Rescue California

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Shelley slows the recall count
A Weblog by Sacramento Bee Columnist Daniel Weintraub

June 27, 2003

Big news from the Secretary of State’s office on the recall. According to a spokesman, Secretary of State Kevin Shelley has interpreted the law to say that county registrars need only be verifying the signatures they received by June 16. The rest they may set aside until the end of the next reporting period on July 23. Then they will report that number to Shelley and he will give them the go-ahead to verify the second batch. But they won’t be required to report that new number until Aug. 22. If this ruling stands, it will delay considerably the verification process and the date by which the recall qualifies for the ballot. It would almost certainly delay the election until March.

This is looking more like a mirror image of Florida every day. Instead of a Republican Secretary of State fighting to slow a recount and elect a Republican president, we have a Democratic Secretary of State acting to slow a signature count to prevent the recall of a Democratic governor.

And just like in Florida, this one might also wind up in the courts. Except for one problem: if the recall proponents sue, they might find themselves locked in a legal death struggle that could delay rather than quicken the pace of the count. So they may be trapped into accepting Shelley's edict.

My reading of the elections code is that the counties are supposed to be verifying the signatures as they get them. Here’s what it says:

11104. (a) The elections official, 30 days after a recall has been initiated and every 30 days thereafter, or more frequently at the discretion of the elections official, shall report to the Secretary of State all of the following: (1) The number of signatures submitted on the recall petition sections for the period ending five days previously, excluding Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays. (2) The cumulative total of all signatures received since the time the recall was initiated and through the period ending five days previously, excluding Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays. (3) The number of valid signatures, verified pursuant to subdivision (b), submitted during the previous reporting period, and of valid signatures verified during the current reporting period. (4) The cumulative total of all valid signatures received since the time the recall was initiated and ending five days previously, excluding Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays.

Those last five lines seem pretty clear: the registrars are required to notify Shelley on July 23 of the number of valid signatures received during the current reporting period, and the cumulative total. And that would be as of July 16, when the recall organizers say they intend to have submitted all the signatures they will need.

But Shelley’s spokesman says that’s not the case.

“They’re required to provide us the number of verified signatures received through June 16, for the next reporting period (on July 16),” the spokesman said. “If they want to verify signatures received after June 16th, the law does not address that issue. They’re not required to do so.”

The problem is that the statute on signature verification seems to clearly require a continuous verification process, but the detailed rules for the process itself (elections code section 9030) are the same as for a ballot initiative, where the signatures are normally turned in all in one batch. That conflict is what gives Shelley the opening he appears to be exploting to delay the count.

Posted by dweintraub at 04:44 PM