I have just received my ballot for California’s recall election for governor Gavin Newsom to be held on September 14th. The system governing recall elections of California’s governor has to be one of the stupidest ever devised. Basically, the ballot consists of two parts. In the first part you are asked to vote yes or no on whether he should be recalled. That is straightforward enough.
In the second part you are asked to vote for one of the candidates vying to hold the office in the event that a majority should vote in the first part to remove him. There are 46 candidates. Nine of the 46 have listed their party preference as Democrats, 24 as Republican, one Libertarian, 2 Green, and 10 as none. but this is meaningless since anyone can put anything as their preference on the ballot. Neither the Democratic or Republican parties have endorsed a candidate. So right now, there is a scramble among the 46 to claim that they would be the best person to assume the office if Newsom is recalled.
This results in voters having to make strategic calculations on the basis of very little information. If, like me, you plan to vote against recalling Newsom, you also need to think about whom you want to vote for in the event that he loses or whether you want to vote for any replacement at all. Right now the Democratic party is urging people to vote ‘no’ on the recall, which is fair enough. But it is also urging voters to skip the second part instead of choosing someone as a backup and their reasoning is not clear.
In theory one could have a result in which Newsom just barely loses the recall vote, getting very close to 50%, but then is replaced by someone who gets less than 3% of the votes. Such an absurd outcome could have been avoided if the target of the recall could also be one of the candidates in the second part, so that they could be recalled and still be re-elected by getting a plurality of the vote. But the law prohibits the target of a recall from being one of the replacement candidates, so that’s out. So we end up with possibility of an absurd scenario playing out, in which a governor who has almost 50% of support is replaced by someone who has just 3%. How absurd is that? Nice work, guys!
Note that Newsom was up for re-election in November 2022 anyway so all this is just to shave 16 months off his term. But Californians seem to love the recall process. Since 1911 when the recall system was included in the state constitution, there have been 54 (!) attempts at recall with only the 2003 effort being successful. In that year, Californians successfully recalled Democratic governor Gray Davis when 55.4% voted for his removal. That time there were 135 (!) candidates vying to replace him and Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected as his replacement. But at least he got 48.58% of the vote. This time there is no one with that level of star power. The closest is reality TV personality Caitlyn Jenner and radio talk show host Larry Elder, both running as Republicans.
I am not sure how this cockamamie scheme came about. It would have been far better to have had two separate elections, one for the recall and, if that passes, another for a new governor. The only reason not to is to save money on holding two elections. But that seems like a small price to pay for avoiding a possibly ridiculous outcome.
it is amazing how good a parliamentary system looks after reading this.
Look at the federal system where a president can be elected even though a majority don’t want that person, and you can’t get rid of him without shooting him even though he almost literally backed a truck up to the treasury and started shoveling in money.
Look at the fiasco in congress where Senators representing 1/3 of the population hold up the majority so completely that dictatorship looms large in the near future.
Why on earth would anyone think that Americans have a clue how to run a democracy?
@2 Why would anyone think they want to?
Simplest reforms:
1) Raise the threshold for qualification of a recall petition.
2) If the recall question succeeds, then the Lt Governor becomes the Governor -- No mad free for all! Note that, in recent years with California’s Jungle primary with the top 2 proceeding to the General election, the Lt Governor is guaranteed to have been selected by a majority of the people who turned out to vote in a statewide election less than 4 years ago!
Yeah, I don’t understand why the CA Dems didn’t back someone. That candidate may not have a very comfortable relationship with Newsom, given the circumstances, and that’s okay. Politicians constantly lie about much worse things. So even if it weren’t entirely genuine, I’m sure they could manage to at least appear to be slightly critical of him for a few months during the election, without hurting anyone’s feelings too much. Because, like it or not, things would probably be back to “normal” soon enough, as if none of it ever happened.
Well, again, there’s another way of getting a reasonably desirable outcome from your point of view. The party could’ve chosen to back a specific replacement for him.
Is the Lt. Governor too busy? That’s allowed, because she wasn’t being recalled, and in CA, the two don’t even run on a combined ticket. Or did she really have a strong desire not to be promoted? Do people not like her either?
Whatever the case, how about anyone else in the entire party? Where are they? I have no answers to offer about that; but whatever may going on there, that’s not the fault of your silly election laws.
But you’re kind of obscuring the fact that, if he does get “almost 50%,” that means that more than 50% want to remove him as governor. Not 3% or whatever — more than 50%. A majority is getting what it wanted in that respect.
It’s a separate, independent question to ask how much support some replacement candidate has among the voters. In many places, if the leading candidate had such a low percentage, there would be a run-off election (or ranked-choice or something), which weeds out most other candidates. In the end, that would result in a larger plurality for the eventual winner, much greater than 3% and perhaps even a majority if that’s deemed necessary. That’s just some more procedural junk that you might not be happy with either, but if that’s the sort of thing you expect it to tell you about the “winner,” then it can be made to tell you that. Probably, there would still be complaints, about the process or your fellow voters or whatever.
