Recall Stupidness

California is sometimes a wonderful place, with our amazing produce and wine and sunshine and coastline. It is sometimes a horrible place, with our wildfires, droughts, insane housing prices, our never ending homeless problems, and hot hot weather. And sadly, it is often a stupid place, with our ballot initiatives and our recall elections. This history of the process goes back to the early 20th century, when sweeping reforms went through in an attempt to weaken influence of private interests, and give more power to the voter. Sadly, this means we often get to vote on stupid things, including sometimes contradictory measures that confuse the voters. Our recall process is such that any elected official may be subject to a recall, assuming the proponents of the recall can gather at least 12 percent of the votes cast in the previous election for that office. So if the Governor were elected with 100 votes, someone would need at least 12 people to sign a petition to recall that Governor, and then there is an election. This isn’t successful very often. Every California governor since 1960 has faced a recall attempt, and only once before has it gone to a vote, when Gray Davis was ousted in favor of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

This recall is the 5th attempt that Newsom has faced, and it started prior to COVID, and if you read it, it is mainly about immigration issues. So, now we get to vote, at great expense. The election is not tied in with any other measures, and consists of 2 questions. Question 1, shall Governor Newsom be recalled. Question 2, if he is recalled, who should replace him? There is a list of 46 candidates. Currently, Larry Elder, a conservative talk show host and anti-vaxxer, is favored to gain the most votes, though who knows. This whole thing is, of course, entirely undemocratic. If 49.9% of voters say ‘No’ to the recall, and 50.1% say ‘Yes’, then whomever gets the most votes of those 46 candidates will be our next Governor. And Newsom is not allowed to be counted, and if you write him in (which I did, not knowing this), they will not count it as a vote for him. So Elder could perhaps become our next Governor with less than 20% of the vote (much less I guess, but he’s polling close to that), while Newsom would have gotten 49.9%.

It’s disheartening and stupid, and of course, Newsom is partly to blame with his tone deaf rich boy mistakes surrounding COVID, which ticked people off and just added fuel to the fire and allowed the proponents to gather the required number of signatures. There was the infamous party at the French Laundry, as well as the fact that he sent his kids back to in-person school when most parents in the state did not have that opportunity. Of course, both of these were completely legal options, the restaurant had one open wall which made it technically outdoors, and the schools were allowed to do hybrid learning, which is what it was. But at the same time as he was doing these things, he was urging people to stay home, to not see family and friends, to limit our activities. So yes, he’s an idiot sometimes, and now we are all paying (financially) for his stupidity, and we may pay a much higher price if he is recalled, because I think Elder would be a horrible Governor. Thankfully the next election is next year, so he wouldn’t be in office very long.

Anyway, I thought I would share some of the humor of all of this with you. We received our ballots a couple of weeks ago, filled them in and mailed them the next day. 2 weeks later, we received our official voter guide. Among the instructions are candidate statements. Some of them are pretty standard.

While others are ridiculous and lazy. Here are a few of the worst ones, for your enjoyment.

Come on Ms. Baade, can’t you do better than just a little slogan?

Mr. Kapelovitz is making Ms. Baade look good in comparison.

At least Mr. Marciniak points us somewhere to get some information, but he doesn’t actually say what to search FOR on YouTube, so I will watch some lovely Keeshond puppy videos.

And Mr. Killens, who also really has nothing to say about why we should vote for him, other than his awesome name and poor punctuation. Maya wants him, for his name alone.

So far, it’s looking like Newsom will beat this, but only time will tell.