Californian voters to be given choice of 250 candidates

The bizarre contest to replace California's Governor threatened to descend into chaos yesterday after the number of potential candidates jumped to almost 250 and election officials questioned the feasibility of compiling and counting ballots.

With state officials making up the rules for the unprecedented recall election more or less as they go along, estimates of the cost rose from $30m (£19m) to $66m - a figure itself subject to revision because of the crowd of would-be replacements for the Governor, Gray Davis.

The Secretary of State's office, which monitors elections, has promised a definitive list of candidates by tomorrow evening. As of yesterday morning, the office had a list of 247 candidates, of whom 115 had been confirmed.

The stampede of candidates - everyone from mainstream career politicians to porn stars, washed-up television actors and the film star Arnold Schwarzenegger - means fitting everyone on to a single ballot card will be impossible. That, in turn, will oblige returning officers to check ballots by hand to prevent double voting, a process that could last several days in the larger counties.

Some have also questioned whether voters will be able to understand how the system works, making the fuss about butterfly ballots and hanging chads in the Florida presidential election race of 2000 look like a picnic.

"It's going to be confusing and it's going to be time-consuming," Bruce Bradley of the Ventura County registrar's office told The Washington Post. "It's a disaster waiting to happen."

The recall vote on 7 October will be in two parts. The first will be a referendum on Mr Davis. If he gets more than 50 per cent, the whole show will be over. But if he loses - as opinion polls suggest he will - election officials will be forced to ferret through the second part, the contest to replace him.

For voters to find the name of their preferred candidate may take several minutes, not least because California law stipulates that official candidates should be clustered in random alphabetical groups, not from A to Z.

A lottery on Monday stipulated that R would be the first letter of this random alphabet - although in some counties the Rs would be shifted to the bottom to make the ballot-positioning as fair as possible.

At the lottery ceremony, Kevin Shelley, California's Secretary of State, put a brave face on the looming chaos, saying he was confident that the results would be fair and equitable in the end.

But he conceded: "Let me be candid. There are going to be problems."