richard
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California's Governor Gray Davis facing recall election
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Jul 25 21:59 UTC 2003 |
Interesting political drama unfolding out in California. The Governor
of California, last year elected to his third term (or is it second
term?) is being subjected to a recall election in the fall. A
millionaire governor wannabe named Darrell Issa funded a petition
drive, supported by most all the republicans in the state, and a lot of
zealous anti-tax groups, and collected over a million signatures to
call for a recall election, and it has been now officially certified
that it will take place.
Pretty interesting that all these anti-tax groups organized to push for
a recall election, which will cost the state many millions of dollars
to hold (elections aren't cheap to put on) Guess you see who the real
tax and spenders are. But the real issue is why overturn an election
just held a year ago, unless Davis was guilty of a criminal act or
being impeached. Davis was elected, and he was re-elected. I hope
that those grexers in California vote against recalling Davis. An
election happened, somebody won, and he has the right to serve out his
term without a bunch of sore losers trying to oust him ahead of time.
I understand Davis is unpopular in California now but he WAS elected.
The deal with the recall will be, based on what I've read, a two part
ballot with a recall question on Davis (yes/no) and if the nays win, a
second part which would be a list of challengers whom you could choose
to replace him with. Arnold Schwarzenegger is ored to run, and with
a long list of candidates, the potential would be there-- if the Davis
recall goes through-- for somebody to become governor with only a small
percentage of the vote.
Hopefully it won't come to that. Davis won his current term fair and
square and he hasn't committed any criminal acts it wouldn't seem that
would warrant his being replaced for the next regular election.
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scg
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response 2 of 264:
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Jul 26 00:44 UTC 2003 |
Davis was pretty unpopular when reelected (to his second term), and generally
appears to be pretty incompetent, but the opposition was worse. Davis didn't
disclose the bad financial shape California was in when running for reelection
(why would have have?), but presumably the Republicans would have had access
to that information too, had they wanted to make use of it.
This time, it appears the Republicans will put up Arnold Schwartzenegger as
their main candidate, although qualifying for the replacement ballot is so
easy it's likely that there will be a really large number of candidates.
The recall election is structured such that there will be two questions on
the same ballot: should the current governor be recalled? and if so, who
should replace him? If the recall gets anything more than 50%, Davis is out,
but then the replacement just has to get more votes than anybody else in what
could be a very crowded field. It's therefore conceivable that 49% of the
voters could support keeping Davis, while somebody else gets, say, 15%, and
the one with 15% will be the new governor. I suspect, however, that the
republicans will line up sufficiently behind one candidate that that the
scenario won't be quite that dramatic, but it still seems unlikely that the
winner will be elected with more votes than the current governor, if the
recall passes.
The scary part is that the Democrats are refusing to run anybody as a
replacement, claiming they don't trust the voters to vote no on the recall
if there's a palatable alternative. That may well be true, but it means that
if the recall passes anyway, we're left with a Republican governor in a very
Democratic state.
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janc
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response 3 of 264:
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Jul 26 00:58 UTC 2003 |
Can Davis add his name to the list of candidates trying to replace him? If
he can, he should. So if 49% vote not to recall him and also vote that he
should replace himself if recalled, then he'd probably still win, because
nobody else would get more votes than him.
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