Quechan council members survive recall try

Vote tally falls short of threshold

Two members of the Quechan Indian Tribe’s Tribal Council survived a recall election held Dec. 30 despite receiving more votes for removal than to be retained, because the total number of voters did not meet the minimum set by the tribe’s constitution.

The results, posted in the front window of the tribal administration building, were almost identical for both officials on the ballot: Tribal Councilwoman Marsha Hill received 210

recall votes and 101 votes to remain. Mark William “Willie” White got 209 recall votes, versus 102 votes for retention.

The tribe’s election laws require a majority of eligible voters to participate in order for a recall election’s results to be valid. The Quechan currently have about 2,700 voters on the rolls, including all tribal members age 18 or older.

Hill and White declined to comment on the election results Friday, maintaining that the vote wasn’t valid because the total tally didn’t meet the constitutional threshold.

It takes 100 petition signatures against a council member to trigger a recall election. Tribal member Sally DeCorse filed recall petitions against six of the seven council members last fall, alleging she was unconstitutionally passed over to fill a vacancy for the tribal vice president’s seat in May 2017.

“The popular vote won, and the people that voted, voted Marsha and Willie out, and I’m happy about that,” she said.

She maintains that recall elections that didn’t meet the total voter threshold have been accepted in the past, and “the council decided not to choose general principles.”

White denied that the tribe has ever accepted a recall vote’s results when less than half the electorate had voted.

After DeCorse filed the petitions which led to the Dec. 30 vote, she filed another set of recall petitions charging the council was not acting quickly enough on the first set. Another recall election, affecting four more council members, is scheduled for Jan. 17, she said.

White and Hill were among four new members elected to the council in December 2016, but they had to wait nearly three months to be sworn in while the defeated incumbents stayed in office and the council tried to declare the vote invalid.