for filing a ballot initiative from $200 to $2,000, making it slightly more difficult for the fanatical and insane to have us vote on insane things. This move comes in the wake of the ballot measure filed earlier this year by a bigoted Orange County attorney that called for all LGBT people to "be put to death by bullets to the head or by any other convenient method." Attorney General Kamala Harris, thankfully, got the thing thrown out by a judge for being patently unconstitutional and a "waste public resources."

Originally, a new bill was proposed that would have raised the filing fee to $8,000, but as the Chron reports, the state Senate was apparently reluctant to set the bar that high (!!!!), and brought it down to $2,000.

As the co-author of the bill, Assemblyman Evan Low (D-Campbell), pointed out, "It has been over 72 years since this aspect of the initiative process has been updated." Yes, that $200 figure has been unchanged since 1943!

$2,000 is kind of in keeping with inflation since 1943, but it's actually less — $200 would be more like $2,779 in 2015 — and just raising it this much does nothing to address the frivolousness with which ballot initiatives get launched all the time.

After the filing fee, of course, initiative sponsors still have to gather 365,880 signatures to get a measure on the ballot.

Anyway, props to the SoCal lady who paid to file the “Intolerant Jackass Act,” which required people who propose measures to murder gays and lesbians to "attend sensitivity training" and to "donate $5,000 to a pro-gay or pro-lesbian organization."