Effort to force L.A. Dist. Atty. George Gascón into recall election fails

Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón has defeated a second recall effort. <span class="copyright"></p> <p>A second effort to force Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón into a recall election fizzled out Monday after officials determined that the campaign to boot him from office failed to gain enough valid signatures.</p> <p>To put Gascón’s job on the ballot, the campaign seeking his ouster needed to gather 566,857 valid signatures by mid-July, a figure reflecting 10% of the people eligible to vote in the election cycle when Gascón won office in November 2020. The L.A. County registrar-recorder/county clerk’s office said Monday that about 520,000 of the signatures submitted were valid.</p> <p>While the campaign submitted roughly 715,000 signatures, some were inevitably going to be disqualified if they were signed by people who were not properly registered to vote in L.A. County or if a registered voter’s signature didn’t match the one on file with the registrar.</p> <p>On Monday, the registrar’s office said 195,783 of the signatures submitted were invalid. Most that were tossed out were either duplicates or submitted by people who were not registered to vote, officials said.</p> <p>In California, most recall drives see between 20% and 30% of collected signatures disqualified, according to Joshua Spivak, an expert on recall elections and senior research fellow at UC Berkeley Law School’s California Constitution Center.</p> <p>The recall campaign in recent months sought signatures through a mass-mailing blitz; some observers expressed concern that this might lead to more disqualifications due to duplication.</p> <p>“We are obviously glad to move forward from this attempted political power grab, but we also understand that there is far more work that needs to be done. And we remain strongly committed to that work,” said Jamarah Hayner, a political strategist leading Gascón’s efforts against the recall. “The D.A.’s primary focus is and has always been keeping us safe and creating a more equitable justice system for all. Today’s announcement does not change that.”</p> <p>Tim Lineberger, a spokesman for the recall effort, said the campaign’s chairpersons were reviewing their options and would provide a statement later. Earlier this year, Lineberger told The Times the campaign would not pursue a third recall attempt if this one failed and would instead focus on defeating Gascón at the ballot box in 2024.</p> <p>Gascón has faced criticism from law enforcement and business leaders since his election. Many were quick to blame his reform-minded policies for rising crime in Los Angeles, despite the fact that similar surges in violence have occurred in California cities with traditional law-and-order prosecutors.</p> <p>Gascón’s moves to severely limit when prosecutors can try juveniles as adults or seek life sentences have stoked the ire of victims rights groups and have left him in untenable positions in a number of high-profile cases. In the case of Hannah Tubbs — a 26-year-old transgender woman who sexually assaulted a child — Gascón’s policy allowed her to receive a short sentence in juvenile court because she was 17 when the crime occurred. The case garnered national outrage and has haunted the district attorney for months.</p> <p>An initial attempt to recall Gascón last year failed miserably, largely due to a lack of fundraising and organization.</p> <p>But this second effort, launched later last year, raised millions of dollars and drew support from a wide swath of police unions and politicians, including Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rick Caruso.</p> <p>With Bay Area voters recalling San Francisco Dist. Atty. Chesa Boudin in June, Gascón seemed at risk of facing a similar fate. Gascón served as San Francisco’s top prosecutor, and Boudin — a former public defender — was his successor in the post.</p> <p>But the Gascón recall campaign’s fortunes muddied in recent months. In mid-July, the registrar’s office performed verification tests on 28,000 signatures collected by the campaign and disqualified 22% of them.</p> <p>Based on Monday’s results, the registrar ended up disqualifying 27% of all 715,000 signatures submitted.</p> <p>In early August, recall organizers began arguing that the review process was unfair. Former Deputy Dist. Atty. Marian Thompson, who has a background in election law, sent a letter to the L.A. County Board of Supervisors claiming that the registrar’s office was using out-of-date processes to verify signatures.</p> <p>She argued that the registrar was ignoring a 2020 change in the law that was meant to make it harder to disqualify mail-in votes or petitions if the signature submitted mismatched the one on file with the registrar. She also said the recall had been barred from sending observers to monitor the verification process.</p> <p>Thompson described the 22% rejection rate from the initial sample as “shockingly large,” even though San Francisco election officials rejected roughly 34% of all petitions submitted during the process that led to Boudin’s recall, according to Spivak. But only 9,490 signatures were disqualified due to a mismatch, the registrar said Monday.</p> <p>The recall effort failed by approximately 46,000 signatures.</p> <p>In a statement issued last week, L.A. County Registrar Dean Logan dismissed Thompson’s letter, denied that officials were using outdated training materials and noted that the California Election Code did not give recall organizers any legal right to monitor the verification process.</p> <p>Meanwhile, a firm that was hired to gather signatures for the recall campaign filed a lawsuit in July, alleging that the campaign owed it at least $500,000. A spokesman for the recall dismissed the suit as “frivolous.”</p> <p>This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.</p> <p>Source: <a href=Read Full Article

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