Editorial: Group seeking recall is off base

Wednesday, Sept. 23, 1998 | 9:32 a.m.

THE secretary of state's office did the right thing Monday when it rejected a request by a citizens group to combine valid signatures from two failed petition drives to recall Clark County Commissioner Yvonne Atkinson Gates.

Citizens for Honest and Responsible Government started its efforts after Gates was reprimanded by the state Ethics Commission for violating ethics laws for her involvement in selecting concessionaires at McCarran International Airport.

Despite significant financial backing from casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, the first recall effort failed after a random count of 500 signatures found that too many of them were invalid. The second recall effort again fell short when the Clark County registrar of voters determined there weren't sufficient valid signatures.

Unable to gather enough registered voters in Gates' district during each signature-gathering drive to force a special election, Citizens for Honest and Responsible Government came up with a scheme that is not worthy of its organization's name. The group last week asked the secretary of state to simply take all the valid signatures from both recall efforts and total them together, as if they were all part of one petition drive.

Talk about tortured and twisted logic. A baseball analogy using a hypothetical three-game series between the Cardinals and the Dodgers is appropriate to show how off base the group's suggestion is. In the first game, the Cardinals lose 10-0, but then win the next two games by scores of 6-3 and 6-0, winning the series. But the illogical reasoning used by the group seeking the recall would suggest that although the Dodgers lost two out of three games, they actually were the winners because they scored more runs (13-12) than the Cardinals.

The bottom line is that these were separate recall efforts and the secretary of state's office took the appropriate action in dismissing Citizens for Honest and Responsible Government's loony request. It's time for those who have been involved in the recall efforts to get on with their lives and stop being pawns for Adelson's shenanigans.