Rumblings About a Recall

The topic keeps cropping up.

Columnist David Jones discussed it on May 9th in the News Herald. He pointed out that a recall of the Attorney General would require the signatures of 15% of the voters in the 2006 gubernatorial contest, or 603,413, and that the recall would be decided by the 11th District Court of Appeals, where Marc Dann resides. That court has five judges, three of whom are Democrats: Tim Cannon (D), Cindy Rice (D), Mary Jane Trapp (D), Diane Grendell (R), and Colleen Mary O'Toole (R).

I noted the News Herald piece the next day, and blogger Chris Baker posted a comment expressing interest in convening bloggers and activists to brainstorm the idea. [UPDATE: Russo picked up the thread the next day and called on ProgressOhio.org to use its huge email list to gather signatures, renewing that call today.]

There was a post on the legal blog Volokh Conspiracy on May 8th, noting that the standard for removal by recall is easier than for impeachment. Recall is based on offical misconduct in office, defined as anyone who:

willfully and flagrantly exercises authority or power not authorized by law, refuses or willfully neglects to enforce the law or to perform any official duty imposed upon him by law, or is guilty of gross neglect of duty, gross immorality, drunkenness, misfeasance, malfeasance, or nonfeasance is guilty of misconduct in office.

Columnist Thomas Suddes wrote about it on May 11th, commenting that if the number of signatures required is too high then "Strickland could ask legislators to lower the quota." (Suddes didn't mention it, but the 15% of voters required by Ohio is greater than the 12% of voters required in California, where Gov. Gray Davis was successfully recalled in 2003.) Suddes also suggests that a recall would be quicker than impeachment, and for that reason perhaps the Democrats don't want to pursue it.

The redoubtable Professor kicks around the idea on Politics 216 today, and the Plain Dealer editorial board refers to it today in the course of unfairly bashing Democratic leadership over Dann's refusal to resign. (The piece is written as if they didn't know perfectly well that the Dems tried to persuade Dann to leave behind the scenes before issuing a public ultimatum.)

So this notion has legs. At first blush, 603,413 signatures seems impossible, but think about it this way:

* It is less than 7,000 signatures per county.

* It is less than the number of signatures turned in to the Secretary of State to get the minimum wage issue on the 2006 ballot.

* It is less than one-third of the 2,035,865 votes received by Dann in 2006, or for that matter of the 1,833,846 votes that Betty Montgomery received.

Nevertheless, I don't see how it is going to happen. A signature drive that large is going to require paid signature gatherers and would take months to complete [unless something like using the ProgressOhio email list is successful]. It has a built-in message risk -- instead of reinforcing the idea that Democrats are working to maintain a higher standard of conduct and clean their own house, it could simply spread the word that a high-ranking Democratic office holder is a total screw-up.