Chaos will surely come to California government, warn prominent businessmen and Democratic politicians, if the drive to recall Gov. Gray Davis reaches the statewide ballot either this fall or next spring.

Alarmists include businessmen like multimillionaire developer Eli Broad and officeholders from U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein to Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante.

For sure, there is uncertainty today about whether Davis will survive even the first year of the new term he won in November.

But chaos? Not in government. Legislators took even longer reaching a state budget compromise last year than they've taken so far this summer. If that's chaos, it has applied in 17 of the last 22 years -- those years when no budget was agreed upon by the June 30 deadline.

But government workers are still doing their jobs, issuing driver's licenses and marriage licenses, guarding prisons, running the lottery, writing parking tickets, fighting fires, teaching schoolchildren.

If real chaos looms anywhere, rather than mere fiscal uncertainty of the sort that hits almost every year, it will surround the recall itself. And most chaos there so far has been produced by Davis backers while fighting the recall, not by its proponents

Proponents are following the law to the letter: They had their petition language OK'd by Secretary of State Kevin Shelley and followed by circulating them in every way they can. Now they say they've gathered more than enough signatures to force a recall election, all according to Hoyle.

Things have not been quite so regular on the other side. And the pro-Davis, anti-recall tactics could grow far more complicated and chaotic as the recall moves ever closer to a vote.

It's already well-established fact that carriers circulating anti-recall pseudo-petitions written by the pro-Davis group Taxpayers Against the Governor's Recall tried to work wherever they knew recall petition carriers already had set up shop. Some staged verbal confrontations.

Other pro-Davis carriers presented their petition as one to "save teachers' jobs." Can a petition with no legal standing do that?

In other places, pro-Davis activists signed false names and addresses onto recall petitions.

There's a purpose in all this. Early on, Steve Smith, the former state Labor Department secretary Davis dispatched to run his anti-recall drive, said, "We'll do anything to keep people from signing those (recall) petitions." He might soon have to rephrase his battle cry into something like, "We'll do anything to invalidate those petitions.'

One step that may be tried would be matching of names on the recall petitions with those on the Davis anti-recall signature sheets. If the same persons signed both documents, the pro-Davis argument will likely be that anyone on both was either misled by the recall campaign or signed a petition he or she didn't really understand or intend to sign.

In that case, should the recall signature be considered valid?

No one has ever asserted anything like this in court, but the entire recall attempt is unprecedented, so why not try that, too? For Davis, the worst that could result would be for a judge simply to dismiss the claim. Even that would take time, contributing to the delayed vote Davis wants.

And if enough false names and addresses appear on petitions among the random samples examined by county registrars of voters, they will have to verify every name submitted, thus drawing out the process and delaying the vote further.

Then there's Shelley, with a unique delaying tactic of his own. Even though almost everyone previously read the recall statute to require registrars to count and validate signatures as they come in, Shelley has now told them they can simply count signatures and wait a month to match them up with existing voter records.

One of the three active recall committees suggests it may seek a court ruling overturning that Shelley instruction.

And there's always the ultimate wild scenario, possible if polls shortly before the eventual vote show the recall winning big: Davis might resign, trying to make the recall moot, hand his office to Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante and try keep it in Democratic hands.

Asked the other day if he would consider this should things ever look desperate, Davis said nothing, but blanched visibly. "He'll never quit," said one top aide.

Even if he tried this move, recall backers say it wouldn't work.

"The law is very specific," said Sal Russo, consultant to one of the recall committees and manager of Bill Simon's failed 2002 Republican campaign for governor. "If Davis quit, Bustamante would be only a caretaker governor. He could stay only until after the recall election decided who would be the next governor."

But a Shelley spokeswoman was not so sure. "We don't know the answer to who would then be governor," she said. "This is completely uncharted territory."

So, yes, chaos is definitely possible here and some already exists. There are also large potential paychecks for lawyers and possible headaches for state Supreme Court justices.

But the chaos surrounds the recall itself, not the mechanisms of government, which will somehow muddle through, just as they're once again carrying on without a state budget.