Also, “I don’t want that dude removed (right now, when given the chance)” isn’t representing the same thing as support for that dude. In order to check that box, you just need to think he’s not quite bad enough to warrant removal from office. You could do that even with a very negative opinion of him, and that’s just setting a very low bar which shouldn’t be hard to clear. So, I just don’t think it makes a lot of sense to compare that to the percentage of people who vote for a candidate (or “support” them) in a normal election, because it’s measuring different things.
@1 jrkr: “it is amazing how good a parliamentary system looks after reading this.”
You might want to study the loooooong road to a new government in The Netherlands or Belgium.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_cabinet_formation
Last Dutch national elections were in march; right now the negotiators are still in the “information phase”.
The record is for Belgium though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010–2011_Belgian_government_formation
It’s the German and French political systems that look attractive.
https://www.expatrio.com/living-germany/facts-about-germany/german-political-system
https://about-france.com/political-system.htm
The French one is more similar to the American one. Sooooo …. why can the French do what the Americans can’t?
(Spoiler: the Americans don’t really have a say -- the USA are not a democracy, unlike France).
Making the second part of the ballot a ranked-preference (or “instant runoff”) system would solve many of the problems raised here -- but California, and the US, would still be in deep political doo-doo.
California judge rules gig worker initiative utilized by Uber and Lyft is unconstitutional
Meanwhile, in New York, a hurricane will hit this weekend, and Cuomo’s resignation is Tuesday.
Good use of the wonderful word “cockamamie”.
mnb0 @ #7;
That long period of no government for Belgium was a good thing. It caused Belgium to not do anything in reaction to the Great Recession and be the best performing EU state over the period.
If a nations laws are basically okay then being held still during tumult is a good thing -- removing political inteference allows people to get on within the rules (whether perfect or not). Changing rules just screws with folks.
There is no need to hurry governance.
There’s also the counter-intuitive wording of the question, where “No” means you’re in favor of the Governor keeping his job. Instead of asking “Should the Governor be recalled,” they should be asking, “Should the Governor remain in office through the end of his term.” Hopefully, more Republicans than Democrats will be confused by the wording.
Compare to the German way of doing a recall election for the chancellor. The chancellor is elected by the parliament, of course. And how do we do a recall election? It’s called “constructive Mistrauensvotum” (constructive vote of no confidence), but what it really is, basically, is the election of a new chancellor. Period. If you can elect a new one, they replace the old one; if you can’t, the old one stays. (There are some procedural complications with timing and so on, but they’re not really relevant to the voting part.) This solves the problems you complain about, and it is also easy to understand. (There is no vote of no confidence other than this one. The chancellor can ask for a vote of confidence, but as far as I can make out, losing that one has no legal consequences whatsoever.)
Footnote: the German words for “(no) confidence” are “Vertrauen” (trust) and “Mistrauen” (distrust).
Grrr spell checkers … of course it’s “konstruktives Mistrauensvotum”, not this Denglish abomination.
I am a Californian. Everything has to to with the railroads. They had a whole buttload of money power, control over the goods of civilization in a cargo cult sorta ways, and influence. They essentially took over the state to do whatever they want.
Historically speaking it went like this: The Lt. Gov.? In their pocket. The other four constitutional officers? Also in their pocket. Your local county and city reps? If your city was along a railroad and therefore a city of any consequence since for most of California history most of the state was entirely undeveloped, then: In Their Pocket. Many Californians used to be prospectors out there getting the $$$ while they could so money most definitely talking was part of the culture.
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As for the wording, the objection is not as reasonable as it seems on the face of it. It is implicit that the Governor or any other office holder should continue their term. Why bring up an initiative about it? If you are thinking the fact that it IS an initiative and therefore folks should know that somebody somewhere is unhappy somehow, you are wrong. It is easy to get an intiative qualified, and it used to be much much easier until corporate interests started fucking their way in with ecocidal petrodollars. Calfornians are used to initiatives being stupid. Therefore the initiative should plainly and directly state what the initiative Whis Is Labelled as a Recall already is doing, which passive-aggressive language of the objectors of the current language will not do.
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Governor Newsom has signed more oil, natural gas, and fucking fracking leases than any other governor of this state. I am voting no to recall him because the alternative isn’t good. Fuck the moronic Democratics that couldn’t learn their lesson from Grey Davis, whom nobody loved and got into office purely on a small portion of Southern California party political will and not the will of of our people.
So, for my second vote I’m voting Green. At least I will be screaming into the darkness as this planet gets raped and all life on it bleeds to death.