Rules: California Democrats look to overhaul system after victory
SACRAMENTO — Hours after Gov. Gavin Newsom crushed the attempt to recall him, Democrats launched a full-scale effort to rewrite recall laws that they argue could allow a vocal minority of conservative voters to perpetually disrupt state government.
On Wednesday morning, as results of Newsom’s landslide victory were still rolling in, state legislators began to tout
proposed measures to overhaul the state’s more-than-centuryold recall process.
The list of possible reforms legislators want is long. Among the top ideas: raising the number of signatures needed to qualify for the ballot, requiring a runoff between the top two vote-getters to replace the governor and allowing the lieutenant governor to take over if the governor is recalled.
State Sen. Steve Glazer and Assembly Member Marc Berman, who chair the Legislature’s election committees, announced they would hold joint, bipartisan hearings this fall to vet those and other possible changes.
Both legislators said their aim is to prevent the recall process from becoming an
often-utilized tool for partisan gain or a vehicle to elect a replacement governor with far less than a majority of the vote.
“The biggest issue is we currently have a process where the governor can be recalled and replaced by somebody who gets less votes than the governor,” Berman, D-Menlo Park, told reporters during a news conference. “At the end of the day, that’s the most important issue.”
Weeks before election day, high-profile Democrats began calling for an overhaul of the recall laws for future contests. They feared a far-right Republican could someday become governor with a scant share of the votes.
Those fears were exacerbated by the emergence of Larry Elder, the conservative radio host who received the most votes among the 46 replacement candidates on Tuesday’s ballot. Although Elder was chosen on about 26% of the overall ballots cast, he would have become governor if Newsom lost.
Under California’s law, if a governor is recalled by a majority of voters, the top votegetter among the replacement candidates wins — even if their total share of the electorate is less than that of the ousted incumbent. Democratic legislators said they have recently been inundated with calls and emails from constituents who’ve called that provision of the recall process “crazy” and “insane.”
Recent polling also suggests voters are open to some changes. A survey this month by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies found 69% of registered voters would support holding a runoff between the top two replacement candidates.
Glazer, D-Orinda, said the goal of reform efforts is not to eliminate voters’ option to recall a governor. He said voters want accountability from their leaders, but not a system ripe for abuse.
“They don’t want this partisan manipulation where a small minority can force an election and have a candidate prevail with less than a majority vote,” Glazer said. “That is anti-democratic.”
But overhauling California’s recall process could be a long and difficult effort. Any significant changes would have to be approved by voters through a constitutional amendment, likely on the November 2022 ballot.
The effort also faces fierce opposition from recall activists, who accuse Democrats of trying to change the rules to keep their grip on single-party dominance in Sacramento.
Orrin Heatlie, a retired Yolo County sheriff ’s sergeant who launched the effort to recall Newsom, said limiting the recall process would deprive voters of one of their few tools to keep the state’s majority party in check.
“That’s a dangerous precedent that they’re going to try to set,” he said. “When you back the people into a corner, that’s when they rise up.”
Heatlie said he would support a measure to require a runoff between the top replacement candidates on a recall ballot. But he said other proposals from Democrats, such as increasing the signature requirement, are designed to stifle voters.
“The recall system is a peaceful manner for people to protest the government,” he said.
But Democratic legislators said they expect most voters will welcome reforms after the state just spent $276 million to conduct a special election that was decided by a margin similar to the 2018 governor’s race Newsom won and that fell just 14 months before a scheduled statewide election.
He added, “That money could be spent on housing, homelessness, on combating climate change, forest fires, early childhood education — you name it.”
That said, the election’s price tag was a minuscule piece of the state’s $196 billion general fund budget.
Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, D-Lakewood (Los Angeles County) and Senate President Pro Tem Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, both said, after the end of the legislative session last week, that recall reforms would be a priority next year.
“We came far too close to having a Governor elected by a tiny fraction of eligible voters,” Rendon said in a statement Wednesday.
Sen. Ben Allen, D-Santa Monica, has been pushing for changes to California’s recall laws since 2018. His proposal, SCA3, would allow the governor, or any other recalled office holder, to run as a candidate on the recall ballot.
Allen said Newsom’s recall merely brought attention to a problem that’s long been apparent. He cited the case of Sen. Josh Newman, D-Fullerton (Orange County), who was recalled in 2018 and replaced by a Republican who received about 16,000 fewer votes. Newman reclaimed the seat in 2020.
“That always seemed like a fundamental unfairness to me,” Allen said. “It’s a problem that our current system allows for a duly elected official to replaced by someone who has less popular support.”
Meanwhile, Newsom isn’t wading into the fight over recall reforms. On Wednesday during a news conference in Oakland, he noted he has been the target of six failed recall attempts — only one qualified for the ballot.
“I’m going to leave that to more objective minds,” Newsom said of proposed recall changes. “It’s a strange place to be as someone that might be on the receiving end yet again.”