Will Recall Qualify?

On July 29, county blogger Larry Gilbert speculated on OrangeJuice.com about candidates who might enter the race to replace Councilman Lance MacLean in a recall election. Read Gilbert’s post at http://orangejuiceblog.com/2009/07/who-wilol-replace-lance-maclean-in-the-mission-viejo-recall-election

The Registrar of Voters is in the process of determining if 13,915 signatures on the recall petition contain at least 9,393 valid ones by the RoV’s standards. After mid-July, some residents at storefronts and other collection venues asked why recall proponents were still getting signatures. Two aspects kept volunteers going: 1) In the 2005 attempt by Capo district constituents to recall all seven school board members, the Registrar of Voters threw out approximately one-third of the signatures. 2) Councilwoman Trish Kelley began an anti-recall campaign in July to keep MacLean in office.

Recall proponents weren’t overly concerned that Trish Kelley would deter residents from signing the petition or convince those who had signed to rescind their signatures. Kelley appeared to be distributing erroneous advice about the rescission process.

The suspense for proponents will be the wait while the Registrar of Voter determines whether or not a recall election will take place. As one example of how the RoV disqualified signatures in the 2005 attempted CUSD recall, entire pages of signatures were thrown out because “they were written in the same color ink.” At storefronts, volunteers generally supply pens, as shoppers usually don’t approach grocery stores with a pen in hand. While the RoV in 2005 was adamant about voters writing the same address that appeared on voter records, the RoV in the 2008 CUSD recall of two school board members allegedly accepted a different address if the constituent remained a resident within the district.

If the RoV disqualifies nearly a third of approximately 14,000 signatures in the MacLean recall, it will still qualify. The hard truth is that such excessive disqualification took place in the past. While some observers are predicting the recall will qualify, the outcome is up to those counting the signatures.