In Conor Moran's column yesterday ("What a student can learn from the state of California") on the upcoming recall election in California, he blames the current effort to recall Gray Davis as being based on "a rare and obscure law." He also describes the effort to recall the governor as spearheaded by an "elitist junta."

These statements are misinformed and misleading.

Since the passing of the recall law, there have been 117 recall attempts in California, including every governor since Pat Brown, most of which fail to succeed in their petition drives. In the 1990s, no fewer than two state assemblymen were recalled.

As to the "elitist junta," the petition to recall Davis could not have succeeded unless the petitioners manage to gather more than twelve percent of the votes cast in the last election. Since Californians registered a historically low turnout in the last gubernatorial election -- only 44% of registered voters cast their ballots, that is only 6.8 million people in a state with a total population of over 30 million -- only poor voter turnout is to blame.

Californians may in fact be led by the wealthy and the elite, Gray Davis himself is a career politician and a graduate from Stanford and Columbia Law School, but the recall election is an exercise in democracy. Hopefully the California voters will exercise their rights in this upcoming election instead of staying at home.

And hopefully the Democrats will decide to run an alternative to Davis on the October ballot instead of placing their confidence in a governor who has mismanaged California at every possible chance.