California’s recall wars appear to have entered a new phase, marked by the failure of the last outstanding LA City Council recall effort, against Mike Bonin, and the revival of recall efforts against progressive prosecutors in LA and San Francisco counties. The recall effort against Bonin was the last of three failed efforts to mount recall campaigns against progressive LA city council members. It had initially appeared to be successful but failed because of an exceptionally high number of invalid signatures — a consequence of relying on per-signature paid canvassers.
At the same time, legislative work is advancing to reform the recall process at the state level, with the broad outlines of potential changes coming into focus, and plenty of time to put final proposals on the ballot for voters to consider this November. The state legislature, Secretary of State Shirley Weber and the state oversight board, the Little Hoover Commission, have all been involved in exploring options.
While recalls are a perennial part of California politics, with an average of 67 local recall attempts annually from 2010 through 2021, the numbers spiked dramatically in 2021 to 120, more than triple the level of the previous two years, according to Geoff Pallay, editor in chief of Ballotpedia, in a Dec. 6 presentation to state legislators.
Many were driven by right-wing activists focused on COVID-19 policies, school board culture wars, criminal justice reform, homelessness and housing policies, all of which played some role in the attempted recall of Governor Gavin Newsom as well. A failed attempt to recall three members of the Los Alamitos school board was typical: The first week of class last September, a single middle school science teacher gave his students a survey asking them their preferred pronouns. A small cadre of parents saw this as “the last straw,” citing “CRT [critical race theory]” (not taught), statewide COVID restrictions (not the district’s responsibility), and an ethnic studies elective (an elective), and began a recall campaign that fizzled when they failed to meet a Dec. 17 filing deadline.
The thoughtful, slow-paced deliberation in the reform discussions stands in stark contrast to the reported influx of Democratic donor support for the second wave of recall attempts against LA District Attorney George Gascón and San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin, which can also be seen in the San Francisco school board recall, where recall supporters have out-raised opponents by 22-1. The largest donor by far is billionaire Arthur Rock, a poster boy for big-tech’s takeover of the Democratic Party establishment, who’s invested tens of millions in the charter school movement — a movement the San Francisco school board has resisted (surprise!).
The second recall against Boudin enjoys a similar million-dollar advantage largely thanks to a PAC “financed by some 74 — mainly extremely wealthy — donors,” primarily “venture capitalists, hedge-fund managers and investment bankers,” according to reporting by Will Jarrett for Mission Local, a San Francisco community publication. Petition gatherers were paid $10 per signature, roughly double the usual top rate.
The second Gascón recall is being backed by “Hollywood power players,” such as Orion Pictures co-founder Mike Medavoy, according to Los Angeles magazine. It cited “well-publicized crimes … in particular the murder of Jaqueline Avant, the 81-year-old wife of legendary Motown producer Clarence Avant,” and “UCLA student and Brentwood High graduate Brianna Kupfer” as motivating factors — precisely the kind of anecdote-driven, knee-jerk response that drove California’s mass-incarceration problem in the first place.
Yet, despite some rise in crime, there’s no evidence that San Francisco or L.A. are particularly exceptional. Indeed, a December report from the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) found that violent crime increased “about 1% in Los Angeles,” when comparing January to October 2020 (when crime rates were lowest due to the pandemic), before Gascón took office, to the same period in 2021.
In sharp contrast with the donor disconnect from reality, lawmakers have been taking their time, seeking input from a range of experts, while the state’s oversight Little Hoover Commission has just completed its own study as well. On Feb. 1, The Assembly Committee on Elections and the Senate Committee on Elections and Constitutional Amendments held their third joint hearing on reforming the recall, following earlier hearings on Oct. 28 and Dec. 6. The main testimony came from Secretary of State Weber, reporting on the results of a consultative process she initiated, led by former governor Jerry Brown (Democrat) and former chief justice Ronald George (Republican), who engaged with a wide range of groups involved in state politics.
But they’re also weighing voters’ likely views as well, taking testimony from PPIC President Mark Baldassare about PPIC’s historic and most recent polling on recall reform, which finds continued support for reforming the process. “Today, majorities across regions and demographic groups agree that change is needed to improve the recall process,” he said, however, “Democrats and Republicans are divided over how much change is needed.”
“My idea, your idea, someone else’s idea, it doesn’t really matter if the voters don’t like it,” the Senate committee chair, Steve Glazer, told Random Lengths. “All a legislative proposal does is tee up a choice for the voters.” In his view, “Any kind of reform has to meet a couple of different tests. One is it still has to provide a level of accountability for politicians. Number two, it has to be simple and easy to understand.”
The first widely-shared concern Weber reported was “That it would have been possible for someone to get fewer votes and become governor to replace a person who got more votes,” because of how California’s recall is structured. Only California and Colorado hold a recall and replacement election at the same time, which is the only way such a flagrantly anti-democratic outcome could occur.
