Recall election is just a few weeks away. Why do so many in SLO County not seem to care?

With less than a month to go until the Sept. 14 recall election, many San Luis Obispo County voters are saying “meh” to the whole thing.

There have been no big rallies, no massive letter-writing campaigns, and while there are several “No on Recall” sings out there, most are referring to an effort to oust three South County school board members — not to the campaign against Gov. Gavin Newsom.

Local talk radio host Dave Congalton said he’s seen an uptick an interest lately, “but mainly among conservatives wanting Newsom out.”

Moderates and liberals have been far more subdued, and it’s not just here.

Across the state, many voters are disinterested in the election. CNN is calling it a “wall of apathy” and whether it’s due to election fatigue or preoccupation with other issues — a deadly pandemic, for instance — is anyone’s guess.

As for the No. 2 question on the ballot — Who should succeed Newsom if he is recalled? — many voters don’t have a clue as to who’s running.

Several SLO County residents we’ve spoken with since the start of campaigning could name only one or two candidates, at most.

Our favorite response: “That guy with a dog.”

She meant bear, and the “guy” is Republican John Cox, who lost to Newsom in the 2018 general election.

Not that we’re judging.

However, we should note that there’s still time to study up on the candidates.

Of course, voters do have the option of leaving the second question blank. We don’t recommend that — we should all have a say in who the next governor will be, just in case Newsom is booted from office — but voting only on the recall question is better than not voting at all.

‘Obscure stuff’

It’s true that the sheer number of candidates is daunting. There are 46 names are on the ballot, though one of the top-tier contenders, former U.S. Rep. Doug Ose, dropped out recently after suffering a heart attack.

That narrows the list of serious candidates to, oh, five or six or seven, depending on who’s counting.

That’s still a lot to track in a short period of time, especially for voters who want to dig in to candidates’ backgrounds and positions on issues.

“This is obscure stuff,” said Gordon Mullin, a contributing Tribune columnist who writes about conservative politics. “Who goes poking around on websites?”

But let’s identify the real culprit here: the recall process itself, which compresses a process that usually takes more than year into a couple of months.

Normally, we’d have a primary campaign that gives us a chance to get to the know the candidates so we can separate the wheat from the chaff.

That’s followed by several more months of campaigning in the lead-up to the general election, with all the attendant hoopla: Yard signs. Bumper stickers. Meet-and-greets. Multiple debates. A parade of endorsements. Fact checks. Sound bites on TV and radio that get repeated ad nauseam.

But in this election, all that action has to be squeezed into a two-month window, and smaller markets like San Luis Obispo County don’t get much attention from the candidates. (We’ve been told two GOP candidates visited the county, but spoke only to Republican audiences, with no press invited.)

That’s no way to choose California’s top leader.

Need for reform

There have been calls to reform the state’s recall process, and we’re 110% behind that.

After all, only 19 states even allow the recall of state officials and of those, California’s requirements for getting a recall on the ballot are among the most lax.

Is it any wonder that there have been well over 100 attempts to recall various state officials in California? The vast majority failed to make it to the ballot. Still, the low bar for qualifying trivializes the process.

Some ideas for reforming the system:

• Require more signatures. In California, only 12% of the number of voters who cast ballots in the previous gubernatorial election are needed. Only Virginia requires fewer signatures — 10%. In other states it’s 20 or 25% and one state — Kansas — requires 40%.
• Shorten the window of time for signature gathering. California allows recall supporters 160 days to gather enough signatures, which is among the more generous time frames. Several other states allow only 60 or 90 days.
• Require specific grounds for a recall. In California, recall proponents don’t have to state a reason. Other states allow recalls only for serious issues, such as corruption, criminal conviction, or physical or mental unfitness for duty.
• Hold a runoff. If a recall is successful but no replacement candidate wins by a simply majority, hold a runoff between the top two candidates.
• Limit the vote to the recall question only. If it fails, then it’s over. If it passes, there are a couple of options: the lieutenant governor takes over until the next regularly scheduled election, or another special election is held to choose a replacement.

Sure, holding separate elections would be more costly and voters may object to going to the polls twice, but in the long run it would be far better for California.

What we have now sets the stage for minority rule by political extremists.

A relatively small number of voters can force a recall for trivial reasons or even no reason whatsoever — something even more easy to accomplish in times of crisis, when much of the population is unhappy with how things are going.

Once enough signatures are gathered, a slew of candidates can easily qualify for the ballot, raising the odds that no single person will be able to get 50% of the vote.

And finally, the abbreviated campaign season makes it difficult to really suss out what the candidates are all about.

Recalls should be a last resort in extreme cases of abuse of power or unfitness to lead — not a cynical tactic by a desperate political party attempting to short-circuit the normal election process.

That’s exactly what the Republican Party is trying to pull off, which is reason enough to vote no on the recall.

It’s also reason to rethink the entire system.

No matter the outcome of this election, we strongly urge lawmakers from both parties to overhaul a broken recall process that could lead to dangerous outcomes for California.

This story was originally published August 19, 2021 at 5:00 AM.