Okay.
Mayor John Whitmire
The group aiming to oust Mayor John Whitmire has set a timeline for its efforts to petition for a recall election.
Recall For Houston announced it is eyeing to begin collecting signatures in the fall.
In the meantime, the group will work to generate awareness and assemble volunteers as it moves forward on its mission to remove the mayor from office through a recall vote.
The group, made up of Houstonians, hopes to collect the 64,000 signatures needed to initiate a recall process.
The petition will require 63,000 signatures collected in a 30-day period.
See here, here, and here for some background. I don’t know why one paragraph says 64K signatures are needed while the next says it’s 63K, but either way I’d advise Recall Houston to aim for at least 90K, to allow for the inevitable errors and invalid sigs. A tall order no matter how you look at it. At least I’ll get a chance to look at their July finance report, so I can see if they’ve actually raised some money for this (I have seen basically no indications that they’ve been active lately; I’d more or less forgotten about them) or if they’ve got little more than a wish and a prayer.
One more thing, if they are really collecting signatures in the fall, I can’t see how this could be on the November ballot. And if it’s not in November, then what, next May? Now you’re in primary season and I guarantee it will be that much harder to get people to pay attention to this. Again, it would be nice if they put out a professional-looking document that explained all of the details of how this process works, what we can expect, and when we can expect it. I’d be less skeptical if I saw that kind of organization.