Silicon Valley venture capitalist Tim Draper's hopes of splitting California into six states took a blow this week after the state ruled his team did not collect enough valid signatures to make it onto the 2016 ballot.
The Six Californias initiative claimed that dividing one of America's largest state into six would make it more governable. The plan would have created America's richest state, dubbed Silicon Valley, and its poorest, named Central California.
The plan was never short of naysayers.
JANELLE WANG ON KNTV: "There must be some potential pit falls."
LARRY GERTSON: "Oh yeah *laughs openly* there certainly are as far as the critics are concerned."
Stephen Colbert: "I'm tired of the whole Idea of a melting pot in America. I think the metaphor you're going for here is one of those Tupperware things where you get to seal off every container."
Criticism aside, Draper's camp did manage to collect just over 750,000 signatures deemed valid by the California government. It's still a ways off from the more than 800,000 the proposal needed to pass — but the signatures collected are nothing to sneeze at either.
Draper said in a statement he does plan to challenge that decision. He claims that his camp did collect enough signatures and that government's supposedly incorrect ruling is "yet another example of the dysfunction of the current system."
Regardless, a political expert said that the Six State California discussion would be helpful for the state. "It could've been an important social debate because it gave voice to a sense of alienation in California. This wasn't a cure that Californians were going to swallow, but it would've been good for the state to have a conversation about the illness."
This video includes an image from Getty Images.
