There are rules that weren’t there to begin with. There were no scholarship limits in college football until Bear Bryant started signing guys to sit on the bench for four years just to keep them away from Auburn or Georgia Tech or Tennessee. There was probably no icing in hockey until it was realized that you could just keep dumping it down to the other end and never actually get any action in front of the mount. The spitball was perfectly legal in baseball until a guy got hit in the head and died. A rule is generally there to maintain order and keep things fair, and as soon as someone figures out how to abuse it to their benefit, it generally has to be changed.
California is spending millions and millions of dollars, in the middle of a pandemic and a protracted fire season and god knows what else is around the corner, in order to hold a recall election. This election is to turf out the governor, Gavin Newsom. Never mind that there are elections next year, or that Newsom was convincingly elected with almost 62% of the vote first time out, or that there is nothing in particular that he has done that is out of bounds with what any other governors have done in the last three years, especially as regards the pandemic. Newsom was elected to be governor of the capital of the Resistance, and has mostly handled his duties without incident.
But.
If you can get 12% of the number of voters who voted in the last election to sign a petition, you can initiate a recall. And if the recall is successful, then there is a list of replacement candidates, and whoever gets the plurality of votes there wins. About 60% of the state voted last time out, which means that in theory, you only need 7.2% of eligible voters in the state to call for a recall. And since the incumbent can’t be on the ballot, whoever comes first on the list is governor, no matter how low a percentage of votes they get so long as no one else’s is higher. Meaning that with 46 candidates on the ballot, it’s very possible that someone with a quarter of the vote or so will get to become governor.
This is happening for one reason and one reason alone: because the Republican Party knows it is too weak to win a fair election in California. They could barely muster 40% of the vote for their candidate in 2018 – but they only have to round up half of their own voters to have enough signatures to force a recall, at which point they get another bite at the apple for the low low price of a quarter of a billion dollars.
I’m sure the recall must have seemed a valuable tool at some point, but like the proposition system, it has become a way to buy and finagle what cannot be won fairly at the ballot box or through the political process. Both are past their sell-by date, and it’s insane to leave sharp objects lying around where the ignorant and willfully malicious can use them to hurt someone. Or the state.