Originally published at: Total Recall: If you're in California, please vote by tomorrow | Boing Boing
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The “Total Recall” puns made more sense last time California had a gubernatorial recall election.
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If that ballot is still sitting unopened on your desk, please take a few minutes to open it, vote No, seal it, and sign and date the envelope with your address. Drop it in a mailbox on your daily walk. It’s painless, I promise.
If you’re a political masochist, on the other hand, don’t do anything and enjoy the exquisite torture of a lunatic like Larry Elder as chief executive of the world’s 5th largest economy.
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I already voted as soon as I got the ballot.
Fingers crossed.
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Dear Wife and I came home early from Summer vaca to rally the troops and get the ballots in the mail, in person, carrier pigeon. We counted around 50 + folks that didn’t even know there was a Re-Call afoot, it’s a war, this is just one battle, and this is the new normal.
P.S. F@ck Larry Elder to hell.
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Is there a special reason to leave the second question blank rather than voting for the least crazy alternative, just in case?
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Good luck to all the Cali folks on this vote. We’re thinking good thoughts your way…
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As long as you’re voting “no” on the first question, then it does no harm to vote for the best option on the second question, although it’s unlikely to help much either. The state Democratic Party is saying to leave it blank because they wanted a simple messaging campaign to maximize the odds of people voting no rather than thinking “what the hell, I like this progressive candidate better, maybe I’ll give him a shot…”
For what it’s worth in the 2003 recall election Cruz Bustamonte, the Democratic Lieutenant Governor at the time, appeared on the ballot as a “plan B” if Davis lost. In that case having a well-known Democrat as an option didn’t prevent a Republican from getting a plurality of the votes.
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How long would he be “in charge” before he too got recalled? Could the petition to recall him get enough signatures before he’s even inaugurated?
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Our expat ballots were delayed because we’ve recently moved and Bpost wouldn’t forward them. They made their way to us by another route. I took them and dropped at the embassy in Paris just to make sure they got there in time. And they’ve arrived back in San Diego and been counted. We did our part for California!
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That would be amusing, but the process can’t start until/unless he’s in office. The earliest that can happen is a little more than a month after the recall election ends (the CA Secretary of State has to certify the recall, and that takes a month.) A large number of registered voter signatures are required and it takes some time and is expensive. Those in charge of voting would almost certain wait until the next scheduled election, which is only a little more than a year away.
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Per the state constitution, once the signatures are received and certified, the election shall be called and held “not less than 60 days nor more than 80 days from the date of verification of sufficient signatures.” (Or it can be up to 180 days after signature certification if that aligns with a previously scheduled election. The language is weird.). So even if the millions of signatures were collected almost immediately and certified in record time, the guy would probably be governor for over 2 months at least.
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I voted immediately after getting my ballot, but I’m worried about this. There’s a lot of damage Elder could do if he ends up in office, even briefly - the environmental impact alone would have international repercussions, and he could easily end up doing things (.e.g. his talk about suspending environmental regulations wrt constructing housing) could still be having a negative impact on the state a century from now.
The big lesson from the Trump era is that it may take a long time to build or fix things, but immeasurable damage can be done extremely quickly. I just hope we won’t get another example of that here.
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When is the next scheduled election for governor?
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Last time around, there was a lot of infighting in the democratic party about the alternatives, and also supposedly a lot of voter confusion around whether they could vote on part 2 if they voted no on part 1. So this time they decided to just stick to defeating the recall itself.
As an individual voter, it makes sense if there is someone you think is less bad that Larry Elder (not hard!) then it’s fine to decide to vote for them. I voted for (throws up a bit) Kevin Paffrath because I will not through inaction, allow any republican to be elected to any office. Given the nature of the recall, the second question is basically a rod of terrible wonder anyway. The system needs reform.
Absent legal reform, probably the correct solution is for the party to settle on a retired “senior statesman” that is well known and reasonably well liked and obviously not trying to use the position as a springboard for their own ambitions as a placeholder until the next general election. I don’t know exactly who this would be or why this wasn’t done.
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November of next year. Which I think led some Democrats to be rather relaxed about all this - “Oh, he’ll only be in power for about a year.” It’s a terrifyingly long period of time, though, and even if Elder was recalled immediately after taking office, that’d be enough time to do serious damage.
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Agreed. Especially since he’s probably hell-bent on doing as much damage as possible in that period of time.
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It’s worth noting that when the polling was close, the pundits were gloating about how this was bad news for the Democrats.
Now that the No vote is leading in the polls by a lot (and early voting is trending strongly for No) the pundits have changed to say the way the results break out is the real bad news for the Democrats.
What they won’t focus on is the way that once Newsome started leaning hard on a pro-vax message and tying Elder to the GOP’s denial and obstructionism on Covid, the race took off in favor of the No vote.
The political press is committed to a narrative that they wrote in March 2020 that Covid could be a winner for the GOP. They’ve been jamming whatever facts they can find into that narrative ever since, and ignoring anything that doesn’t fit.
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Fingers crossed for Cali Mutants. I’m not a big fan of Newsom, but a year of Elder is objectively worse.
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