This happened to State Senator (and committee member) Josh Newman (D-Fullerton), in 2018, when he got 66,197 votes and was replaced by a candidate who got only 50,215 votes, in an election with 158,089 voters. He regained his seat in the next election, in 2020, when 418,218 people voted (more than twice as many), and he’s since been working on reforming the initiative on several fronts — as Random Lengths reported last year.
Despite his experience, “I’m a firm believer in the value of the recall process,” he told Random Lengths, but the question is, “what is the right framework,” he said. “I want to restore it to what I believe was the original intended purpose, as opposed to is the current effective purpose or the opportunistic purpose of ‘Oh wow, we can use the recall provision to get to a special election,’” with a smaller electorate—as happened with him in 2018. Thus, the smaller electorate runs directly counter to the claim that the recall represents “the will of the people.”
Newman’s bill to eliminate paid signature gathering on a per-signature basis passed the legislature last year but was vetoed by Governor Newsom. This year, he’s submitted a proposed constitutional amendment to eliminate the replacement election, so the recall would be a straight up-or-down vote. Replacement would be via special election, succession (in the case of lt. governor replacing the governor), or appointment (where vacancies are currently filled that way). Seven states use a similar system.
“It’s my assertion that the presence of that second question is what creates the incentive, and a very powerful incentive, for people to try and exploit California’s recall provisions for reasons that have nothing to do with justice or any sort of integrity or redress that the framers had in mind,” Newman said. “Because obviously, the world has changed a lot between 1911 and 2022.”
Glazer is sympathetic to the idea of separating the recall and replacement elections. “Part of a healthy democracy is to give voters the time and patience to examine the question before them and not be rushed into the emotions of the moment,” he said.
Voters aren’t the only ones being rushed. “Election officials up and down the state simply believe that much more time is needed to administer an election in a state the size of California,” Weber said. On the other hand, it’s unfair to both voters and targeted officials to drag the process out too long. A stand-alone recall would address both concerns.
A report from the Little Hoover Institute came to a different conclusion: eliminate the recall question, and put the incumbent on the ballot against all challengers. Five states use such a system, and a proposed constitutional amendment has already been introduced. This would avoid an anti-democratic outcome, but wouldn’t address election officials’ concerns. Still, it’s worth considering.
Another concern Weber cited as the reasons for recall. “Some were saying that we should use the same kind of language that we use for impeachment, that this is a form of impeachment by the public vs. impeachment by the legislature,” she said. There’s an intuitive appeal to this logic, but it could be problematic in practice.
“While there is a lot of logic to the malfeasance standard, the vulnerability is there could be expensive litigation, mostly at the local level, where most recalls occur,” Glazer said. “You could have a view that politician X is corrupt, dangerous, breaking rules or simply out of touch. But it is a standard that could be opinion over fact and election clerks and judges would be forced to sort it all out.” The problem could be the worst for those least powerful. “Pragmatically, you could be putting enormous burdens on local officials to make these judgments, and to bear the cost and delay of substantial litigation,” he added.
There’s also a pragmatic concern in terms of civic trust, Newman pointed out. Weber’s suggestion was “interesting,” he said, but, “If we think about doing that, I think you’re subject to the response, ‘Oh, you’re trying to rig the game, make it harder to recall an elected official,’” a response that’s also likely with respect to changes to signature requirements, he noted.
At the Oct. 28 hearing, UC Riverside political scientist Karthick Ramakrishnan advised that the legislature should provide the public with a “menu of choices” not just a single ballot measure. These could address different problem areas as well as different ways of dealing with the same problem.
Glazer agreed. “Typically any kind of proposed change is as strong as its weakest element,” he said. “And so if you give a voter choice on different changes you may be protecting some of the more popular reforms from the weaker ones.”
Changing signature requirements, as Newman noted, is a potential minefield. But California is out of step with most other states. Also at the Oct. 28 hearing, Ben Williams of the National Conference of State Legislatures showed how atypical California is in two respects. We’re only one of two states requiring less than 15% of signatures to qualify a recall, most states require 25% or more; most states (13) provide less time to gather signatures rather than more (3), 11 provide 90 days or less. “There’s a concern that our time frame is entirely too long,” Weber said. In addition, our signature standard is 12% of voters in the last election for statewide officers, rather than a percent of registered voters, another angle that can be gamed. (It’s 20% for state legislators.) Good arguments can be made for changing all of these — but they might prove unpopular, nonetheless, as Newman suggests. So a menu-style approach seems sensible for all of them.
“I’m trying to make sure that the question we put to the voters is the least political question, is the most concise and objective question,” Newman said. “Let’s do this in such a way that we don’t have an unintended consequence that might be as worse or as bad as the original problems.”
“It’s not easy to put forward a clean, understandable, and persuasive change and that’s why we are taking our time and not leaping ahead with one proposal or another,” Glazer said.
The careful deliberation in the legislature stands in stark contrast to what’s happening with some Democratic donors, who seem happy to exploit the system’s vulnerabilities, telling themselves they’re the good guys for doing Donald Trump’s dirty work for him, working to derail criminal justice reforms to a system that still incarcerates people at a rate roughly 10 times that of Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands.
