On Monday of this week, for the first time in television (and American) history, a gubernatorial inauguration is to be carried live and coast to coast on all three networks—CNN, MSNBC, and FNC. Network TV ain’t what it used to be. Still, this is a notable first. Even in California, it isn’t every day that so singular a figure as Arnold Schwarzenegger is solemnly invested with supreme executive power, especially under such astonishing circumstances.

The rest of the country got a lot of derisive laughs out of the California recall election. It provoked a few rueful chuckles in the Golden State, too. Viewed strictly as a process, though, it functioned remarkably well. And the transition, which many people quite reasonably expected to be bumpy and rancorous, was smooth and collegial. The involuntarily outgoing governor, Gray Davis, had every right to feel bitter at getting the boot just eleven months after being reëlected. If he had gone all sullen and uncoöperative, that would have been only human (a category he has always had trouble fitting into, poor guy). But he was the soul of graciousness after his defeat; and Schwarzenegger, of course, is a genial fellow. Perhaps the biggest reason for the smoothness of the transition, though, was that Schwarzenegger had won the election so convincingly that no one could quibble about the legitimacy of his right to the office.

The size and clarity of the victory came as a surprise. The most glaring flaw in the design of the recall process is the danger of a grossly undemocratic outcome. A two-part ballot—thumbs up or thumbs down on the incumbent, and then, if it’s thumbs down, the awarding of the job to the first-place plurality winner among, in this case, a hundred and thirty-five replacement candidates—created the mathematical possibility of an election in which the loser outpolls the winner by better than fifty to one. “If Davis is recalled,” the columnist George F. Will predicted, “he probably will be replaced by a governor who received substantially fewer votes than were cast against the recall.” Many observers agreed—me, for example. (In a dispatch from California for this magazine, I confidently called that outcome “a near-certainty.”) These predictions were, to put it mildly, wrong. On October 7th, Schwarzenegger got 4,203,596 votes, or 48.6 per cent of the total. This was more than the vote for retaining Davis (4,006,021, or 44.6 per cent), much more than the vote for Schwarzenegger’s nearest rival, Lieutenant Governor Cruz Bustamente (2,723,768, or 31.5 per cent), and more, even, than the vote for Davis in the last regular election (3,469,025, or 47.4 per cent). Nor did the California recall have the undemocratic taint of the 2000 Presidential election, in which, on top of Al Gore’s half-million-vote plurality over George W. Bush, left-of-center candidates outpolled right-of-center ones, fifty-one to forty-nine per cent. In California, Republicans of various stripes amassed well over sixty per cent.

Governor Davis and his supporters portrayed the recall as a cynical attempt to overturn a democratic election, likening it not only to Florida in 2000 but also to the Clinton impeachment and this year’s Republican redistricting coup in Texas. The public, rightly, found these parallels unconvincing. It’s one thing to overturn an election by means of a judicial ukase, a partisan parody of a trial, or an orgy of gerrymandering. It’s another to overturn an election by means of another election. The recall did indeed originate as a cynical Republican power grab—and it ended as one, in that Republicans have now grabbed power in Sacramento. But along the way it also turned out to be a pretty good exercise in American democracy. The attention of the public and the press was riveted, even before Schwarzenegger entered the race. The issues got a thorough airing. And voter turnout was high—twenty per cent higher than in the regular gubernatorial election the year before.

In the early stages of the recall campaign, it wasn’t just partisan Democrats who grumbled that the whole process was inherently mischievous. George Will called it “vandalism.” The Washington Post’s David S. Broder, the Yoda of the political press corps, called it a “perversion of representative government.” In the wake of Schwarzenegger’s victory, talk of actually repealing the recall provision of the California constitution—which was added in 1911 and until this year had never been used against a statewide official—has died away. But there is a move afoot to tinker with it. Mark Ridley-Thomas, a Democratic state legislator from Los Angeles, is pushing an amendment that would eliminate the replacement ballot, letting the lieutenant governor take over after a successful recall. It’s a well-meaning proposal, but its main effect, besides robbing the process of much of its interest, would be to turn a recall into a face-off between two incumbents, the governor and the lieutenant governor, who in California are separately elected.

Here’s a better way: choose the replacement not by plurality but by instant runoff voting. Under I.R.V., a voter lists as many candidates as he or she wishes in order of preference. In the counting, the electoral computer drops the least popular candidates, one by one, and instantly recounts the votes for the candidates who remain until one of them accumulates an outright majority. That way, the booby trap of the existing recall process—the strong possibility that an incumbent who is unacceptable to a small majority will get traded in for a challenger who is unacceptable to a large majority—would be eliminated, while its advantages would be left intact. (Under I.R.V., by the way, Schwarzenegger would still have won. He would have received fewer first-place votes, but the instant runoffs would probably have ended up giving him a two-to-one majority.)

A recall election like California’s is exciting, dramatic, and fun, with or without an action star heading the cast. (Schwarzenegger boycotted the campaign’s kickoff TV debate, but it scored high in the ratings anyway.) The heavy media attention somewhat reduces the importance of paid advertising and, therefore, of money. Voter turnout soars. Because there are multiple candidates instead of just two, mudslinging, which discredits the slinger as well as the spattered, is riskier; and, because the range of views on offer is wider, debate is livelier. This recall was a Technicolor, special-effects-crammed, Austro-American version of a British snap election. It featured the populist equivalent of a vote of no confidence, and the campaign, like campaigns in Britain, was blessedly short—just eighty days, still plenty of time to allow voters to make an informed choice without forcing them to make politics a way of life. Add the I.R.V. tweak, and the California circus would be a model for us all.