I believe I was watching CNN this morning while my car was being repaired. CA has had 31 attempts at a Recall, and this 32nd one is the charm. They have about 1.5 million signatures of which about 1.2 have been verified as legit, registered voters.
What started all this, how do you verify all those voters in a timely fashion, and the ex-Gov can still run again, IIRC? Last, can the State have a Republican Gov and Democrat Lt. Gov? (They say the Democrats are reluctant to put a candidate to make it look like the Repubs are on a quest for power.)
I’m not sure how they verify the signatures, but I assume they take a statistical sample, verify those, and the project out to the total. Which is why the recall folks submit more than the req’ed armount.
Davis had the worst job approval rating of all the other Governors, so he was a lot more vulnerable. Both the Governor and Lt Gov are elected seperately, so yes, they can be of different parties. The Dems are really going out on a limb if they don’t field a candidate. Of course, Davis could end the whole flap be resigning and let his (Dem) Lt Gov assume office before the recall.
The signatures are verified first at the County level, so in theory there are 58 different groups verifying them.
I doubt that many signatures are ever gathered in Alpine County, which has a tiny population.
The law is unclear if Davis can resign. That probably won’t make a difference. Even if he resigned, the recall law (which is not very well written) seems to indicate that the election would go through and the replacement candidate would still take over. It would just elevate the lieutenant governor temporarily. The recall election would also have ramifications about who has to pay for it depending upon the outcome. If Davis is not recalled, the State has to pay him back for his expenses.
All of the elected statewide constitutional officers in California are Democrats: Governor, Lt. Governor, Treasurer, Secretary of State, Controller, Attorney General, and Insurance Commissioner.
The Superintendent of Public Instruction is the other official elected on a statewide basis, but that job is officially nonpartisan. However, that person is a Democrat also.
Some Democrats think that if there are no Democrats on the replacement election ballot it would make people less likely to want to vote for the recall. A Democrat would be less likely to boot out the incumbent Democrat, if s/he knew that the replacement was guaranteed to be a Republican.
After further checking, I have confirmed that Davis definitely CANNOT run to replace himself.
And according to the recall statutes, a voter can only vote in the replacement election if s/he voted “yes” or “no” in the recall portion of the ballot.
However, that section may be challenged in court as some believe unfairly disenfranchises people who choose to abstain.
Another interesting aspect of this is, Davis could be recalled by a 51-49 margin. Then the winner of the replacement election could win with a very small percentage of the vote.
So you could have 49% of the voters wanting to keep Davis, but only 10% wanting Candidate X as the governor and Candidate X gets the job.