Nearly 18 months after filing a lawsuit against Los Angeles County over the disqualification of signatures in a recall effort against District Attorney George Gascón, the committee to recall the D.A. announced Tuesday that it was dropping its lawsuit.
After hearing the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder’s Office was rejecting nearly 200,000 signatures from the more than 715,000 collected, the Committee to Recall George Gascón sought injunctive relief in October 2022.
The lawsuit has been in litigation since.
On Tuesday, the group driving the lawsuit said after months of costly litigation and countless volunteer hours, it was planning to rely on November’s election in order to remove Gascón.
“After over a year and half of review and litigation, countless volunteer hours, mounting legal bills, and endless stonewalling tactics by the Registrar of Voters, the Recall Committee has decided to dismiss its lawsuit given the impending election and the fact that no trial date has been set despite its attempts to expedite the litigation,” according to a statement from the Recall George Gascón Committee. “While this outcome was no doubt the intended result of the registrar’s lack of transparency and endless delay tactics, the committee’s work has nonetheless exposed the wrongful rejection of tens of thousands of valid signatures, bloated voter rolls, and flawed procedures.”
A spokesman for the Registrar-Recorder’s Office asked for a copy of the statement Tuesday afternoon in response to a request for comment, but one was not immediately available from Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan.
A representative for Gascón’s campaign declined to comment.
The recall campaign needed to collect signatures from 10% of all registered L.A. County voters, a figure that came out to a little more than 566,000 names.
After review, Logan’s office determined that only 520,000 signatures were valid, leaving the committee about 46,000 short of forcing a recall election.
The Registrar-Recorder’s Office validated 72.6% of all of the campaign’s signatures.
Data on invalid signatures from Ballotpedia indicated the county’s bounce rate for signatures in the petition was slightly higher than the national average for the previous five years, according to a previous story in The Signal.
“The average signature validity rate for approved measures from 2017 to 2022 was 74.95%,” according to the website. “The average signature validity rate for defeated measures was 76.25%.”
