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A Weblog by
Sacramento Bee Columnist Daniel Weintraub

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June 26, 2003

Is Shelley the new Katherine Harris?

I see I’m not the only one having a hard time getting straight answers from Secretary of State Kevin Shelley about the recall rules. Roll Call reports that a Shelley spokeswoman says it is “unclear whether a scheduled recall election would proceed if Davis resigns before it takes place.” (Article is for paid subscribers only; I got the quote through Rick Hasen’s Election Law blog.) Shelley’s office has also been painfully slow in answering questions I’ve had about how things will unfold, and up until now I’ve given them the benefit of the doubt, figuring they’re new in the job and a little bit overwhelmed. But the longer this goes on the more I’m inclined to suspect that Shelley wants to keep things vague so he can make it up as he goes along—sort of a Democratic version of the post-election legal interpretations in Florida 2000. I don’t think Davis is going to resign, but shouldn’t Shelley know by now what the law says about the effect of a resignation in the face of a recall? And even if we observers think the law is unclear, shouldn’t Shelley have an opinion, since that’s where the process of sorting it out would begin?