District Attorney George Gascon’s recall is being undermined by Los Angeles County officials who are not following the law, giving the prosecutor the edge, a campaign to unseat him explosively claims.
The Registrar-Recorder’s Office is using illegal standards to verify and count recall petition signatures, increasing the odds that the vote will be thrown out, the campaign claims. Volunteers delivered 717,000 signatures to the registrar, which is 150,000 more than required. A random sampling showed 22% were invalid, but the campaign doesn’t buy it.
“The committee has grave concerns that the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder’s Office did not use current laws and uniform guidelines set forth in the Elections Code and California Code of Regulations … when it examined signatures during the random sampling of the recall petition filed with it on July 6, 2022,” said a letter sent to the Board of Supervisors from the campaign on Tuesday. “It is believed they are not doing so now as it continues to conduct its full examination and review of every signature.”
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The campaign asked the county to divulge its standards for verifying signatures and was given a training manual written by a forensic analyst from 2015.
State law changed in 2020 to make it easier for county officials to declare that a signature is valid. The standard now is to presume the signature is correct unless it looks substantially different. At that point, two additional officials must unanimously agree that it is invalid.
When the law changed for the 2020 election, the number of rejected ballots decreased by 83%, said former District Attorney Steve Cooley, who is one of the lead campaign organizers.
“Something is not adding up. Almost everything is not adding up,” Cooley told the Washington Examiner.
The campaign wanted to send monitors to watch the signature verification process, but this was denied by the county on the grounds that the recall effort is not an election. However on Election Day, voters who seek to recall Gascon will also be asked to pick a successor from a list of names, thereby electing someone, the campaign says in dispute.
“The county’s failure to follow current law and uniform guidelines in the examination of the random sampling … is a violation of the rights of every Los Angeles County voter who signed their name to the recall petition to a fair, lawful and appropriate signature verification,” the letter said.
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“A voter has the right to participate in the electoral process and have his or her vote count in our democracy. To reject a signature is to effectively disenfranchise a voter/petitioner,” the letter said.
Cooley stopped short of accusing the county of cheating. Gascon has support among Los Angeles lawmakers, including Holly Mitchell, former senator and now-chairman of the county Board of Supervisors.
“We can’t know for sure because of the lack of transparency, but it’s highly likely that they are not implementing the law and that could make the difference as to whether or not the recall is certified,” Cooley said. “We have every reason to believe they are not following the present law.”
The registrar responded to the Washington Examiner: “The petition verification process is highly regulated and governed by provisions codified in the California Government Code, California Elections Code, and the State Code of Regulations. Our office adheres to those guidelines and regulations.
“Once the process is complete and a determination on sufficiency is made, those same regulations provide the proponents the opportunity for review, if desired. Right now our focus is on completing the verification within the legal timelines with integrity and appropriate quality review.”
Gascon was elected in 2018 on a promise to be a criminal justice system reformer. His tenure has been tumultuous, as mandates were immediately imposed downgrading most felonies and giving defendants every opportunity to stay out of jail.
Gascon’s own prosecutors promptly sued him after the state’s famous “three strikes” law was disallowed in the office. This meant repeat violent offenders would not go to prison for life. A court eventually sided with prosecutors, but Gascon utilized other methods to clear out the jails, such as refusing to file certain charges, including use of a gun and gang membership — which normally come with stiff sentences in California.
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“This is the most momentous challenge to California’s electoral system in recent history,” Cooley said. “The stakes couldn’t be higher. It really is a matter of life and death.”
Cooley was referring to several instances in which felons who should have been behind bars went on to allegedly kill someone else. The most recent example involves two police officers who responded to a call at a motel and were shot dead when they opened a door. Additional officers responded and shot the suspect, Justin Flores, to death.
Flores’s criminal history revealed that he should have been charged with a weapons count the year prior, which would have kept him in jail at the time the officers were killed.
