Kevin Shelley is under pressure from a lot of people these days, but he says the only person he owes is his wife.

When she gave birth to their first child in November 2001, he hit the road to run for California secretary of state. When she became pregnant again last fall, he promised things would be different. He might be the largest state's new chief elections official, he told her, but with 2003 an off-year he'd be able to spend plenty of time at home.

That was before a Republican effort to recall Democratic Gov. Gray Davis took off.

This week, the movement's backers declared they had enough signatures of voter support in hand to force a historic election to remove Davis. Now Shelley, a fellow Democrat, finds himself the lightning rod in what could be the nation's most contentious election issue since the Florida presidential vote recount of 2000.

In an interview Wednesday during another long day at the office, the 47-year-old former state lawmaker, who as a legislator blew up so often under pressure that he sought help with anger management, sighed, "Believe me, every day it's, 'Honey, you said the first year was going to be really kind of relaxed.' "

Shelley's days are now consumed by correspondence with elections officials from the state's 58 counties and endless meetings with his own bipartisan team of lawyers and advisers, many of whom he inherited from his Republican predecessor, Bill Jones.

Shelley is charged with understanding the finer points of a provision that has been in the state Constitution since 1911 but has never been tested against a sitting governor.

If recall supporters have indeed submitted at least 897,158 valid voter signatures in support of a recall -- the minimum needed to trigger an election -- a key question is when that election would be held.

Republicans want it this fall, while voters are angry about the state's $38.2 billion budget shortfall and rising vehicle license fees. Democrats want it next March, when voters have had a chance to calm down and when Democratic turnout is expected to be higher.

The date would depend largely on how quickly county elections officials validate signatures, and on how picky they are about which signatures they count. They're now asking questions such as whether voters' middle initials must be included in their signatures.

The answers are coming out of Shelley's office, day by day. He wants his advice to be sound. Like the controversy that ushered George W. Bush rather than Al Gore into the White House, this could all end up in court.

"The courts are the ones who ultimately decide how these processes go," said Carroll Wills, a spokesman for Taxpayers Against the Governor's Recall, a union-backed group organizing opposition to the recall. "They have lawyers. We have lawyers. Everybody gets a lawyer."

A San Francisco liberal who once served as majority leader in the state Assembly, Shelley knows his partisan record colors others' assumptions about how he is interpreting the law. He says he doesn't want to be branded California's version of former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris.

He insists he is no shill for the governor. "We're not giving any guidance to anyone to slow it down," he said of the election timetable. "We're not giving any guidance to anyone to speed it up."

"You have a neutral arbiter's job to oversee this election in a nonpartisan way," he continued. "I have to just resist everything else. And it's a challenge."

Shelley describes pressure from both sides of the aisle. From Republicans, it has been direct: Nasty notes and calls from voters. Letters from a law firm threatening legal action if he did not change one of his rulings and force county elections officials to speed up the process. In that ruling, he said counties could take up to 30 days to validate signatures once they were counted.

"I think he's tried to avoid stepping on any land mines, but that has caused him to not make the right decision, which is to call for the recall to be expedited," said Republican consultant Sal Russo, who is advising one group of recall supporters. "He's not being forthright in his advice."

From Democrats, Shelley said, the pressure has been "nothing tangible."

He speaks in vague terms of "suggestions" as Davis supporters question the process: "(They ask): 'How does the timeline work here?' Little nuances here and there."

Shelley said that he was invited to a California Labor Federation strategy session on how to best oppose the recall but that he declined and was never pressured to reconsider.

Neither the governor nor Taxpayers Against the Governor's Recall has asked him for anything, Shelley said. Asked just who had pressured him, he said, "I can't say. Just supporters."

He won't say whether he thinks it is legitimate to recall a governor who is accused not of corruption but of understating the state's fiscal problems, Shelley said: "I don't have an opinion. I cannot have an opinion."

He also won't say whether he thinks Davis has done a good job as governor.

Nor will he venture an educated guess as to if and when a recall election will be held.

While some Republicans are giving Shelley a hard time, the director of Rescue California, the pro-recall group that gathered most of the signatures, says he has changed his mind about Shelley in the last week or two.

At first, Shelley seemed inclined to drag out the signature-verification process, David Gilliard said. Ultimately, Shelley told counties that he would count signatures as they submitted them. "That was a huge step in my mind," Gilliard said. "Right now, I think he's going to be fair and he's not going to stand in the way."

Wills, of the anti-recall group, said other Davis opponents have unfairly smeared Shelley.

"They've sort of thrown this sinister specter out there that Kevin Shelley is in league with the governor to thwart the will of the people," Wills said. "From our perspective, nothing could be further from the truth. For one thing, he doesn't talk to us about what he's doing."