Officials with the Recall L.A. County District Attorney George Gascón Campaign said Wednesday they will be reviewing roughly 32,000 signatures that were disqualified for having different registration addresses than they had put for their signature.
The news comes just two days after officials at the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s Office had announced the submitted recall petition for the county’s top prosecutor was found insufficient, saying that the petition had fallen short by roughly 46,000 signatures.
According to a breakdown of the 195,783 invalidated signatures, 88,464 signatures were not from registered voters, 32,187 had a different address and 43,593 had signed more than once. The remaining number of invalidated signatures fell into a variety of other categories.
The recall petitioners had submitted 717,000 signatures and needed 566,857 to be found valid — a number representing 10% of the number of registered voters in L.A. County.
However, according to a source familiar with the registrar’s breakdown of disqualified signatures, more than 32,000 alone were disqualified for different registration addresses despite being registered L.A. County voters and having matching signatures. This, among other things, is what the petitioners will now review over the coming 21 days — the allocated amount of time the recall campaign has been given to review the Registrar of Voters’ rejection report.
“We will leave no stone unturned and intend to ensure no voter is or was disenfranchised,” said Tim Lineberger, a spokesman for the recall campaign. “If the recall were on a ballot tomorrow, Gascón would lose in a landslide. This is a matter of technicalities at this point.”
Since the signatures were submitted on July 6, the staff at the L.A. County Registrar’s Office had been combing through the various signatures compiled in the recall petition, working to validate each one of the approximate 717,000 signatures based on a number of factors that include, but are not limited to: ensuring the signature is from a registered voter, that their signed address is the same as the one on their voter registration, and that the registered voter did not sign the petition more than once, among other criteria.
“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,” said Elise Moore, a spokeswoman for the pro-Gascón campaign, on Monday. “And we remain strongly committed to that work.”
The Registrar’s Office had until Aug. 17 to determine whether the petition had enough signatures to cause a special election against Gascón. Officials from the Registrar’s Office were not available to respond to The Signal’s request for comment as of Wednesday.
