More news:
Arnold’s in, Cruz Bustamante (the Lt. Gov.) and John Garamendi (the State Insurance Commissioneer) are in, Issa is out, and it appears that Riordan won’t run.
:eek:
Issa is out? ISSA?! Gawd, what was he hiding?
If they weren’t laughing before, I imagine they’re laughing now.
Whoops! Posted too soon in the heat of the moment…
I mean, wasn’t the whole shindig basically his idea? Has he endorsed anyone else? Did he say why he left?
Bustamente (who should be gov automatically IMO if the recall passes, but MO doesn’t count) is the only Dem who makes sense running for me, because he has been elected with the understanding that he could become governor.
WTH are the ballots going to look like? How are the districts going to cope? In NYC we have these old Eisenhower-era machines and people are grouped by party, but we couldn’t cope with 50 or so names for one office. I guess it’ll have to be strictly alphabetical by name, because WTF is Angelyne’s party?
OMG, will there be debates?? Comedy gold! Although since it’s about the future of our most populous state, it’ll be a laugh because otherwise I’ll cry kind of thing. Don’t envy you guys.
According to www.yahoo.com, he’s not endorsing anyone, and he claimed that he wanted to stay in Congress in order to restore peace in the Middle East.
Peter Ueberroth (the former baseball commissioneer) has now joined the race.
The order of the candidates will be at random, varying from county to county, and they will use a non-partisan ballot.
What happens if the current voting equipment can’t handle the number of candidates? There could be hundreds. This could end up being a bigger circus than the Florida presidential election.
Yeah, right. :rolleyes: Maybe he finally realized that if he ran for governor, everyone would be slinging brickabats at him and pointing out that the entire recall effort was a naked power grab for himself.
Hoo boy. Between Schwarzenegger, Gary Coleman, and now Ueberroth, this whole thing is just getting goofier by the minute…
Recall Issa!
Don’t blame me. Those were his claims, not mine.
(BTW, as a federal official, Issa can’t be recalled under Californian law, and his district is such that it is unlikely that he’ll ever retire, unless he loses a primary.)
The LA Times did a story on Issa and how well known he is in his district. Apparently not much. However, it is a solidly Republican district.
Issa also has a lot of money and he would likely be able to beat back any primary challengers even if the national Republican party decided to oppose him.
Mike Huffington is also out of the race.
According to CNN there are now more than 370 official candidates. I’m very curious about the logistics of the balloting for 370+ candidates. And I wonder how many of these candidates will try to bring court challenges over things like balloting and counting. And, if BobT and squeegee are correct then the bar may be much lower for forcing another recall vote for whoever the winner is, and they could face a recall attempt as soon as they enter office. It would seem that, in theory, we could see a string of these things with one occuring every few months resulting in a constantly rotating governorship. There must be something to prevent that, right?
When California amended its recall laws in 1974, the grace period for any person installed in an office for a recall was eliminated. That was one of its selling points in the ballot pamphlet.
The only exceptions are for some local offices to which people are appointed and not elected.
If there truly were 370 candidates the present ballots used in Los Angeles County could not accommodate that many choices. Voters would have to use two ballots and then wade through several pages of candidates and then select someone and hope they use the correct ballot.
Yeah, I know. I heard him blubbering at the press conference, too. If he dropped out of the race willingly, I’m God. :rolleyes:
Sure, but I can still b*tch about it, can’t I? 
I think CNN misspoke – that’s probably the number of people who have requested the paperwork to file for the election.
The Sacramento Bee list 64 candidates this morning (still an astonishing number).
There was some poor harrassed election official on NIGHTLINE last night–she said that, physically, none of the voting systems in place now can accomodate more than 250 candidates. (Note to UnAmerican Dopers: you probably already know this from 2000, but here the nuts and bolts administration of elections is left up to the states and how you vote can differ hugely from town to town within a state, although all the locales have to obey the same state laws). She also said that nine folks had filed officially, although obviously this morning that’s gone up. Hundreds of people have requested the papers to file, but few have completed and submitted them.
She also said wistfully that CA had already ‘retired’ the last punchcard system–“We had a retirement party for Chad” was the way she put it–but now they would have to dig them up and use them again in places, because they weren’t expecting a statewide election until next year. That’s gonna be…fun.
I used to work for the guy in charge of elections on the state level–it’s a tough job in a ‘normal’ election as you’d be amazed exactly how many ways people can fuck up the simplest instructions. And to be fair most of the instructions are far from simple to begin with.
I see that the LA Times (free reg required) puts the candidate total lower than the Sac Bee:
So it sounds like the ‘official’ number is 37, not 64 and certainly not 370. I guess we’ll know the final total sometime Sunday.
Even 37 candidates is a lot for people to wade through, especially since they are arranged more or less randomly.
I can’t recall any primary election I’ve ever voted for that’s had more than 20 candidates.
The LA mayoral election in 1993 had a very long ballot, but I don’t live in the city limits, so that wasn’t my problem.
Looks like someone at CNN must have mistyped and added a zero to the 37 figure that others have mentioned. You’d think that they would have fixed it by now but the article still says 370 official candidates. Even if it’s in the 30 to 70 range that’s still an awful lot of candidates and a lot of potential problems.
What will make it a little easier is that there’s one question and then only one office to vote for.
How are they going to arrange them? Somebody mentioned it’ll be different in each county–why? I guess the only fair way is last name, first name, party, but I’m sure before this is through we’ll see some candidates running under two party names.
Although the staff has better things to do than keep this up-to-the-minute, here’s the website of the poor schmuck who has to administer the election, the CA Secretary of State. It’s The Source of official stats for now.