It’s good to see that the three recall groups, defeated in their effort to unseat Mayor Ron Littlefield, are also apparently willing to quit their misguided attempt to recall City Council members Jack Benson and Manny Rico. The councilmen did nothing to make themselves legitimate targets of a recall initiative. They should be allowed to serve out their current terms without the distraction of critics, especially those whose failure to competently guide their own attempted recall ironically undermined the legitimacy of that effort.
Given the circumstances, of course, the recall groups have no viable alternative but to quit the attempt to oust the council members. The court ruling that found the city recall statute inoperable under state law brought their recall drive under stiffer state standards, which at this late date are insurmountable. In fact, a legal recall election couldn’t occur for the two council members until August 2012. The recall organizers simply missed the boat.
Still, there are useful lessons to take away from the badly managed recall attempt. For starters, advocates of any future recall campaigns should at least know what the applicable legal standards are for a recall petition. The Election Commission should also study that part of election law better, as well.
Organizers should also have reasonable grounds for a recall, and significant public support for such an action. They had neither.
State law, even for authorized municipal recalls under their own charters, makes clearly specific requirements for petitions. Such petitions, and the subsequent ballot, requires a “question” to voters as to whether the referenced official shall be recalled. The law further requires that signers enter the date on which they sign the petition, in order to show that their signing falls within the statutory time frame for recall petitions to circulate.
Yet many of the recall petitions and signatures turned in to the Election Commission, and wrongly counted by the commission, failed to state a recall question. And more than half of the potentially qualified signers also failed to write the date they signed the petition. The Election Commission should not have counted those signatures.
The other central issue was whether the city’s recall provisions, set out in a charter last amended in 1990, was properly adopted after the state actually empowered municipalities, in 1997, to employ different standards and processes for recall elections. In fact, the court found, the city’s recall provisions have not been properly adopted and do not govern recalls.
These multiple defects defeated the recall at every turn. Some disgruntled voters have cited these issues – especially the vastly larger number of signatures (15,000) needed under state law to recall the mayor and City Council members – as mere legal technicalities that robbed them of a successful recall.
That’s hardly an excuse: It myopically overlooks legal reality and the standards needed for good governance. State law clearly describes how recalls must occur not just to be legal for the sake of legality, but to fix a standard for electoral contests that are uniform across the state. If there were no legal criteria for a recall (or any other legal issue), the result would be civil chaos. Courts aren’t the culprits because they confirm the law. The recall groups, moreover, were warned by Election Commission attorney Chris Clem of the likelihood that state law would prevail, but failed to heed his warning.
To criticize as mere “technicalities” all the multiple defects in the recall effort is both naive and lazy. There are either legal criteria for election recalls, or there are none. That recall organizers stumbled on these issues was their fault. To suggest otherwise defies the notion of sensible standards for public business. It also provides a measure of the recall organizers’ competence, and their judgment about how government should work.