Californians vote on budget woes

Californians were heading to the polls Tuesday to vote on a raft of special ballot measures touted by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to help plug the state's multi-billion-dollar budget deficit.

A total of six measures are being voted on, which will allow for increases in sales, income and vehicle taxes as well as other moves such as pay freezes for elected officials.

Schwarzenegger has warned that failure of the six budget measures will lead to cuts in essential services to avert a fresh fiscal crisis.

Schwarzenegger told legislators in a letter last week that for the first time since 1938, California faced a drop in annual income tax collections as the effects of recession took hold in the most populous US state.

Schwarzenegger said that since lawmakers passed a budget earlier in February to plug a projected 42-billion-dollar deficit with spending cuts and tax increases, California's financial situation had worsened.

Schwarzenegger said California now faces a budget shortfall of 15.4 billion dollars, almost double a March estimate of eight billion dollars.

Failure of the ballot measures being voted on Tuesday would see the deficit increase to 21.3 billion, he added.

However Schwarzenegger appeared to be facing an uphill struggle in Tuesday's vote, with several polls projecting a low turnout of around 25 percent as voters struggle to make sense of the ballot measures being proposed.

California has been battered by the recession, which has sent tax revenues nose-diving. The state, the global center of high technology and the movie industry, has a 1.8-trillion-dollar economy that generates about 13 percent of US gross domestic product.