My experience has been that special election voters are the more dedicated and informed members of the electorate, the ones who can think and read and care, and that results of special elections are more valid than general election outcomes.
That is a personal anecdotal impression, and readers are invited to carp to the contrary in comments.
From all I saw nothing in the recall effort went to the heart of Mr. Schaffer's capability and job performance as a council member, where he often was a minority voice against a majority will, but the City Attorney got a court order saying the election would be held because the St. Francis city charter preempted state law on malfeasance, misfeasance, and nonfeasance standards so that witch hunting in St. Francis was okay. I have emailed the St. Francis City Administrator for a copy of the Judge's opinion, to see what reasoning prevailed, but I still await a response.
So the special election was held, Schaffer prevailing 344 vs. 300, a vote closer than I expected to see. I thought sanity would dictate a ten-to-one majority against the tongue-cluckers.
Strib online Dec. 16, reports:
The vote total is fewer than the 10 percent of registered voters who signed a petition to hold the recall election. City Clerk Barb Held said road conditions and long commutes might have factored into the low turnout.
Amy Lazere, a member of the committee the [sic] initiated the recall, credited Schaffer's victory to an aggressive campaign that she said was girded by lies and misrepresentations.
"I'm ready to puke that the city of St. Francis is on his side," she said.
I do not know Mr. Schaffer, but I know his friend Chester Graham, who is a quite decent person concerned with wanting good government over bad, with wanting ordinary people to see their rights recognized in court, and in general concerned with fair and just as better standards to live under than our too prevalent "Golden Rule" version, the one having the men with the gold making the rules.
My hope would be, given Strib reporting, that Mr. Schaffer would circulate a petition requiring Amy Lazere to show up at the next city hall meeting and puke, as she said she was ready to do. Presumably the St. Francis City Attorney might get a court order barring a special election of the puking issue as outside of both the St. Francis Charter and State law, but it just seems something that under the totality of circumstances ought to be pursued. Ms. Amy simply deserves it.
While I have seen coarse conflict of interest tolerated in one of St. Francis' neighboring cities, the offenders not being targeted for recall, and I have seen ineptness at the council table that to me was nonfeasance or so bad as to be misfeasance, there was toleration of that also.
In St. Francis, (and would YOU like to live there), charges against Council member Schaffer were reported by Strib as:
He has been under fire since a year ago, when he was accused of making inappropriate sexual remarks to a younger woman at a social event. He was censured by the City Council for that incident.
The recall group also accused Schaffer, 69, of spreading false information to residents, and of acting erratically and without city backing.
A police call to report a crew of Spanish-speaking roofers, and an outburst at a television reporter over the summer, led detractors to call him an embarrassment. Supporters called Schaffer a patriot, a straight talker who refuses to march in step with the council.
To me, going to an election over such non-job related things (for a municipal council member's job) as Strib mentions, is giving tongue-clucking too much procedural sway against personal freedom to live free of the neighbors' collective harassment; we after all have eliminated ducking stools in this nation; and I confess to having been far more embarrassed, personally, by seeing large-bloc land owners calling the shots in the neighboring town, if "embarrassment" is to be the measure of whether one should be allowed to stay on a city council.
Don't YOU find conflict of interest to be culpably worse and more troubling a public job-related council member performance worry than what LeRoy Schaffer did, on his own time, in his own perhaps awkward way?
I do.
Again, the special election vs. general election dimension is an interesting one, Strib stating:
The recall group had hoped to schedule the recall for Election Day; almost 300 of their 807 signatures had to be tossed because only previously registered voters were eligible to sign the petition. They needed 741, or 10 percent of the city's voters. They reached their goal 10 days later, after the Election Day deadline.
In the meantime, committee member Jeff Sandoval narrowly won a council seat, beating out incumbent Ray Jones by three votes. Schaffer filed a lawsuit against the city to try to stop the vote. He tried to take a restraining order against the recall group, the mayor and City Council members.
Sandoval said he was disappointed by the outcome and worried about the prospect of having to work with Schaffer on the council.
"One side of it will be very difficult," he said. "It will be very difficult to work with him because I don't believe he has any credibility. The other side of it is I have to do what's best for this city, and that means having to work with him."
It seems to me that Jeff Sandoval and Amy Lazere have made public spectacles of themselves, in a very offensive way and in a way democracy allows despite its offensiveness (thus showing one inadequacy in democracy), and it also seems that after failing in their attempt at making LeRoy Schaffer's days harder than they should be, these two should apologize to the people of St. Francis for their own conduct instead of continuing to feel themselves special.
I think looking for problematic and outright stupid conduct for this pair should begin by looking in a mirror.
_______UPDATE__________
For further detail, here is questioning of a letter to the editor Schaffer wrote (LTEs being a protected First Amendment thing when last I looked).
