California’s legislature is considering proposed reforms to the state’s process for recalling statewide officers. Some call for increasing the signature requirement and shortening the signature-gathering time for qualifying such recalls. Those are two sides of the same coin: both directly affect how difficult it is to qualify a recall election. With recalls already so difficult to qualify that over 90% of signature drives fail to make the ballot, other proposed reforms will produce better results than raising the qualifying standard.

Changing either the total signature number or the gathering time will increase or decrease the qualification burden recall proponents face: More signatures are harder to gather, and gathering the same number in a shorter time is harder. And either increasing the number, or shortening the time, would make the process more costly.