Recall organizers targeting Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price began turning in signatures Monday morning, marking a significant step in their unprecedented bid to remove the county’s top prosecutor barely a year after she took office.
Leaders of the group Save Alameda For Everyone plan to deliver the documents to the county’s Registrar of Voters, Tim Dupuis later Monday. His staff then must to begin the arduous task of validating the petitions by weeding out duplicates and ensuring that each signature belongs to a registered voter living in Alameda County.
The group announced the move at a press conference outside Rene C. Davidson Courthouse in downtown Oakland, a day before the group’s deadline to turn in the required 73,195 signatures needed to get the question before voters.
The county’s election office has 10 days to validate the signatures — a task complicated by the fact that the office must also preside over Tuesday’s election. On the ballot is a question asking voters to reform the county’s recall laws, including by lengthening the validation timeline from 10 days to 30.
If recall organizers do not have enough valid signatures, then the county’s charter allows them 10 additional days to make up that gap. The provision is one of several differences between local and state recall election laws that county officials have asked voters to reconcile in this week’s election.
It remains unclear exactly when a recall election might be held, should Price’s opponents turn in enough valid signatures. Much of that is dependent upon whether voters approve changes to the county’s election laws on Tuesday, according to an analysis released last year by Dupuis.
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The move Monday comes barely 14 months into Price’s tenure as the first Black woman to serve as the county’s top prosecutor. And it marks the second recall effort aimed at a Bay Area district attorney in just the last few years, after voters in San Francisco booted their own progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin, from office in a nationally-watched campaign in June 2022.
Price has faced a vocal opposition since the first months of her tenure, with opponents first holding a rally in April 2023 on the steps of the Rene C. Davidson Courthouse in downtown Oakland that called for her removal from office.
Recall leaders say Price has been too lenient on crime since taking office, and they have criticized her efforts at curtailing prison sentences and reducing the number of sentencing enhancements filed against criminals defendants. They have pointed to her handling of multiple murder prosecutions — including a plea deal for a man once accused in three killings as a teenager — as signs of Price not being tough enough on crime.
Price, a longtime civil rights attorney who became DA in January, has pilloried lengthy prison sentences as a vestige of the country’s racist overreaction to crime, one that has devastated communities of color and led to unnecessary mass incarceration of criminals. A vocal critic of law enforcement, she also has taken steps to re-open misconduct cases against police and sheriff’s deputies.
The historic election has little precedent in Alameda County’s history. A statement by Alameda County Counsel Donna Ziegler in mid-August said that no recall election had been held in the county for at least 30 years — “if ever.”