After the last attack ad fades away and the last ballot is counted, elected officials are supposed to sit down and govern. But it’s hard to govern effectively if the losers can demand a do-over.

That’s the problem with recall elections. They distract elected officials from the people’s business. They make leadership dangerous, which makes difficult decisions even rarer. They put public officials in perpetual campaign mode when they ought to be doing their jobs.

That’s been the experience in some St. Louis city neighborhoods and in some of its suburbs.

Now, a majority of the Illinois House wants to import the practice to the land of Lincoln. The House voted 75 to 33 for a constitutional amendment allowing voters to recall the governor, other elected state officials and members of the General Assembly. If the Senate goes along, the measure would be sent to the voters.

The House vote was an act of spleen-venting aimed at Gov. Rod Blagojevich, part of the bitter Democrat-on-Democrat power struggle that has marred his years in office.
House members, however, should be careful what they wish for. As we’ve seen in St. Louis, recall is as likely to be used against little fish like them as it is against big ones like governors.

The Missouri side of the metro area has seen at least 15 recall attempts in the past quarter century, and most were successful. Last year, former Mayor Ann Purzner of Overland got the boot from voters who were angry about her high-handed style and her effort to fire the police chief.

In 2006, two St. Charles council members survived a recall effort that resulted in criminal charges against a person who had circulated recall petitions. Between 2003 and 2005, three St. Louis aldermen lost their jobs in recall elections.

St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay is facing a recall attempt by an alliance of political foes. His offense: He demoted the city’s first black fire chief for disobeying the mayor’s orders involving the racially sensitive issue of promotions within the department. It was a politically bold act on the mayor’s part, and the Fire Department is better for it.

That underscores a major flaw of recall laws: Office holders sometimes have to make unpopular decisions for the public good, trusting that the benefits will become apparent to voters before the next scheduled election. That’s called leadership. If the penalty is a recall vote, there probably will be less of it.

The Illinois bill sets a fairly high bar for recalling an office holder. Advocates must gather signatures equaling 12 percent of the total vote in the last election for the office to be challenged. For example, it would take 416,000 signatures to put Gov. Blagojevich on the block.

The bar ought to be high for this sort of thing, but that raises another problem. Recall provisions became popular during the progressive movement of a century ago. The concept was that citizens upset by a politician’s conduct in office could organize effectively and oust him prior to the next election.

Politics have changed since then. Circulating petitions now is often a for-profit business that pays people to gather signatures. Angry citizens are less likely to mount successful efforts than are special interests with the money to hire people to collect signatures.

The power to recall officials should be on the books for those instances when a politician behaves so outrageously that he truly merits an early firing. But it’s a nuclear option that should be used only as a last resort.

Too often, recall creates more mischief than public good. It’s better to let office holders serve out their terms. Mayor Slay, for example, will face re-election next March. If his opponents are serious about getting rid of him, they have plenty of time to horde their resources and marshal their organizing skills.

Rep. Jay Hoffman, D-Collinsville, put it well in a speech on the Illinois House floor recently. “We do have recall. It’s called an election.”