Blogtrek

California's weird election

I see now that Gray Davis now has to go through a recall election. The laws of California say that all you need to run for Governor is to be a resident of California, pay $3,500, and get 65 signatures. A K2 person can easily run for Governor. (K2 means that the person knows or is known by between 31 and 316 people; the notation is logarithmic and is explained in "Logarithms keep Doc Brown in Perspective"). Most of us are K3 (between 316 and 3,162 people), so most of us could run for governor, and a lot of people are. I hear that there are 352 candidates for governor now, and the number is likely to rise. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Arianna Huffington, and Larry Flynt are among the candidates. So also is Bridget O'Reilly, who has been unemployed for three years and thinks of this as another job she is trying to get. She will get fame and notice out of this, and that may help her to get another job.

But with so many candidates, we could wind up with a winner with only 5.2% of the vote, say, but leading all the 351 others by a wide margin. And perhaps those 5.2% are a fringe group that the other 94.8% don't believe in at all. You get one of those as governor and almost everyone will be unhappy. So this could get wild. If they are going to do this, they need a runoff election, or several runoff elections, to eliminate the fringes and get at the candidates that are rated in the top 10% or so by everyone.

This may even hurt Bush's chances of getting reelected next year. I thought at first of an Arnold Schwarzenegger challenge to the Republican Party's nomination of Bush, but he is foreign-born. Still, this could be a place where people voice their discontent, and maybe a governor will be elected who will be emboldened by this either to challenge Bush for the Republican nomination or run as a third-party. If either of these succeed, Bush loses a Lichtman key and perhaps the election.