A ballot initiative in California, Proposition 34, gives voters the chance to abolish capital punishment in the state. Initiatives are generally a bad way to make law, but a vote by the people is the only way to overturn the death penalty in California because that was how it was adopted in 1978.

Statewide polls about the measure have moved favorably toward repeal of the penalty in the past few months, but it is one of the important choices on Tuesday that remains too close to call. We encourage every California voter to support the initiative.

It would shift more than 725 inmates from death row to life in prison without the possibility of parole, and it would reduce by almost one-quarter the number of inmates in the United States waiting to be executed.

Passage of the initiative would end a capital punishment system that is almost certainly unconstitutional on the most fundamental basis: many who have received the state death sentence do not rank as the worst of the worst among convicted criminals. California clearly imposes the sentence in ways far broader than the “narrow category of the most serious crimes” that the Supreme Court has said is allowed by the Constitution.