Daniel Weintraub of the Sacramento Bee recently reported on Secretary of State Kevin Shelley’s latest Stupid SOS Trick, which consists of discouraging counties from counting recently-submitted petition signatures. Left unchecked, will likely delay the recall vote until March, to coincide with what will be for all intents and purposes a Democrat-only primary. This is not the first sleazy and illegal stunt Shelley has pulled in connection with the recall. His original Stupid SOS Trick involved frivolous, last-minute rejections of proposed petition forms on hypertechnical grounds.

Weintraub draws an unfortunate and unfair parallel to former Florida SOS Katherine Harris, however:

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.

Um … no. Contrary to Democrat lore, Florida law does not provide for the endless recounts sought by Al Gore. It does, however, provide for certification of the vote total on a relatively short schedule, to which Harris adhered until the Florida Supreme “Court” ordered her not to. If Harris did anything wrong at all, as Sore-Loserman Democrats maintain, it was in her overly strict adherence to the relevant Florida statutes as written, not in any attempt to circumvent them. This does not merit any comparison at all to what Kevin Shelley is doing now, which (as Weintraub rightly notes) is to encourage counties to ignore the law.

In a subsequent entry, Weintraub quotes Shelley’s non-explanation:

My responsibility is to run a fair and impartial election system. Sometimes I’m going to make a ruling or provide advice that’s going to make the proponents happy or mad, and the same thing for the opponents. I can assure you, they’ll have equal-opportunity to be ticked off.

Translation: Nevermind what the law says, if both sides are mad at me, I must be doing something right. [Oh yeah, and if both sides aren't mad at me, pretend they are. Please?]

Mr. Shelley’s antics indicate that Davis is not the only official who has proven himself unfit to serve in the office to which he was elected. At the time of the 2002 election, no one anticipated a recall, but everyone did assume that the SOS would do his job and not resort to petty, partisan games, any more than we feared that his Republican predecessor, Bill Jones, would have arranged for Bush to “win” California. Is it too late to recall Shelley as well?

While we’re at it, let’s get rid of Garamendi, too. Remember him? He is the Insurance Commissioner who was going to provide affordable health care to all Californians. He must be really frustrated now, having been reminded of the fact that the Insurance Commissioner has no jurisdiction over HMOs, the only plausible vehicle to do that. So Garamendi should step down from the post he accidentally got himself elected to, and lobby the new governor to appoint him head of the Department of Managed Health Care, where he will finally be able to do what he said all along that he was going to do. But if he won’t step down, how much does it cost to add one more name to a recall ballot that was already there? So we end up with six questions instead of two. So what? That’s a lot less than the number of questions we have to ask in almost every other election.

My suggestion gets us three recalls for the price of 1. What a deal! I’m sure that anyone who opposed the Davis recall because he actually fell for the name “Taxpayers Against the Recall” will be glad to jump on board. I’m sure Rick Hasen will concur, as none of these individuals obtained a majority of the popular vote, meaning that none of them were really “elected” according to Hasen’s version of the Election Code.