Almost a century after Californians gained the right to force a recall election against a sitting governor, the state today appeared on the verge of using the power for the first time and authorizing a vote on whether to oust Gov. Gray Davis.

California's counties had submitted to the state more than 1.3 million valid ballot petition signatures needed to secure the recall question a spot on a fall special election ballot, state and local officials said. The number of signatures was nearly a fifth of the 6 million state residents who voted in the election last year.

Secretary of State Kevin Shelley officially certified the results early this evening. Never before, in 31 other tries, has a governor recall effort made it this far. The initiative would send the state into uncharted political and legal territory that had officials in Sacramento consulting election lawyers in a dizzying state of uncertainty today.
Some basic aspects of the likely vote remained in contention. Chief among them was whether Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante — a Democrat like Mr. Davis — who is charged under the state constitution with calling the election, would set a two-part ballot: one determining Mr. Davis's fate and one choosing a successor.

Some Democrats now say they believe that Mr. Bustamante, who does not have warm relations with the governor, is required only to call a vote on Mr. Davis. The presumption had been that the lieutenant governor must also give voters the chance to select a replacement.

Some experts say that no election is needed because the state constitution provides for the elevation of the lieutenant governor when the governor's office is vacant.

A certification by Mr. Shelley would mark a new stage in a campaign that only three months ago seemed destined to go nowhere. But because of the fervor of a few antitax crusaders, the money of another recall supporter and Mr. Davis's unpopularity, the stars aligned against the governor in a state where voter revolt has a long history of roiling the political cosmos.

As Mr. Davis faces a plebiscite on his political future, he can take some comfort in knowing that, at least in part, he is the victim of quirks in the state's constitution and of California's fevered politics.
"This is a case where Republicans in California clearly understood that at this point they are not politically competitive," said Garry South, who was Mr. Davis's chief political strategist last year and is informally advising him on the recall. "They now smell blood — right-wing radio, right-wing groups, the whole right-wing-nut axis that has been shut out of California politics for some time."
California is one of only 15 states that allow for the recall of state officials, which along with the referendum and the popular initiative are a legacy of the state's progressive politics of the early 20th century and Gov. Hiram Johnson, who was looking for ways to circumvent the reach of big railroad interests.
The targets of the 31 previous attempts against California governors included the likes of Jerry Brown, a Democrat, and Ronald Reagan and Pete Wilson, both Republicans.
This time around, polls show that half the California electorate is angry and willing to consider tossing Mr. Davis from office. But that anger is counterbalanced by widespread apathy, or perhaps despair, leading to consistently falling voter turnout.

Under the state's recall procedures, it takes signatures amounting to just 12 percent of the votes cast in the last election for governor to force a recall — in this case 897,158.

