LOS ANGELES (CN) — Opponents of Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón submitted a petition to recall him Wednesday with what they say are roughly 717,000 signatures.
"You can’t say that the DA creates crime, but he’s supposed to have a plan to combat crime," said Eric Siddall, the vice president of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys for Los Angeles County — the union that represents rank-and-file prosecutors. "And this DA doesn’t have that plan."
The signatures will now be checked and verified by the county clerk's office. To qualify for the ballot, the campaign needs at least 566,857 valid signatures from registered voters within LA County. Joshua Spivak, a senior research fellow at UC Berkeley Law School’s California Constitution Center and the author of a book about recall elections, said that in a typical recall attempt, around 20% of signatures prove invalid — either duplicates or from ineligible voters.
Should that be the case here, the Recall Gascón petition qualifies with a few thousand signatures to spare.
If the recall does qualify, Gascón's task may prove a difficult one. According to Spivak, more than three-quarters of all candidates in California who face a recall election on the ballot lose.
"If people were angry enough to get the signatures, if they were angry enough to sign and do the work, then you’re in a heap of trouble," said Spivak.
A recent notable exception was the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, who easily defeated a recall attempt last year. And during that same election, Sonoma County voters overwhelmingly rejected an attempt to recall District Attorney Jill Ravitch. On the other hand, San Francisco voters recalled their district attorney Chesa Boudin last month. Also this year, they ousted three school board members.
In a phone interview, Gascón said the campaign against him was being driven by "very right wing people with questionable ethics," who were able to gather the 717,000 signatures with money (the recall campaign says they've raised more than $8 million) and misinformation.
"I was approached in a Costco store and asked, 'Would you like to keep rapists away from your neighborhood?'" said an incredulous Gascón. He was handed a petition to sign. HIs own name was on it. The man was being paid for every signature he gathered. "This is a very different scenario than a contested election, where you have a fight [over] thoughts and ideas."
He added: "While it is true there are some victims out there and they are angry, the reality is that this is a Republican power grab and the way they’ve gotten the signatures is extremely questionable."
Tim Lineburger, spokesman for the Recall Gascón campaign, rejected that characterization.
"This is not a partisan issue," Lineburger said. "Voters from every walk of life are rejecting this version of criminal justice reform. It’s such a failed experiment."
To bolster his argument, he cites the case of Boudin.
"In San Francisco, one of the most liberal places in the country, they rejected Boudin’s version of reform outright," Lineburger said. "They want public safety just like anyone else."
Though both Gascón and Boudin are part of a generation of reformer district attorneys who campaigned on a platform of reducing sentencing, "ending mass incarceration" and holding law enforcement more accountable, their respective backgrounds couldn't be more different. Boudin's parents were members of the Weather Underground, both of whom went to prison for their role in a string of robberies which left two police officers and a security guard dead. Two other notorious Weather Underground members, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, helped raise him. Boudin later became a public defender. When he ran for DA, he had never been a prosecutor.
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