FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, July 7th, 2023
Lawsuit Filed Seeking Certification of Recall Petition After Review Identifies Tens of Thousands of Wrongly Rejected Signatures
The recall committee has been reviewing rejected signatures and gathering evidence for the past 10 months, despite stonewalling by the Los Angeles Registrar of Voters
(Los Angeles, CA) – Today, the Recall DA George Gascon Committee filed a lawsuit asking the Court to certify the recall petition for Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon. The lawsuit is the product of a more than 10-month review of rejected signatures, which resulted in the discovery of tens of thousands of valid signatures that were incorrectly or unlawfully rejected, negligent and flawed counting processes utilized by the Los Angeles Registrar of Voters, and an inflated signature requirement due to bloated voter rolls.
In July 2022, the Recall Committee submitted an astounding 715,833 signatures in support of the recall petition – 148,976 more than the 566,857 signatures that the Registrar informed the Committee were necessary to trigger a recall election. According to the Registrar, it was the largest local recall petition that the Registrar had ever processed. Over the next month, the Registrar utilized close to 400 people to verify the sufficiency of the Recall Petition – most of whom were temporary workers with no background whatsoever in election law or the Registrar’s computer systems.
Ultimately, the Registrar claimed that a remarkable 195,758 supporting signatures – over 27% of the total submitted – were invalid for one of sixteen different reasons. According to the Registrar, the Recall Petition had only 520,050 valid signatures, which it claimed was 46,807 fewer than was needed to qualify for a recall election. Determined to uncover how and why so many signatures were rejected, the Committee exercised its statutory right to review the recall petition. Over the last 10 months, the Committee engaged in a laborious, signature-by-signature assessment of the reasons for the rejection. The review effort required over 140 volunteers and was led by Kathy Cady, Karen Shonka, Marian Thompson, and Cassandra Vandenberg.
For nearly a year, the Registrar of Voters tried its best to stymie the review, including blocking reasonable access to the recall petition, blocking access to the voter data needed to evaluate signature rejections, and more. The Committee was forced to seek and obtain a court injunction to get even a modicum of reasonable access to perform their examination of the Recall Petition. What the Committee found when it obtained that access was astounding.
Inflated Signature Requirement
The Los Angeles Registrar of Voters relied on and required a signature threshold that it knew to be inaccurate. A recall petition must be supported by the signatures of at least 10% of the jurisdiction’s active registered voters to qualify for a recall election. The Registrar told the Committee it needed to obtain 566,857 signatures to qualify the Recall Petition purportedly because the County had 5,668,569 active registered voters at the time.
The Registrar, however, knew that this number was wrong. The Registrar has since admitted to the Committee and others (in writing) that Los Angeles County had only 5,438,400 active registered voters at the time – 230,169 fewer than what was originally claimed (exhibit 6 in lawsuit).
Furthermore, the Committee has determined that even this calculation included approximately 35,015 voters who should not have been identified as active voters in Los Angeles County – such as voters who had moved out of the county, voters who had moved out of state, duplicate registration files, and more. The number of active registered voters in Los Angeles County as of January 4, 2022, should have been calculated to be no more than 5,403,385. Accordingly, the Recall Petition required no more than 540,338 signatures to qualify for a recall election.
Incorrectly Rejected Signatures
As described in the lawsuit, the Committee has reviewed 94,000 of the 195,758 rejected signatures thus far. Of the 94,000 signatures reviewed, the Committee has identified no fewer than 20,587 signatures that clearly should have been deemed valid but were incorrectly rejected by the Registrar. Examples of clear and obvious wrongful rejections include:
- No signature, including the original, when “duplicates” were present. Egregious examples include occurrences where the signer made a mistake filling out the address section, stopped and moved to the next signature number, and then signed and filled in the information correctly. In numerous cases like this, the Registrar rejected the first one for missing the signature, then rejected the completed one immediately below as a duplicate.
- Rejections for “canceled” voter files, even though the voter signed the petition prior to the cancellation according to the Registrar’s own voter records. In other cases where a voter had two voter files on record – one active and one inactive – the Registrar attributed the signature to the inactive voter file, even if the information matched what was in the active file.
- Rejections for “different address”, even when the address on the petition matched exactly what appeared in the Registrar’s voter file. In other instances, signatures were rejected because the voter moved during the petition circulation period or after signing, and the Registrar failed to review prior addresses or update the file.
- Rejections based on the voter being “not registered”, even when the voter could easily be identified as a registered voter by typing in the name or address on the petition. Even more disturbingly, many were marked as a valid signature WITH voter ID handwritten on the petition, but ultimately disqualified as not registered.
- Roughly 90% of rejections based on “registration date”, meaning the voter was allegedly not registered at the time of signing, were found to be inaccurate. In almost all the cases, the voter was not only registered, but had been for 5 – 20 years. Based on the Committee’s review, it appears that in July and August of 2022, thousands of voter files had their original registration date changed. When reviewing their voter history, it was clear nearly all had been voting or eligible to vote for years and should never have been rejected.
Unlawfully Rejected Signatures
The Registrar rejected at least 5,597 additional signatures based on a failure to comply with signature review standards and based on the application of unconstitutional signature review standards. All such signatures were unlawfully rejected because California’s failure to allow signature curing for petition signers – that is, giving such signers an opportunity to cure alleged deficiencies in their signatures. This is an unconstitutional burden on their right to vote. Roughly 2,425 such signatures were also wrongly rejected because the Registrar failed to conduct all required levels of review for signatures that were invalidated for having a mismatched signature.
Summary
Contrary to the Registrar’s certification, the Committee submitted at least 546,234 valid signatures in support of the Recall Petition, and likely many more. This exceeds the number of signatures that were actually required to qualify the Recall Petition (540,338). The Registrar should thus have certified the Recall Petition as sufficient, and the Board of Supervisors should have ordered a recall election.
The Recall DA George Gascon Committee issued the following statement in reaction:
“The gravity of the Registrar’s errors cannot be emphasized enough. The Registrar disenfranchised over 26,000 Los Angeles County citizens – and likely many more – by wrongly refusing to count their signatures in support of the Recall Petition. Moreover, by intentionally overstating the number of signatures required to qualify the Recall Petition, and by erroneously rejecting these tens of thousands of Recall Petition signatures, the Registrar deprived all citizens of Los Angeles County of their fundamental, constitutional right to vote on whether to recall the County’s top law enforcement official who is charged with protecting their safety and the safety of their families and loved ones. With Gascón’s pro-criminal prosecutorial policies sparking a sharp rise in violent crime, no one in Los Angeles County – and certainly not the hundreds of thousands of citizens who signed the Recall Petition – should be forced to wait for Gascon’s term to end in December 2024 to vote to remove him from office. Based on the overwhelming evidence gathered by the Committee, an election to recall Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon should be held immediately. The recall effort, the historical number of signatures gathered, and the unprecedented review of the Registrar’s conduct would never have occurred were it not for the victims who stuck their necks out from the beginning to spearhead the recall, the volunteers who engaged in a grueling process despite facing every roadblock imaginable, and the residents and donors who have fought back for public safety in their communities. The Recall Committee and the citizens of Los Angeles owe them a tremendous debt of gratitude, and we will never give up or stop fighting on their behalf.” – The Recall DA George Gascon Committee.
Click here to read the full complaint.
“The integrity of these processes is fundamental to our representative form of government and influences the confidence and participation of our electorate. Attempts to compromise the integrity of this process ought to be scrutinized.”
– Dean Logan, LA County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk
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