The recall election itself could be decided by as few as a third of the state's 15 million registered voters.
Governor Davis's room to maneuver has been further eroded by the public's extensive use of the initiative process, which has tied the hands of elected officials by limiting the amount of taxes that can be collected and by directing how much of the revenue that is raised can be spent. Thus, the steps he might take to counter the state's budget crisis have been sharply restricted.
Between 1978 and 2000, more than 600 statewide initiative petitions were circulated, 118 issues appeared on the ballot and 52 passed. The subjects ranged from prison terms to car insurance rates. Roughly a quarter concerned how the state raises and spends tax money.
Proposition 13, which passed in 1978, not only cut property taxes in half statewide, but also required a two-thirds vote to raise new local taxes to replace them. Proposition 98, passed a decade later, required that 40 percent of state revenues go directly to public schools. When mandatory health care spending is factored in, there is little discretionary spending left for the governor and legislature to adjust to produce a balanced budget.
Term limits, meanwhile, which were also imposed through public initiative, and gerrymandered legislative districts have produced a State Legislature that is inexperienced, highly polarized and seemingly immune to compromise. The result, many experts say, is a state that is virtually ungovernable.
"There is a climate of suspicion here that no one in California can govern us so we have to willy-nilly govern ourselves," said D. J. Waldie, a longtime local official in Lakewood, a suburb of Los Angeles. "We have in essence a fourth branch of government — the initiative — and that's a difficult place to be."
Leon Panetta, a former member of Congress from Monterey and former budget director and White House chief of staff for President Bill Clinton, said that the recall is a case of direct democracy run amok.
"The initiative process more and more became a substitute for governance in Sacramento, and it ultimately produced this recall," he said. "The result is ultimate chaos."
But more than California's history of direct democracy has brought Mr. Davis to this extraordinary moment.
A state budget shortfall, already of record proportions last fall, nearly doubled by this summer, setting off new rounds of partisan rancor in Sacramento as programs were slashed, new taxes were debated and an apathetic public was roused by their pocketbooks.
Mr. Davis, whom polls showed to be hugely unpopular even as he won re-election in November, found he had no reservoir of goodwill among the electorate to draw on as the state descended into political chaos.
Even Democratic voters told pollsters that the recall process was a legitimate way to register dissatisfaction with Mr. Davis. Both Republicans and antitax crusaders jumped to take advantage of the sentiment.
"I know we're turning on the stress machine here, not just on the governor but on the whole bureaucracy," said Ted Costa, who is the chairman of People's Advocate, a group that had pushed tax-related ballot initiatives for 25 years but had not undertaken a statewide recall before this one. "But when you have a firmness in the right, you proceed."
The recall idea was born in December in the somewhat disorderly world of Mr. Costa, who labors from a shabby suite of offices behind an all-night Krispy Kreme stand on the north side of Sacramento.
Mr. Costa describes himself as a "government reformer" and a "wacko" dedicated to returning power from corrupt and incompetent elected officials to the sovereign people. He says he was moved to action by Mr. Davis's handling of the state's staggering budget deficit, which has recently been calculated to be a record $38.2 billion.

It would not be very long before Mr. Costa had company in the form of two other ad hoc groups, Rescue California, organized by a former Republican member of the California Assembly, Howard Kaloogian, and Recall Gray Davis, the vehicle of a political consultant, Sal Russo. Republicans had criticized Mr. Russo for the ineffectual challenge last November posed to Mr. Davis by their candidate, Bill Simon Jr.
Mr. Russo said he had been frustrated on Election Day by voter apathy about Mr. Davis's shortcomings, that nothing Mr. Simon said about Mr. Davis seemed to stick, even concerns he raised about the budget.

Once the new deficit numbers became known after the election, Mr. Russo said, the mood change among the public was palpable.
Money was being cut for schools, universities, arts organizations, hospitals, parks, law enforcement agencies and more; virtually no one in the state was left untouched.
"The problem with the recall efforts in the past was that they were always narrowly based," said Mr. Russo, who had been involved in a recall drive against Jerry Brown. "You can impeach a governor for a single act, but for a recall you need a broader political purpose. This time we have people mad at him from across the ideological spectrum."
Still, with the sobering realities of organizing a recall campaign in a state of 35 million people, the effort was going nowhere without a bankroll. That came from Darrell Issa, a millionaire Republican congressman from San Diego, who contributed more than $1.6 million to pay for professional signature gatherers.
"This is not just about Gray Davis's low job ratings," said Mr. South, the adviser to Mr. Davis. "It illustrates the larger point that you can put almost anything on the ballot, no matter how goofy or crazy, if you have enough money."
Mr. Davis has been trying to make his opponents the issue, arguing that California is in danger of being hijacked by the right. Today he predicted he would survive.

"I've had to fight for everything in my life and trust me, I've had more political obituaries written about me than you could possibly imagine," he said on KFWB-AM.

Analysts from both parties say that many of Mr. Davis's problems are his own making. They cite his passive response to the energy crisis three years ago, his participation in a state spending spree during the boom years early in his governorship and his relentless fund-raising.
Trying to steer a political course down the center of the state's ideological divide, in part to attract donations from corporations, he managed to offend countless Democrats from the party's traditional base among blue-collar workers and minorities.
Robert Gnaizda, the policy director of the Greenlining Institute, a group in San Francisco that promotes the interests of low-income and minority communities, said Mr. Davis ignored the group for his entire first term and met with its leaders for the first time in April, as the recall campaign was gaining steam.
"Not meeting with the Greenlining coalition wasn't the problem itself, but it was symptomatic of how minority groups were viewed," said Mr. Gnaizda, who said he thought Mr. Davis had seen the error of his ways. "Many people believe it would have been best if he had won his second election by one vote so he would have understood the importance of courting the voters from the base."