Last month, as Facebook pages advocating Governor Snyder's recall began to proliferate, I wrote a diary (Recall Snyder?) at our statewide blog, 'Blogging for Michigan', laying out just how difficult this task would be, given the extraordinarily high bar of 25% of the number of votes for Governor in 2010 - 807,000 - needed as petition signatures even to get a recall on the ballot. I broke it down into how many signatures we would need proportionally in Kalamazoo County (20,000, or really more like 40,000, given that counties like us would need to make up for many rural areas of the state. I reflected a bit on how difficult this would be, and by extension, how difficult the entire effort would be.
A diary here yesterday (Snyder Recall Petition Coming to Michigan!!) announced the progress made so far, which I will get to in a minute. I reposted as a comment my analysis from a month ago. I was not being critical of the desire to recall Snyder, just questioning the feasibility.
For that I got mocked and derided - ran into the dkos groupthink buzzsaw for the first time in eight years of blogging here. You can read the comments there if you like; I won't recapitulate them here. It's not pretty, and makes me question the claim that folks here represent the reality-based community. At least on this occasion. It's not that they disagreed with my analysis - it's that so many rejected even discussing the practicality of the effort without refuting it.
Anyhow, here is the news on recall, which the above diary did not give in detail - a group called Michigan Citizens United (kinda evokes the horrid Citizens United v. FEC decision) has been formed as a PAC, started collecting money (~$2000 so far), and on Monday filed the language of the recall petition with the Washtenaw County Clerk's office, as required (Gov. Snyder is officially a Washtenaw resident). A clarity hearing has been scheduled for April 29th. The website says that "Once the language is approved, we can start collecting signatures." However, the deadline for submitting the petitions, assuming that they want the recall election to be this November, is August 5. Assuming further that signatures are collected up to this deadline, the 90 days allowed to collect signatures would extend only back to May 7. Or, if you start April 30, then the last signatures must be collected July 29. The dates will need to be clarified a bit further, but that is roughly the time period being talked about.