The 2-1 vote by the Hamilton County Election Commission to proceed with a recall election — albeit in August of 2012 — of Chattanooga Mayor Ron Littlefield reeks of willfully blind misdirection, or unbridled political sabotage. Either way, it’s a flawed decision.
It wrongly inflates a withered fringe initiative to oust the mayor over necessary fiscal policies. It harms the city’s progress and political direction at a critical time. And at the moment, it’s causing needless uncertainty about the present state of city government and the legal viability of the mayor’s continued tenure.
The commission’s decision, of course, may well fall soon before a court. The recall initiative, the subject of a pending lawsuit, is already being contested by the mayor at the appellate court level. It is further tainted by compelling legal questions regarding the adequacy of the recall petitions, the signatures on them, and the law — state or municipal — under which it falls. When the case is finally heard on its merits — again — there’s a good chance that it will fail, again, to require a recall election.
That, indeed, was the verdict when the case was decided here last year by Circuit Court Judge Jeff Hollingsworth. He ruled then that the recall initiative was flawed in several critical ways. It was pursued under a city ordinance recall provision, instead of the prevailing — and more strenuous — state recall law. And, the judge found, the number of properly confirmed signatures of voters failed to meet threshold standards for certification under either recall law.
Under the state law, petitioners would have had to present around 15,000 qualified voters’ signatures. Under the city’s statutes, it would have needed around 9,000 qualified signatures. Hollingsworth ruled that defects in petitions and signature standards whittled the number of qualified signatures down to around 4,000, far short of sufficiency under either law.