Appeals court blocks Oct. 7 recall election (SFgate.com, September 15, 2003): A federal appeals court blocked California's Oct. 7 recall election Monday, throwing the fate of the unprecedented election into question. The Ninth U.S. Court or Appeals ruled that the vote cannot take place because almost half of the votes will be cast on unreliable problematic punch-card machines. The decision was granted an immediate 7-day stay to give the losing sides to appeal. The three-judge panel said that the use of the problematic machines is exacerbated by the sheer number of candidates vying to succeed Governor Davis if he is recalled.
My goodness. Whoda thunk it? Every other appeal has failed so badly that you wouldn't have expected this one to succeed.
I would not lay odds on this result surviving a Supreme Court appeal, if the case is accepted. Then again, I'm not sure of the odds of it being accepted for full hearing and review, given both the issues at hand and the time constraints. One issue is whether or not a Supreme Court review on the merits could be done in reasonable time. I should hope that after that most spectacular debacle, the Court would be more cautious about dealing with elections and their fairness. (If nothing else, there is a certain lovely "hoisted by their own petard" aspect of relying on Bush v Gore to support this particular request, which I suspect would go in exactly the opposite direction of that particular Court majority.) I think, although I'm not certain, that the Court can both grant certiorari and simultaneously issue a per curiam opinion reversing the appeals court at the same time, if necessary, although I'm not certain.
It will be interesting to see exactly how this turns out. If the request is refused, I would expect it to be refused without comment, since that's how most Court rejections of review requests are handled. (On the other hand, depending on who is on which side, a rejection of cert may produce an impressively snarky or disturbed opinion of why the other justices feel that review should have been granted.)
Frankly, I don't see how any court would conclude that anyone's interests would be harmed by a postponement of the election to March 7. Then again, I'd have thought that issue would have been decided in just that way a few court cases ago.
I am somewhat puzzled as to why the state, of all possible parties, would appeal the case (LA Times, registration required). At best, shouldn't the state be neutral on the issue of when the election is held? At worst, I'd think they'd say, "Hey, it'll save us money to wait until we were going to have an election with new processes in place in any event! Cool beans!" I don't understand what harm the state would suffer.
(Purely a side note: I do love the fact that, in the SFGate poll of whether or not the appeals court was right to postpone the decision, the 2d ranked result at the moment is, "I can't take six more months of this." I suppose it says something about how we regard our privileges and duties and what they've come to that some people's basic response at this point is essentially "Make this go away.")
Posted by iain at September 15, 2003 01:55 PMComments
