A petition to recall Oregon Gov. Kate Brown failed to get the number of signatures necessary to advance to the November ballot, the state’s GOP chair announced on Monday.
Oregon GOP Chair and Adair Village Mayor Bill Currier announced the news Monday afternoon in a statement.
The “Stop The Abuse – Recall Kate Brown” campaign gathered 277,254 total signatures, just 1 percent short of the 280,050 required signature goal, Currier declared.
Currier claimed the petition failed in part because of Brown’s health orders that shut down big venues such as the Oregon State Fair and other festivals where it typically gathers signatures.
Last year’s petition to recall Brown fell 8 percent short of the minimum signatures required.
Currier also blamed the state legislature’s rules barring the use of electronic signature sheets for the petition’s failure.
“Kate Brown is the one who fueled this recall and gave Oregonians new reasons every day to want a do-over,” Currier said. “During these three months we’ve heard the countless heartbreaking stories of Oregon families, workers, and business owners who have suffered at the hands of Kate Brown’s egregious abuses of power and her disastrous pandemic shutdowns. We must continue to work to hold her and her enablers in the state legislature accountable by ending the Democratic supermajority.”
In 2018, Brown won reelection by more than 100,000 votes in a race against former state Rep. Knute Buehler of Bend, Oregon.
Brown announced in late August that Oregon schools could possibly need another 200 days to reopen normally if COVID-19 transmission rates do not fall to required levels.
The governor mandated that COVID-19 case counts must be at 10 per 100,000 people with test positive rates of 5 percent over two weeks for counties to reopen schools for in-person instruction.
Rural school districts are allowed to reopen with two-week case rates of 30 per 100,000 people.
The vast majority of school districts throughout Oregon already decided to move to online learning only for at least the first six weeks of fall instruction.
Following the weekend shooting of a Patriot Prayer supporter in Portland, Brown directed state and local police to bolster the Portland Police Bureau as it and state investigators search for a suspect.
