Interest in California recall is flagging

MARTINEZ, Calif. -- The deluge of completed absentee ballots in the mail has dried up. The lines for advance voting at county offices have vanished. Even the telephone calls have dropped off from voters asking about the California recall election, its curious cast of candidates and that confounding ballot that goes on and on.

"I am looking at my phones, and there is only one busy line," said Stephen L. Weir, the clerk-recorder in Contra Costa County, here in a far-flung suburb east of San Francisco. "They should be lit up like a Christmas tree."

After a week of legal uncertainty, the Oct. 7 recall election for Gov. Gray Davis is back on. In fact, it was never officially called off as appeals court judges stayed their ruling postponing the vote, and state election officials will get a new hearing on Monday.

But local election officials, bleary-eyed and a bit short-fused after two months preparing for the hurried-up vote, now worry they may be left standing at the altar on Election Day. It seems the many uncanny twists and turns of the past two months, beginning with the early splash of vanity candidates and now the quarreling in court over punch-card voting, have left many Californians with cold feet about the unprecedented recall.

"People are getting annoyed with the whole thing and losing interest," said Summer Roberts, who works at a frame shop in Walnut Creek, where the campaign's first debate was conducted with great hoopla several weeks ago. "I think the general public is getting lost. They are feeling jerked around."

Mark DiCamillo, director of the Field Poll, said legal doubts raised last week about the election, real or imagined, could not have come at a worse time for voter turnout. The depleted mail bags arriving at county election offices, DiCamillo said, were evidence of voter hesitance.

About a quarter of voters in statewide elections in California typically cast absentee ballots, he said.

State officials said on Friday that nearly 500,000 people had voted by absentee ballot since Sept. 8, with an additional 2 million absentee ballots still outstanding. Officials had expected many of those ballots to be returned this week.

"This is the main harvesting time for absentee votes," DiCamillo said. "It cuts into the number of votes that would have been cast. Maybe those will be made up for if indeed they go forward with the election, but I don't know that, and we may never know that."

Jennifer Ramm, a foster care worker in Rancho Cordova, a Sacramento suburb, said she still planned to vote, but she expressed growing disgust with an election she had long ago dismissed as foolhardy.

"I am only going to feel more irritated if they end up throwing out my vote," said Ramm, who went to the county election office this week to make sure her absentee ballot would be tabulated if mailed. "This whole election has been nothing but a big waste of money."

Whether the voter dolor fades when the court battles conclude, or whether it has deeper roots in an irksome recall process that has tested the patience of most every Californian at some point, remains anyone's guess.

"We have a lot of really teed-off people out there," said Sidney S. Novaresi, president of People's Advocate, an antitax group in Sacramento that helped start the recall. "If the election gets delayed, all of those absentee ballots are going to have to be junked and done all over gain. Who knows what would happen then."

Some people, including Lt. Gov. Cruz M. Bustamante, the only Democratic officeholder on the ballot to replace Davis should he lose the recall vote, have attributed the souring public mood to "recall fatigue," something that has also beset many of the contest's participants.

The election has dominated news coverage for more than two months in a state with a famously short attention span. Davis has kept such an exhausting schedule that he managed to deliver one of the funniest lines of the campaign the other night without even intending to.

"My vision is to make the most diverse state on earth, and we have people from every planet on the earth in this state," Davis said at a town-hall style meeting in Sacramento.

The fatigue has also had more serious consequences as a whirlwind of rumors and false reports surrounding the past week's legal activity swept the state. One said that absentee ballots should be destroyed.

"This random, rampant, uncontrolled dissemination of information, almost like urban legends, is having a chilling effect on the election," Weir said. "People are just wanting this thing over, and the mood seems to have a life of it is own. There is no directing it, no spinning it."

Alice Jarboe, the manager of voter services in Sacramento County, one of at least six counties where the disputed punch-card voting systems are still in use, said the confusion and frustration came as no surprise. Even with the heavy news media coverage of the election, Jarboe said, most people have found it difficult to follow recall developments.

Some voters still do not understand that they can vote for only one of the 135 candidates on the ballot to replace Davis, a point election officials have been hammering home since early last month. With a sudden bombshell like this week's court actions, she said, election overload was unavoidable.

"Every time you turn around, the rules are changing," said Jarboe, who admits to being a bit tired and cranky herself. "As an elections manager, I would like to get the election back on track. As a human being, I would like to have a weekend off."

A new public opinion poll, scheduled to be released on Sunday by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, indicates that 92 percent of likely voters are very closely or fairly closely following recall news.

But the poll was conducted Sept. 9 to Sept. 17, so only some of the respondents were interviewed after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling last Monday. The poll did not pose questions about the court action.

Nonetheless, Mark Baldassare, director of the poll, took issue with the notion that a significant number of voters were getting cold feet. He said the new survey indicated the recall remained "a big show for the public" and that the partisan divide among Republicans and Democrats was becoming more pronounced.

The poll showed that 53 percent of likely voters would vote to remove Davis from office, compared with 58 percent a month ago. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. It showed Bustamante and Arnold Schwarzenegger leading the replacement candidates, followed by state Sen. Tom McClintock.

"My general sense is that the effects of the legal wrangling for the Democrats is it provides further evidence that this is a misuse of the recall process," Baldassare said, "and for the Republicans, it gives them another reason to feel that they need to intervene in the political system."

Jonno Wells, who runs a surf forecasting service in Orange County, falls among those who favor intervention. He has already voted for Davis' recall by absentee ballot. Over lunch in Huntington Beach with a friend, Wells said he feared a delay in the election would spell defeat for the recall.

"Six months is a long time," Wells said. "People will get sick of it."

In Oakland, Angela Clark, a Democrat, said she did not need to wait six months.

"Like a lot of people," Clark said, "I'm disgusted."

Josette Woolley, a French citizen who owns a sporting goods store in Walnut Creek with her husband, has been following the recall in the French and the California news media.

If she could vote, Woolley said, she would choose McClintock. But even as an outsider looking in with some amusement, Woolley said enough was enough.

"At first it was fun," she said. "But it isn't fun anymore."

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