I know. I live in Fall River, and know full well everything that happened in that election. The ballot had 2 items on it: 1) Should Correia be removed from office, and 2) who should be elected mayor if he is recalled. To boot, there was a 3 way race with no run off for the mayor’s office, which split the anti Correia vote, allowing him to get elected again.

The courts set a precedent several years back when Flanagan was up for recalled and he challenged a BoE ruling that he could not appear on the ballot as a candidate for mayor in the same election in which he was up for recall.

The issue here is first past the post. If this election had used ranked choice voting or another method requiring over 50% to win, he never would have won. He was recalled, but then won a plurality of only 35%: https://www.wbur.org/news/2019/03/13/fall-river-mayor-wins-recall-election

So the issue is that the voting system allows someone with 35% of the vote to win simply because there were a lot of candidates in the race. No way would he have won under RCV as he was never going to be the 2nd choice candidate of the 61% of people who voted to recall him in the first place.

That doesn't really accurately describe the will of the people. 66% of voters voted to remove him from office.

The same election idiotically included him as an option on the 2nd question of who who the next mayor should be and there were like 5 candidates. He got 35% of that vote, a few hundred more than the next closest answer and was removed/re-elected on the same ballot.

At the end of the day, it's true to say that 2 out of every 3 voters who participated in the recall did not want him staying in office. It's dishonest to frame it as Fall River embracing a crook.

All you can really infer from that election is that a) there should be some overhaul to a process that allows a recall election to have the incumbent be on a replacement question and b) ranked-choice voting almost certainly would have prevented this.

Even then, this was before the 2nd set of charges about bribery, which actually might matter to people. The SnoOwl stuff was a more tenuous case and didnt really breach the public trust.