SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Hours after California Gov. Gavin Newsom beat back a recall election that could have cost him his job, his fellow Democrats in the state Legislature said Wednesday that they will push for changes to make it more difficult to challenge a sitting governor.
That could include increasing the number of signatures needed to force a recall election, raising the standard to require wrongdoing on the part of the officeholder and changing the process that could permit someone with a small percentage of votes to replace the state’s top elected official.
“I think the recall process has been weaponized,” Newsom said a day after his decisive victory.
He said the recall rules affect not just governors but school boards, city councils, county supervisors and district attorneys, notably in Los Angeles and San Francisco, where progressive prosecutors with reform agendas are facing recall efforts.
The governor noted that California has one of the nation’s lowest thresholds for the number of signatures needed to trigger a recall election. In Newsom’s case, organizers had to collect nearly 1.5 million signatures out of California’s 22 million registered voters in their bid to oust him, or 12 percent of the electorate who voted him into office in 2018. By contrast, Kansas requires 40 percent.
But the efforts faced pushback from those who organized the recall election against Newsom, and it drew questions from experts, who said California’s law is better than many others in limiting requirements that make it harder to recall politicians.
“They’re working in opposition of the will of the people when they take action like that to limit our ability to self-govern,” said Orrin Heatlie, chief proponent of the recall effort.
There is little benefit for Democrats in pushing changes that could anger voters, said Joshua Spivak, an expert on recalls and senior fellow at the Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform in New York.
“From a political point of view, it’s kind of crazy, and I can’t imagine why they would spend political capital on this,” Spivak said. “Are you going to go to the voters and say, ‘Well, we didn’t deal with the homeless problem, but yeah, we fixed the recall?’ It just doesn’t seem like a smart move.”
Newsom declined to say what changes he favors, saying he is too close to the process as a recall target.
