The county Election Commission and organizers of the failed effort to recall Mayor Ron Littlefield said last week they weren’t sure what their next step would be in the wake of the court ruling that barred the recall. Organizers were rightly uncertain about their dim chances in another legal appeal, yet some Election Commission members suggested they might bill the city for the cost of this disastrous farce.
As they review the wreckage of their misguided mission and the legal flaws that allowed it, it should be apparent that they brought their defeat on themselves. And as a result, the Election Commission itself — not the city of Chattanooga and not Mayor Littlefield — should bear the cost of the commission’s egregious failure to follow the state’s election laws.
The recall petitions failed from the get-go to meet legal muster for the needed number of valid, dated signatures and the form of their petitions. The recall sponsors would not have had enough legally valid and dated signatures and properly formed petitions even if the city’s faulty recall statute had been properly enacted — which the court found it hadn’t.
The superior state recall law still would have required valid voter signatures to be signed and dated, to allow signees to legally retract their signature within 10 days of signing such a petition. The force of state law also still would have required a unifying legal question on the petitions. There was no getting around those legal requirements, and the Election Commission should have automatically upheld them in the beginning.
Yet the same three Republican commission members dismissed their responsibility when the deadline for the petitions loomed. They did so again after being informed in 2010 by the first court ruling of their due process errors. And when the recall lawsuit was remanded back to the Election Commission by the appeals court last November for due process on a decision, they blithely went ahead and certified a recall election without considering the potential legal result of the action. That was their last chance to acknowledge the process errors and deny the recall on the merits of the petitions.