A two-way split between those two won't re-elect Davis, as one might assume with confidence that a majority of those voting either Issa or Arnold would also vote "Yes" on the recall.
And FYI, that election date sets the date for interested candidates to file their papers for August 9; just over two weeks for anyone with $3,500 and 65 friends to get onto the ballot. At least Bustamante didn't pull a dirty trick of calling the election earlier so that candidates would've had to file by Friday... but this does give the Dems time if they want to pull the "Commission on the Governorship" stunt (I referred to it in a Bee article earlier) with regard to the state Supreme Court. Still, some of the legal experts I've been hearing say that the language in the State Constitution & Elections Code does allow for other candidates to replace the governor. Furthermore, Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, a Dem, says he will accept replacement candidates who file the correct paperwork and place them on the ballot.
I thought the ballot would be, you could vote no, then vote for Davis. Yeah, it would be different if it was Yes/No, then the winner under "Yes" gets the job, even if No outvoted the frontrunner under "Yes." Is that how it works? Does anyone really know?
I'm pretty sure that Davis can't be on the ballot for the second question, since the question is "if the recall is successful, who will replace the outgoing governor". The CA Government site on the recall doesn't seem to cover this specifically, though. http://www.ss.ca.gov/elections/recall.htm The FAQ about "what will the recall ballot look like" says "replacement candidate" so that's why I'm assuming the above assumption.
Hopefully Arnold will do the right thing and let Dick do the running, like he should have done in November 2002, if my fellow California Reeps could have recognized that he was the proper choice for Governor, and not that tool Simon. If Riordan is in, I feel a lot better about this recall busniess.
Question 1: Yes/No to recall. If Yes gets the majority, Davis is out; if No, he stays and Question 2 is void. Question 2: Vote for 1 candidate to replace recalled governor. Gray Davis cannot be a candidate. Both those voting yes and those voting no can cast a vote on this question. If Yes got a majority on Question 1, the candidate with a plurality of Question 2 votes becomes governor. This happens unless the courts say that the succession law, which says that the Lt. Gov. takes the governor's office in the event of a vacancy, supersedes the recall law that calls for question 2. In that case there's only Question 1, and Yes means Davis goes and Bustamante takes over, and No means he stays.
They're also saying Bustamante might try to split the two elections...handing him the governorship, coincidentally enough. I'm guessing California and US Supreme Courts settle this one.
Well said, Noah. The only addition I have is that I have heard from reputable sources that one must make a mark on Question #1 in order to have your selection on Question #2 counted (i.e. there are no abstentions from Q #1 or you will spoil your ballot). Strange, eh? In today's other recall news, the draft Arianna Huffington folks have launched a website: www.RunAriannaRun.com. Worth a look. AIUI, there's about two and a half weeks until the filing deadline for candidates. This is a critical time for recall backers to recruit candidates and/or pressure the Dems into running an alternative. Now is the time when Davis is most vulnerable to competition from within his own party or from moderate-to-progressive independents. There must be some really interesting conversations going on behind the scenes. Good stuff maynard.
Keep in mind: if you vote "no" on #1, you can't vote on #2. This is why this is perhaps the most badly-written actively-used law in the country. Let's say the recall vote goes 55-45 in favor of recall. That means that 45% of the people voted for Davis, but those people are excluded from the rest of the process. Then, let's say there are ten people on part 2 of the ballot, and the winner of that group gets 25% of the votes cast in #2. That's only 14% (25% of 55%) of the total popular vote. In this example you threw out a guy who got 45% of the vote in favor of someone who got 14%. Way to go, jackasses. There should be an NCAA-style national board of elections, and Californians should get the death penalty for a year. Your initiative system has been hijacked by big money assholes and whack-jobs who are destroying the democratic process.
Are you sure about that? That's so obviously retarded, I have a hard time believing it's really the law.
The lawyers are burning the midnight oil on this thing, but I'd be astonished if that was the case. Every ballot I've seen, you could vote or not vote on each item separately. Another positive note - Michael Savage is talking about running. Maybe he figures that with such a big field, his chances are decent. Or maybe he just became a publicity whore after the MSNBC thing. In any event, he would liven up the field.
DevilDave quoted the CA legal code on this on the first page. It says that: "No vote cast in the recall election shall be counted for any candidate unless the voter also voted for or against the recall of the officer sought to be recalled." (emphasis mine) So you have to vote in the recall, not necessarily for the recall. I was mistaken on that. Regardless, if this goes to a vote and Davis gets recalled, you can bet the house that "no" on #1 will get more votes than the leading candidate on #2. However, Davis can't be on the second part of the ballot. This means that the guy who will get the most votes won't win.
OK, you had me, then you lost me... If "Davis gets recalled" that means there were more "yes" votes, regardless of who people picked in #2. It doesn't matter who the heck voters choose on Question #2 - if the combined "yes" is more than "no" then Davis is gonzo. Question #2 is a separate deal. I definitely agree, "no" will likely get more votes than the leading candidate on #2. But if the "yes" votes prevail overall on #1, then whoever gets the most votes on #2 becomes captain of the Titanic.
