Make no mistake about it: The lawsuit filed by Gov. Gray Davis' allies against the attempt to recall the governor is meant to slow the process and ensure that the inevitable election is held later rather than sooner.

The recall campaign has collected more than 1.7 million signatures, nearly twice the required minimum of 897,000. And the county officials who have begun to verify them are finding an unusually high rate of accuracy. The Californians who signed the petitions are who they say they are, in other words, and they are registered to vote. There will be an election.

Davis says he fears nothing, that he is fine with facing the voters again. But he would rather face them in March, when Democrats are holding a presidential primary, than in October or November, when voters who are not wild about him might just stay home rather than trekking to the polls to preserve his career. A delay also would give Davis more time to raise questions about the need for a recall, more time to persuade the moneyed interest groups to support him and more time to hope for an economic miracle that might bail the state out of its fiscal predicament.

On all those counts it makes sense for the governor's allies to throw a wrench into the machine, even at the risk of making voters angrier than they are today.

Having said that, the filing still raises some interesting legal and political questions about the way California qualifies initiatives, and now recall measures, for the ballot.

State law is very clear: Only registered voters may circulate petitions on behalf of a recall. The Davis team says it has evidence that out-of-state residents were brought in to do the work, put up at hotels and registered to vote even though they had no intention to remain in California. They say that at least two of the imports were convicted criminals who were not entitled to register or vote in California. And having found a couple of these people, the Davis folks want a timeout so they can investigate the background of every one of the petition circulators.

Election law experts suggest that the case is doomed to fail. Why? For openers, the requirement that petition circulators be registered voters is probably unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down a similar law in Colorado that required circulators of ballot measure petitions to be registered, finding that the requirement was a violation of the First Amendment. The court hasn't ruled on the same question in the case of a recall election, but the same principle would seem to apply.

"I see no reason to distinguish between the two," says Richard Hasen, a law professor and election law expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

Hasen says the courts tend to side with voters in cases such as this. If you are registered to vote and you sign a petition to recall the governor, the courts are likely to find that your signature should count even if the circulator was ineligible or made a mistake somewhere in his paperwork.

A court also could find the request by the Davis forces simply impractical. More than 150,000 people circulated petitions, and about 3,000 were paid to do so. Investigating everyone in the larger group is probably unnecessary, because most were voters who got the petition in the mail, and then signed it and mailed it back to the campaign, perhaps after getting a neighbor or two to join the movement.

But even the smaller group of 3,000 paid circulators could take months to investigate. And there is this: Now that hundreds of thousands of petitions are in boxes at the counties, in no particular order, how would they even find the papers circulated by people who were paid among all of those that were circulated for free? It seems to make much more sense for a judge to ask the counties: Are the signatures good, or not? If they are, fine. Let's have an election. Any problem with the circulators can be dealt with separately.

The Davis supporters also seem to be trying to use the legal process to make a political point: that the campaign to recall him is off to a sleazy start because it brought people in from out of state to circulate the petitions, and then paid them to do so. Of course, the California firms that do this sort of work all mysteriously turned up too busy to help the recall after the governor's allies made it clear that they wanted this movement stopped.

But there is also an elitist strain to the argument that it's inappropriate to pay a construction worker from Washington state a few bucks to help qualify a measure for the California ballot. After all, Davis and other politicians routinely import political consultants from New York or Washington, D.C., and pay them tens of thousands of dollars to persuade the voters to elect them.

Think about that the next time one of the governor's people suggests that getting help from out of state is somehow wrong.