Seventy-three percent of voters in Avenal, California told their mayor and three city council members to pack up and leave. That was April. It's July now, and all four are still sitting in their seats, still voting on city business, still spending public money.
They didn't appeal. They didn't ask for a recount. They just refused to leave office.
Mayor Alvaro Preciado, along with council members Leticia Gamez, Pablo Hernandez, and David Reynosa, were recalled in an April special election administered by the Kings County Registrar of Voters. The results weren't close — 73 percent of the small Central Valley city's roughly 13,000 residents who cast ballots wanted them gone. The recall campaign centered on government transparency concerns and a controversial chain of decisions that left Avenal temporarily without municipal fire coverage after the Kings County Board of Supervisors terminated a longstanding fire services agreement on March 28.
So the town said enough. Voters did exactly what civics class says you're supposed to do when your elected officials fail you. They organized a recall, held an election, and won in a landslide so decisive it borders on unanimous.
Then, on June 11, three of the four recalled officials — Preciado, Gamez, and Hernandez — voted to reject the certified election results entirely. Essentially they voted themselves back into office by holding a vote only they were allowed to participate in. Their argument: the recall was invalid because Kings County administered the election rather than the City Council authorizing it themselves. The people who lost the election decided they get to grade the paperwork.
Mayor Preciado told the San Francisco Chronicle, "If it was a legal election from the beginning, I wouldn't be here right now." Which is a remarkable sentence to say out loud. The election was certified by the Kings County Registrar. The votes were counted. The results were published. But the man who lost by 73 points has unilaterally decided which elections count and which ones don't.
The June 18 council meeting — the first since the officials voted to keep themselves in power — went about as well as you'd expect. Residents packed the Avenal Theater, shouting erupted within minutes, and roughly half the audience walked out in protest. Three of the four recalled members showed up. Gamez did not.
Recall organizer Dalilah Barajas told ABC30, "We had a democratic process that they said was good." She added, "Our citizens are tired of it. We're done. We want to see them out of their position."
Ricardo Verdugo, the sole council member who wasn't recalled and the only one with an uncontested legal claim to his seat, attended the meeting but refused to participate in any actions requiring a quorum. A quiet protest from the one person in the room who apparently still thinks elections mean something.
The recalled officials' position is that the City Council itself needed to authorize the recall election, and Kings County overstepped by administering it. City Manager Antony V. Lopez responded, "We're ready to go through the process as prescribed by the AG and have our day in court." Kings County District Attorney Sarah Hacker and Sheriff Dave Putnam went further — they sent a cease-and-desist letter warning the recalled officials they could face legal consequences if they continued exercising authority and spending public funds. California Attorney General Rob Bonta approved a quo warranto lawsuit, a rarely used legal mechanism that allows courts to determine whether someone lawfully holds public office.
We spend enormous energy in this country arguing about threats to democracy. Entire news cycles are devoted to hypothetical scenarios in which someone, somewhere, might not respect an election outcome. Meanwhile, in a 13,000-person city in California's Central Valley, four officials lost their recall election in a landslide, voted to reject the results, and kept showing up to work.
The courts will handle it. A quo warranto action is about as definitive as it gets. But the next time someone lectures you about the sacred obligation to respect democratic outcomes, you can point them to Avenal. Where 73 percent of voters said "you're fired," and the people who got fired took a vote and decided they weren't.
