Leaders of the Recall District Attorney George Gascón campaign announced Thursday that they plan to begin their review of the disqualified signatures next week, in hopes of finding enough evidence to keep their failed petition alive.
While the L.A. County Registrar Recorder’s Office does not have a specific recourse for the invalidated signature review, insiders familiar with the recall campaign have hinted that they may take the matter to court should they find sufficient grounds.
“The committee of volunteers, victims and victim advocates, and staff has done, and will continue to do, everything humanly possible to remove George Gascón from office,” Tim Lineberger, a spokesman for the recall campaign, said on Thursday. “We will begin the review of rejected signatures next week and are currently evaluating all potential legal challenges.”
According to Lineberger, the recall will now have the ability to review all 195,783 signatures that were invalidated of the approximate 717,000 total signatures submitted. The recall, in order for it to have made the ballot, would’ve needed 566,857.
Campaign officials have said that they will spend three days a week for an indefinite number of weeks reviewing the justification for each signature being disqualified. Among the various disqualification reasons they plan to review, according to Lineberger, will be the 32,000 signatures that were disqualified for having different addresses than they had put with their signature.
Since the signatures were submitted on July 6, the staff at the L.A. County Registrar’s Office spent roughly a month combing through the various signatures compiled in the recall petition, working to validate each 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.
The news comes on the heels of a controversy born out of the failed recall attempt, with some criticizing the amount of money raised by the campaign, how those funds were spent and if the recall leadership team was negligent in its signature gathering process.
Lineberger said the campaign categorically denies the accusations of malfeasance, calling the rumors “provably false” and designed to “unfairly mischaracterize the efforts of the campaign.”
“Any objective and fact-based analysis, especially when compared to other campaigns or petition gathering efforts, will demonstrate we operated with efficiency, minimal overhead, and gathered a nationally unprecedented number of signatures,” Lineberger said.
