LOS ANGELES — A second effort to force Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón into a recall election fizzled out Monday after officials determined that the campaign to boot him from office failed to gain enough valid signatures.
To put Gascón’s job on the ballot, the campaign seeking his ouster needed to gather 566,857 valid signatures by mid-July; the figure reflects 10% of the people who were eligible to vote in the election cycle when he won office in November 2020. The L.A. County registrar-recorder/county clerk’s office said Monday that about 520,000 of the signatures submitted were valid.
While the campaign submitted roughly 715,000 signatures, some were inevitably going to be disqualified if they were signed by people who were not properly registered to vote in L.A. County or if a registered voter’s signature didn’t match the one on file with the registrar. In California, most recall drives see at least 20% of collected signatures disqualified, according to Joshua Spivak, an expert on recall elections and senior research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley Law School’s California Constitution Center.
