Today is the day for Arapahoe Co. residents to recall Tracy Baker. Baker, our beloved county clerk-recorder, has pretty conclusively been shown to have behaved with wild impropriety with an assistant, showering his girlfriend with promotions and huge pay raises, all the while exchanging hot e-mails with her during the business day.
When a GOP office holder has become a big enough embarrassment that the GOP county board of supervisors and the state GOP leadership are demanding he resign, you know something’s gotten pretty bad.
Is it worth the $400k to hold a special recall election? Maybe, maybe not. But, then, what’s the hidden cost of someone like Baker staying in office and setting the tone for local government.
I, for one, will be thrilled to not have to write the jerk a check for my car registration every year.
Everyone complains about how much recall elections cost, but in the the long-term they’re probably worth it. Throw one bum out of office and the effects on all the other bums is most salutory. Your investment of US$400k could seem cheap in the final accounting.
Agreed.
I still think the cost could have been prevented if people had pulled out their heads and voted for the Independent that ran against him.
Sometimes, our “two party only” system bugs me.
Oh, absolutely. That he got reelected after this story broke is appalling.
That said, two things:
1. That wasn’t a matter of the “two party only” system, but of the knee-jerk “He’s a member of Party X, so I’ll just automatically check off his name” syndrome, something that is symptomatic of party politics in general.
2. On the ballot as an alternative are a Republican and a Libertarian. (The Dem in the party is a write-in.) I suspect the Republican will get in (given the makeup of the population in this county), but it’s definitely a non-two-party race.
Baker’s out, in an 8:1 margin. More folks voted against him by absentee ballot than voted for him in person.
It being a special election probably didn’t help him any. Short of a massive groundswell of support (unlikely without party involvement), anyone who was motivated to go uot and vote probably was going to be voting against him.
The GOP candidate to fill the position won, of course, handily. Margie and I both voted for the Libertarian candidate, just to shake the ruling party up by that much.