Here is reporting of the judicial dispute over whether there would be a special election, the reporting on which I base the charter-vs-state-law characterization, and referencing the judicial opinion I requested a copy of from St. Francis officials.
Here is another First Amendment loving blogger calling Schaffer "folk hero."
Here is the google search that got the UPDATE items.
KSTP has the most detailed coverage, this item being the source of the photo of Shaffer, and linking to other Shaffer related KSTP material, with more reported on the Hispanic roofers incident, and on Jeff Sandoval:In June, Schaffer called the St. Francis Police Department to investigate what he thought were illegal immigrants working on a home in his neighborhood.
Schaffer told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS that he's not a racist. He does admit he called police to report suspicious behavior by Spanish-speaking roofers working on a home.
According to the police report, Schaffer stated that he was "certain that they were illegal aliens because they didn't speak English."
When 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS talked to Schaffer about the incident, he insisted the police call wasn’t racially charged.
"We got rid of slavery and somehow economically we survived. We got rid of all that nice cheap labor in the south and they adapted," Schaffer said.
Residents told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS that the calls for Schaffer’s resignation are not because of his actions, but because of what he said.
"Right now I’m embarrassed to even be on the city council or even be a resident of St. Francis," said fellow Councilmember Tim Brown.
Brown said this isn’t the first time he’s heard Schaffer make racially charged comments. He said Schaffer called Hispanics ‘wetbacks’ during his 2006 campaign.
"Even if I wasn’t half-Mexican, most people don’t think that I am and I hear this and I do not care for it. Never have and I never will," said St. Francis Planning Commissioner Jeff Sandoval.
He and four others collected the 700 necessary signatures needed for a recall vote.
"You can have opinions, but your opinions have to be very carefully worded. You have to be careful about what you say and how you say things," Sandoval said.
KSTP has posted the 911 call transcript showing Schaffer from his home seeking a check on status of non-English speaking roofing workers at a neighboring address.
Judge for yourself, is political correctness nannyism vs. free speech norms cause to want to remove a city council member from a city council seat? Was Schaffer wrong to question city land dealings in a LTE? Who are these people who caused there to be a special election and what kind of America do they want? Is it the America you want? Should citizens in their private capacity seeing something triggering suspicions be hesitant in calling and asking authorities to check out a situation? Should one feel intimidated over political correctness in phoning 911? Is questionable judgment and speech apart from sitting at the council table and acting in an official capacity a suitable cause for having a recall effort? What are the limits of community vs. individual, or individuals vs. other individuals, in terms of attaining official actions? What is freedom to mean, in actual situations, beyond platitudes and abstractions? What consequences should attach to how "freedom" is exercised or curtailed or channeled?
_________FURTHER UPDATE_________
Try it this way, our love of the First Amendment, and the sentence, "You can have opinions, but your opinions have to be very carefully worded."
How do you judge the juxtaposition of those two things? Compatible or incompatible? Think what you want but talk politically correct or be silenced OR hunted down with torches and pitchforks? Is it that, a conflict beyond resolution, or simply stressing that it is best to be polite and well mannered, whatever point you wish to make? But if impolite, what are proper consequences and what are overreaching consequences? What protections do you accord unpopular views, since popular views generally do not need protection because the weight of numbers alone protects things held to be popular?
Flag-burning and gay marriage have been exploited by some for political advantage, due to unpopularity vs. feelings of wanting a society that imposes less restraint against freedoms and against imbalanced civil rights. I believe the Federalist arguments recognized the strong and numerous could protect themselves, and the term "tyranny of the majority" was a focus Madison and others deemed important to consider.
Saying, "You can have opinions, but your opinions have to be very carefully worded;" Is that AMERICA? Is that your view of give and take?
On the other hand, was it not a positive thing to have the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black Kenyan elected president without bigoted words bandied about publicly during the election process? There are nuances to the questions.
________FURTHER UPDATE__________
The online bio of Judge Barry Sullivan, the one denying Schaffer's effort to restrain the recall effort, is here. A Pawlenty appointee.
Online docket history for Schaffer's case against St. Francis should be accessible from here, or there is an online image I posted here.
Please post a comment or email if you have difficulty with any link.
Reporting (e.g., PiPress, here) has identified Schaffer's lawyer as Alan Jontz, and an Alan Jontz has been subject to disciplinary action in the past but I cannot say it is the same person or not, see, here and here. Chester Graham, mentioned earlier, also has been subject to disciplinary action, and some people may weigh that as a factor to consider. I do not put much weight into such things, especially with Graham, who I have met personally and spoken to at the Anoka County Law Library. I have never met Schaffer nor Judge Sullivan, nor any other person named in the docketed matter. People who do not defy authority and test boundaries seldom become "test cases" as Schaffer was. Rosa Parks broke the law, sitting wrongly in a southern bus. Lunch counter sit-ns were unlawful, and law enforcement acted locally to keep southern dining areas segregated. We must keep a perspective.