On the night his constituents presented over 4,000 signatures to recall him from the Fargo school board, Seth Holden needed an escape. The campaign had been gaining momentum all summer, with green-shirted activists circulating a petition at local concerts and farmer’s markets to remove four members, including Holden. Their complaints stretched back to 2020, when […]
Expert warnings on California recall election reform latimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from latimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
In 1995, California was awash in political intrigue. Two state Republican lawmakers had consorted with the Democratic devil himself, keeping Assembly Speaker Willie Brown in power, and the result was a pair of recall elections that chased the GOP collaborators from office.
Watching 3,000 miles away, Joshua Spivak was captivated.
“Fantastic,” Spivak exulted in a conversation this week. “If you’re a fan of politics, that’s just as interesting as it gets.”
Spivak, who was studying history at Brooklyn College at the time, wrote his master’s thesis on the recall process. In the decades since, he has fashioned himself into arguably the nation’s leading expert on the subject.