The deadline Monday for the last signatures gathered by the three groups pushing for recall elections ended just the first phase of the initiative. The second act opened predictably Tuesday when Mayor Ron Littlefield finally issued his response – a blunt letter chastising the recall proponents and their signature-collection methods, and a lawsuit that seeks to bar the Election Commission from staging a potentially mismanaged recall initiative. Now, it’s up to Circuit Court to decide whether a recall election actually will be held and, if so, under what law and what terms.
Questions abound, and understandably so. The legal path to a recall has a lot of trip wires that could derail the process.
Foremost is whether state law or the city charter controls a recall. If state law prevails, the proponents would need more than 15,000 qualified signatures, not just 9,000, to gain a recall. It now appears that recall advocates do not possess the 15,000 qualified-signature margin.
If they do, the next question is whether the Election Commission correctly administered and vetted the form and date of the recall petition(s) and the voters’ signatures and signing dates to meet the legal standards necessary for a recall to proceed. The mayor’s lawsuit charges the commission with mishandling oversight of the recall process and time-frame at virtually every step.
If the Election Commission has properly done its job and the petitions and voter signatures meet legal requirements for a recall vote to occur under state law, the vote on Nov. 2 would be simply a yes-no referendum on whether to hold a recall election. If the answer is yes, the city would have to finance a subsequent separate citywide election to fill the recalled seat, or seats. Candidates then would file qualifying petitions and campaign quickly for the post against Mayor Littlefield, who already has committed to run again in that event.