LOS ANGELES (CN) — The bid to recall Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón, which fell just 46,000 signatures short of making the ballot last year, sued the county registrar Friday over what it says were tens of thousands of wrongly rejected signatures.
"The voters of Los Angeles got completely screwed over, to put it lightly," said Tim Lineburger, spokesman for the recall campaign. "We’re asking for what we believe is the only remedy, for the court to ultimately certify the recall petition. From there, our hope is that the Board of Supervisors would hold a special election."\
He added: "This should’ve happened a long time ago. And in the meantime, George Gascón's pro-criminal policies have continued to have a deteriorating effect on the entire community."
A spokesperson for Gascón declined to comment.
Gascón, a former LAPD officer, former San Francisco police chief and former San Francisco DA, was elected in LA in 2020 on a platform of criminal justice reform. His tenure was controversial from its first day, and the changes he sought to push through, aimed at reducing prison sentences, had his staff of prosecutors in a state of open revolt. As violent crime rose throughout 2021, Gascón became a political lightning rod, synonymous to some with California's permissiveness around crime and homelessness. Gascón's successor in San Francisco, Chesa Boudin, was recalled by voters last year.
But the campaign to take down Gascón had a much rougher go. A first attempt became mired in infighting and had to be scrapped. The second try was better organized and better funded but failed to make the ballot, a failure that some attributed to strategic mistakes by the campaign — including a reliance on costly direct mail, a tactic which may have yielded an especially high rate of invalid signatures.
It was one year and a day ago that the campaign submitted just over 715,000 signatures. Nearly 200,000 of those were disqualified. According to the registrar's office, 88,000 were tossed for not belonging to registered voters, 43,000 were deemed duplicates and 32,000 were found to have written down the wrong address. Around 9,000 signatures didn't match those on the voter roll, and some 5,000 wrote down addresses outside LA County.
Right away, the campaign said they intended to check the registrar's work. They later said the county was "stonewalling" them in an attempt to "slow walk" their efforts. They sued for better access and this past December, a superior court judge ordered the county to provide them with certain material — what the campaign has called "a modicum of reasonable access."
"What the committee found when it obtained that access was astounding," the campaign said in a statement.
To recall an elected official in California, a campaign must gather signatures equal to 10% of the jurisdiction's registered voters. Last year, the county said it had 5,668,569 registered voters, putting the recall signatures threshold at 566,857.
In their civil complaint, filed in LA County Superior Court, the recall campaign says the county got that number wrong — that in fact, there are only 5,438,400 registered voters, citing the response to a Public Records Act request put in by the campaign. That would have lowered the recall threshold by about 20,000 signatures.
The complaint also takes issue with many of the invalidated signatures.
"The registrar incorrectly rejected at least 20,5871 petition signatures that the law plainly required them to accept," the campaign says in its lawsuit. As an example, the plaintiff says that when the registrar found duplicate signatures, both were thrown out, rather than one being counted and the other tossed. Others, the campaign says, "were rejected on the purported basis that the voter was not registered to vote — even though the registrar’s records plainly revealed that the voter was registered to vote."
According to Lineburger, "There is no other way to interpret this other than that the Registrar botched the process. At best, this thing was negligently conducted. At worst, it looks like something much more nefarious."
He added that the suspicion that someone at the registrar's office had intentionally thrown out valid signatures is "entirely reasonable."
One way or another, voters will have their say on Gascón's tenure: He's up for reelection in 2024.
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