It's a math thing. Hypothetical case: say a million votes are cast, 60% for Yes and 40% for No on question 1, and the winner of question #2 gets a 20% plurality with the other 80% being split among seventeen other people. Obie is saying that the 400000 "No" votes on question #1 are votes for Davis so he would get twice as many votes than the 200000 votes that the winner of question #2 gets, so therefore, Davis gets the most votes but isn't the governor any more.
The math doesn't quite work out, though, because the votes on question 2 include votes from people who voted No. Perhaps of the 200,000 people who voted for the winner in your example, 150,000 votes came from people who voted No on the recall. So you can't really make a big point comparing the 40% voting No to the 20% voting for the winner, because there's a huge overlap of people who are counted in both of those percentages.
We were discussing this issue in my office this morning. I think it works like this: 1) You vote Yes or No: Should Davis should be recalled? 2) Regardless of how you voted about Davis, you can vote for the candidate of your choice, but not for Davis. If a majority votes No on Davis, then whoever gets the most votes is the Governor until the next election. So a person can vote in favor of Davis and still pick another candidate. That is why the democrats would be foolish not to run somebody else. On a different issue, from talking to people in my office and friends, including liberals, I have yet to hear somebody say that they support Davis. I did have some tell me that they will vote against the recall just because they don't want a Republican, or because they dissagree in principle with the idea of the recall, but nobody I know said they will support Davis because they think he is doing a good job. Will somebody here in Big Soccer step up and defend Davis based on his record? If you are a California democrat, are you happy with Davis? Or would you only vote for him only as the lesser of evils?
You're going to have a hard time finding someone on this board. Looking at the past 10 (!) pages, I've not only seen no Californian support Davis, I've seen no Californian against the recall (maybe one, but still...). That's no Democrat, no Republican, no Green, no Libertarian, no P&F, no Natural Law giving Davis any love at all. That's about accurate in the state. I can only guess that among the 1004 people they poll for approval ratings are about 200 DP officials. Bustamante did his best Brutus impression yesterday, BTW, when he exactly laid out details of the recall, and didn't pull the aforementioned (2 pages ago by Dan Loney) shenanigans. The Sac Bee has had very good coverage of this. For those who haven't been following this as closely as some of us, that's a good place to catch up.
You've got my point. Let's say 5 million people vote, and 3 million vote for the recall while 2 million vote against it. That's 2 million people who, in effect, voted for Davis. But those votes no longer matter, because the majority voted yes so Davis is out. The election then goes to Q. #2, and it appears that there will be at least a dozen candidates and maybe a lot more. (God help us that this is happening in California, by the way -- land of the photo op. If I'm, say, Todd Bridges, I'm scraping together $3500 today just for the publicity of running for governor.) Given the cacophony of political ideas that are going to be thrown about, in my example, the "winner" of that question is almost certainly not going to get 2 million votes. So instead of the governorship going to the plurality, it goes to the person who in effect places second. That's democracy in California.
One can only hope that the silliness of this replacement election will become a primer in IRV for the whole country.
The DNC president said no Democrat would be running in the recall. However, the reason I think Bustamante set the election for when he did (giving potential candidates two weeks from now to file their papers) is to have Democrats discuss further about the possibility of running a candidate. Or perhaps opening the possibility of rogue Dem going after it. Heck, as I mentioned earlier in the thread, if you have $3,500 lying around and know 65 people, you could be governor of the most populous state in the nation... I think most CA Dems don't think highly of Davis as a person or as a politician. I'm not going to defend his record, except to say that some of the things state Republicans are hanging on him are at the very least exaggerations, if not unwarranted. I don't deny that Davis mishandled things during the energy crisis. But Dems and Reeps need to share the blame on what precipitated it... the way de-regulation was handled in this state. Much of that was done in the administration of a Republican governor and a Legislature less dominated by Democrats. The deficit was a product of a national economy going south. Poor planning for the future on the part of those in power? Certainly. But didn't many states do the same and similarly face budget deficits that require cutting spending and/or tax increases?
I don't think anyone would argue with separate elections, although apparently that will be fought in this case by the GOP candidates. The GOP itself, at least the national version, has kept a very careful distance from this mess, and credit to them for that. No one's going to come away from this smelling good. Anyway, there should be one yes/no election, and then, if yes wins, Bustamante should be caretaker while a by-election is held. I'm aware that this is a golden opportunity for the GOP to capture a statehouse, but in a way, it isn't. The CA GOP is thinner than Karen Carpenter. There's a reason they're hoping for Arnold - all of their actual politicians couldn't get elected prison bitch in San Quentin. Having a clown college alumni festival on the bottom of the recall ballot (Michael Savage Weiner? Sweet Jesus!) won't do the Republicans any favors in this state. And if you want to see ugly - wait until you get a load of what a Democratic Legislature and state office staff (there are no Republican statewide officeholders - did I mention the CA GOP was up La Creek du Merde?) will do to Governor Issa. He'll end up making Michael Huffington look like Leland Stanford.
This is one reason I'm not too excited about this whole recall business. Since it's good to be the victim in California politics, the GOP could have had a huge advantage in '06 (or even in '04 for the midterms) in saying "see what the Gray Davis machine did to our state?" Instead, an asshat like Issa (although Irv Rubin did try to bomb his office, which should be somewhat of a point of acceptance for a Cal-Lefty) becomes the face of the GOP. Crap.