By Susan Shelley
Originally published August 24, 2022
The second attempt to recall Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón came up short after the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s Office determined that only 520,050 of the 715,833 submitted signatures on the recall petitions were valid, with 566,857 required. Now the proponents have the opportunity to review all the disqualified signatures, along with the county’s notations on why the signatures were invalid.
This process could be more important to the future of Los Angeles County than the recall itself.
The accuracy of L.A. County’s voter rolls has long been the subject of criticism and even litigation. In 2019, the county reached a settlement of a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch and Election Integrity Project California that required the removal of 1.5 million inactive voters from the rolls.
The county’s verification of signatures on the recall petitions raises the question of whether this process resulted in other errors. A total of 7,344 signatures were disqualified as “canceled.” The registrar’s office told me, “That category represents invalid petition signatures of voters who were once registered in L.A. County but are now canceled.”
In addition, the county’s media representative explained, the “canceled” category includes voters who are deceased. When I inquired if this means the voters died after they signed the recall petition but before the petitions were verified, the answer was: “deceased means the death took place before the date shown on the petition.” They were dead when they signed?
Federal law requires that states maintain current and accurate voter rolls, and the Supreme Court has ruled on the lengthy procedures states must use in order to do that. Generally, registrations must be removed if voters don’t respond to a postcard mailing and do not vote for a number of years. But there are always a lot of lawsuits around this issue, so counties can be hesitant to cancel registrations.
Is it credible that 7,344 people who signed the recall petition did not vote at all in recent years and their registrations were appropriately canceled by the county?
Another category to check carefully is invalidity for “signature mismatch.” State regulations in place since 2020 require three separate election officials to agree unanimously, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the signature on the petition clearly does not match the signature(s) in the voter’s registration record. Specific regulations define how a match is to be determined, allowing for age and other factors.
In section 20960 of the California Code of Regulations, paragraph (b) states, “The comparison of a signature shall begin with the basic presumption that the signature on the petition or ballot envelope is the voter’s signature.” Paragraph (c) states, “Exact matches are not required for an elections official to confirm a valid signature.”
Did the county fully comply with these regulations when officials disqualified 9,490 signatures for mismatch?
The county disqualified 88,464 signatures because the signers were not registered voters, but recall proponents should check the voter file for themselves. If voters used an unrecognized abbreviation for their city name, or wrote their name with initials, or used a different version such as “Bob” instead of “Robert,” a valid voter registration for that person may have been missed.
California now has a statewide voter database called VoteCal, and it may need some work. In June 2021 the Election Integrity Project California sent a letter to Secretary of State Shirley Weber asking why California had “more than 1.8 million more registered voters than eligible citizens.” An EIPCa analysis found that as of Feb. 9, 2021, L.A. County had 5.8 million active registered voters and 1.44 million inactive registered voters, but only 6.1 million eligible citizens.
Accuracy is critical: the threshold for qualifying a county recall petition is 10% of the number of registered voters, different than a state recall, which requires a percentage of the number of actual votes cast in the previous election for governor.
The threshold to qualify the Gascón recall was based on 5.66 million registered voters, but if the accurate number of eligible registered voters in L.A. County is less than 5.2 million, then the proponents collected enough valid signatures to qualify the recall for the ballot. And if an illegal or incorrect process or standard was used to validate signatures or registration records, it may have qualified regardless.
Write to Susan at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter @Susan_Shelley.
This column was originally published by the Southern California News Group.