Lawmakers fail to address the recall circus

The one thing Californians learned from the 2021 recall is that the process for removing a governor from office is broken.

Polling last fall showed that voters wanted change. The nonpartisan Little Hoover Commission held hearings and issued recommendations. And a joint committee of the state Senate and Assembly held hearings.

Sadly, in the end, nothing got done. Any substantive reform would require voter approval of a state constitutional amendment. But no reform proposal will meet today's deadline for placing measures on the November ballot.

After all the hoopla, state lawmakers dropped the ball. At a time when we are deeply concerned about the national threat to our democracy, they have failed to fix the antidemocratic provisions of California's costly gubernatorial recall system.

The result is that we will continue limping along with arguably the worst process in the nation. Only 19 states have provisions for voters to remove the governor midterm and no others have a qualification threshold as low as California's.

For a recall petition to reach the ballot here, it needs signatures of only 12% of the votes cast for governor in the last election. It's a bar ripe for abuse by political consultants and signature-gathering firms as we witnessed in the 2003 Gray Davis recall and the 2021 attempt to unseat Gavin Newsom.

We don't have a system designed for removing people who abuse the office. Instead, with such a low signature threshold, we have a system for political retribution when a group doesn't like the incumbent.

As California Secretary of State Shirley Weber said, “Is it reasonable to have such a low bar for recall? There's always 10 to 15% who do not like somebody.”

Indeed, in his first two years in office, Newsom faced six recall petitions. The first attempt at an election doover was filed just 70 days after he assumed office.

It was inevitable that one of the petitions eventually garnered enough support, especially after a court order extended the 160-day period for gathering signatures for another five months because of the pandemic. In the end, the recall election cost state and local governments more than $200 million.

The signature threshold is only part of the problem. The process that follows is even more egregious.

Under California's system, there are two questions on the ballot, whether to recall the incumbent and the selection of a replacement. The incumbent cannot be listed as a choice for the second question. And an unlimited number of people can join the circus of replacement candidates, for which there is no runoff between the top votegetters.

So, an incumbent could be recalled while garnering 49.9% of the votes to stay in office and be replaced by someone who receives just 20% of the votes on the second question. That's not democratic.

It also places the incumbent's party in a political quandary, whether to endanger the effort to beat back the recall by also supporting a replacement candidate. In last fall's recall election, Newsom backers focused solely on the recall question, and fortunately succeeded in defeating it. But had the effort failed, radio talk show host Larry Elder, who topped the list of 53 replacement candidates, would have become governor with support from just 28% of the voters who participated in the election.

There are easy fixes to the signature threshold problem, starting with simply raising the bar. For example, rather than 12% of the votes cast in the prior election to place a recall on the ballot, we could make it 10% of the much larger group of all registered voters. That would also eliminate the recall vulnerability created by a low-turnout election.

As for the problem of replacement candidate slipping in with a tiny plurality on the second question, there are three obvious possible solutions: Allow the incumbent to run as a replacement candidate; he or she still might be the most popular alternative. Have a runoff between the top two finishers in the replacement election. Or do away with the second question on the ballot and make the democratically elected lieutenant governor the replacement in the event of a recall.

All these alternatives have been widely discussed. The job of the Legislature was to settle on the best package of reforms and put them before voters. It failed.

As a result, it's probably not a matter of if, but rather when, we must once again relive this gubernatorial recall charade.