Efforts to toss Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon out of his job have failed. The L.A. County Registrar’s office said that there weren’t enough valid signatures to qualify the petition for the ballot.
There were “715,833 petition signatures submitted for the recall of Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon,” but it turns out that about 28 percent were not valid. Backers of the recall effort, endorsed by some of the prosecutors in Gascon’s own office, assumed a 22 percent invalid rate. A previous check of rejection rates by L.A. officials showed that the petition effort had far more valid signatures.
RELEASE: Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Completes Petition Verification for District Attorney Recall Attempt; Petition found insufficient to qualify the recall for the ballot.
Link: https://t.co/DOnh0dtCGK
— Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk (@LACountyRRCC) August 15, 2022
It seems some people signed the petition more than once or were not registered voters. Gascon’s well-financed effort to keep his job succeeded in getting 7,344 to take their names off the signature sheets.
A summary breakdown of the invalid signatures is as follows: • Not Registered: 88,464 • Max Number of Times Signed (Duplicate): 43,593 • Different Address: 32,187 • Mismatch Signature: 9,490 • Canceled: 7,344 • Out of County Address: 5,374 • Other: 9,331
Supporters of the recall for the criminal-friendly DA are highly suspicious of the signature counting efforts by L.A. county elections officials, which found that 28 percent of signatures were invalid.
Former Trump Administration official Richard Grenell, who lives in the L.A. area, made the same point you’re probably thinking yourself right now: Isn’t it odd that these woke elections officials scrutinize signatures on petitions more closely than signatures on ballots?
We’ve never seen a vetting this thorough from LA County. They don’t clean up their voter rolls with this level of detail BEFORE they send out the ballots….
But they toss out more than 1/4 of the Gascon Recall signatures?@DCLogan is a partisan he/him/his.
Fix California will demand that @DCLogan conduct the same level of scrutiny on LA County’s voter rolls before mailing out unsolicited ballots. The arbitrary enforcement of the law on mail in ballots is a violation of voters’ civil rights.
BREAKING: The effort to recall L.A. DA @GeorgeGascon has FAILED to qualify for the ballot. The Registrar-Recorders office announced only 520,050 of the 715k+ signatures it collected were valid. It needed 566,857. Details below. @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/uoEo473QBO
— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) August 15, 2022
Last week, pro-recall forces called into question the rate of invalidated signatures. The LA Daily News reported that backers believe the rejection rate was “shockingly large.”
22% rejection rate of 717,000 petition signatures randomly sampled last month signals the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s Office isn’t complying with a 2022 law governing signature verification, claimed a letter from Steve Cooley, co-chairman of the Committee to Recall District Attorney George Gascón, to the Board of Supervisors.
[Cooley said the] county rejected 2% of signatures as non-matching on vote-by-mail ballots cast in the November 2018 general election. In the 2020 election, the rejection rate was less than 1% in Los Angeles County, he noted.
Last month, election officials sampled 35,793 signatures, or 5% of the total, and found that 27,983 of them were valid. The number falls within the parameters requiring the county to verify all of the signatures.”
Oops.
The woke registrar taunted recall supporters on his personal Twitter account when they brought attention to the disparity between what the county said the rejection rate was earlier and what it ended up being.
#selectiveoutrage — when confronted with fear of an unknown outcome, invent a fictitious narrative to misinform and cast doubt.
— Dean Logan (he/him/his) (@DCLogan) August 9, 2022
As for the man of the hour, Gascon said he was grateful to be spared the embarrassment of recall, which he called a “political power grab.”
Grateful to move forward from this attempted political power grab-rest assured LA County, the work hasn’t stopped.
My primary focus has been & will always be keeping us safe & creating a more equitable justice system for all.
I remain strongly committed to that work & to you.
— George Gascón (@GeorgeGascon) August 15, 2022
Gascon has made it his mission to let out as many dangerous people from jails as possible and make sure they don’t make it into jail in the first place.
Prosecutors in his own office are suing him for failure to enforce the law.
Story cited here.