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Well this is certainly bad news for LA County. The recall petition has fallen about 46,000 signatures short according to the County Clerk. That means they had nearly 92% of the signatures needed. So close but still not quite there.

The release reads in part:

Based on the examination and verification, which was conducted in compliance with the statutory and regulatory requirements of the California Government Code, Elections Code, and Code of Regulations, 520,050 signatures were found to be valid and 195,783 were found to be invalid. To qualify the recall for the ballot, the petition required 566,857 valid signatures; therefore, the petition has failed to meet the sufficiency requirements and no further action shall be taken on the petition.

A summary breakdown of the invalid signatures is as follows:

• Not Registered: 88,464
• Max Number of Times Signed (Duplicate): 43,593
• Different Address: 32,187
• Mismatch Signature: 9,490
• Canceled: 7,344
• Out of County Address: 5,374
• Other: 9,331

This is the second failed attempt to recall DA George Gascon, though this one came much closer to getting on the ballot.

An initial attempt to recall Gascón last year failed miserably, largely due to a lack of fundraising and organization.

But a second effort launched late last year raised millions of dollars and drew support from a wide swath of police unions and politicians, including Los Angeles mayoral candidate Rick Caruso.

And with Bay Area voters recalling San Francisco Dist. Atty. Chesa Boudin in June, Gascón seemed at risk of facing a similar fate…

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But the recall campaign’s own fortunes muddied in recent months. In mid-July, the Registrar’s office performed verification tests on a batch of 28,000 signatures collected by the campaign and counted only 78% of those signatures as valid. If that verification rate was applied to the entire petition effort, the recall would have failed.

Still, this is probably the end for the recall effort.

The Recall drive had complained last week that the county was not using the correct standard to verify signatures.

However, a look at this press release suggests the complaints were mostly about signature verifications standards. However the biggest problems with the submitted signatures appear to have been people not registered (nearly 90k) and people who signed more than once (43k duplicates). Even if you granted all of the mismatched signatures were valid, it wouldn’t have been enough to change the outcome in this case (only 9,500 mismatches).

Gascon’s current term will expire at the end of 2024 so LA residents are going to have a little more than two more years of Gascon’s policies. Unfortunately, they are getting exactly what they voted for.

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