PROVIDENCE — The Superior Court is expected to decide today whether Secretary of State A. Ralph Mollis should allow a Nov. 3 recall election in Smithfield.

The timing is crucial. Stephen G. Tocco, president of the Town Council, who is the target of the recall effort, will have served out half of his two-year term on Nov. 4. If the town’s voters decide to oust him on or after that date, his replacement will be selected by the Town Council. If he is removed from office on or before Nov. 3, voters will choose a successor at a special election.

Tocco is one of three Democrats who form the majority on the five-member panel. If the council appoints a new member to replace him, that member must, by law, be a Democrat. The voters at a special election, however, presumably could choose from several candidates, and the Democrats could lose control of the council.

The town’s Board of Canvassers on Sept. 14 certified a list of voters who had signed recall petitions, and delivered the needed papers to Mollis’s office. But the board, by a margin of 36 minutes, failed to meet a 4 p.m. deadline to deliver the papers to the secretary of state’s office in Providence that day, Mollis’s office informed the town on Monday. The canvassers had wanted the paperwork to go through in order to have an election on Nov. 3 due to another election deadline, Anne H. Allen, one of the three canvassers, testified yesterday under questioning by Timothy Robenhymer, representing Lawrence J. Mancini, Smithfield’s Democratic town chairman.

James W. Archer, Republican town chairman, sued Mollis, asking the court to approve the certified papers retroactive to Sept. 14 in order to let the election go forward. Archer contended that allowing an election on Nov. 3 would create no injury for the state, but an election after that date would deprive Smithfield voters of the chance of picking their own elected representative. He said the 4 p.m. deadline was “arbitrary.”

Archer testified yesterday that he told the Board of Canvassers at its Sept. 14 session that it was preferable to let the voters decide rather than to have a new member “appointed by a two-to-two Town Council.”

The lawsuit, and a counterclaim by Mancini, drew no fewer than eight lawyers to the courtroom of Judge Allen P. Rubine on Wednesday and yesterday.

“The question is whether to compel the secretary of state to certify the signatures and schedule an election in November,” Rubine said.

Patrick Dougherty, representing Mancini, told Rubine, “Four o’clock is the operative language. The language [in the law] is clear and unambiguous. That deadline is set in stone. They missed the deadline.”

Dougherty asked Rubine to dismiss the case. The judge said he would rule later.

Dougherty also said that if Archer and the others who want to oust the controversial Tocco lose their court fight, they would have to start a recall drive from scratch, a process that took about three weeks to complete this month.

Rubine said it was his intention to deliver decisions today on the election deadline and on a counterclaim filed by Mancini that alleges the Board of Canvassers violated the state‘s Open Meetings Law by acting on language that had not been advertised in advance on its agenda.

The recall drive began after disclosure by The Providence Journal that Tocco was involved in municipal corruption cases in Providence and Pawtucket in the 1980s and 1990s. Tocco testified for the prosecution in return for a grant of immunity. He said he had been involved in negotiating thousands of dollars in bribes, and had carried the money from the construction company for which he then worked and delivered it to crooked officials.

Tocco was also a member of the Rhode Island Capitol Police force at the same time. He later rose to be chief.

After The Journal’s disclosures, Governor Carcieri several weeks ago removed him from that job and transferred him to another state post that does not involve law enforcement.

Tocco has declined either to step down from the presidency or resign the council altogether, steps urged by a number of former and current officials from both parties.

tmorgan@projo.com