Not long after the dust settled on Alameda County’s initial attempt to determine if a recall election for District Attorney Pamela Price can actually take place, new chaos ensued.
The county’s Registrar of Voters office said Thursday it would need to undertake a manual count of the 123,374 petition signatures turned in by recall supporters to determine if enough of them — 73,195 signatures, or about 59% of the total — are valid.
The registrar’s initial count selected a random 5% of the total petition forms in order to estimate the total. However, that first count produced results that are considered inconclusive in California’s election code, triggering the need for a hand count.
Price’s campaign quickly hailed the outcome as a major victory. The announcement of a hand count suggested that a significant number of invalid signatures had already been found on the forms.
The recall campaign, meanwhile, scrambled to assure supporters that things were fine — and that the registrar’s actual projection, obtained by this news organization, would give them no reason to abandon optimism.
The process of hand-counting and verifying the signatures could take as long as a month, county registrar Tim Dupuis said Thursday.
Alameda County’s current charter requires the results to be announced within 10 days; however, the language is in the process of being modified due to the success passage of Measure B.
There are high stakes in the Price recall, one of the Bay Area’s most closely followed political battles — between an ambitious DA with a progressive approach to criminal justice and a wave of critics who accuse her of being soft on crime.
Here’s a breakdown of where things stood Friday:
How the random sampling of recall signatures worked
The recall campaign needs to have gathered the minimum threshold — 73,195 petition signatures — to challenge Price in an election just a couple of years into her first term, which otherwise would end in 2028.
The county’s projected outcome, based on the early sample, was 102% of that number, per data obtained by this news organization. The state is clear on its criteria: If the results had projected that the number of valid signatures were higher than 110% of the needed threshold, then the petition would be certified and an election could take place.
If the number were lower than 90%, than the petition wouldn’t be certified and the recall efforts would be all but dead.
Instead, the county’s projection automatically triggers a hand count to “ensure that everyone can be confident” about the results, the registrar’s office said in a statement. No one will know for certain if the recall organizers gathered enough signatures until the hand count is complete.
Does the initial outcome signal a victory for the Price campaign?
The widely publicized recall campaign spent several months — and a lot of money — gathering petitions from residents in public places, ultimately submitting over 50,000 signatures more than required. That seemed to indicate momentum in the recall movement, experts said at the time.
So the revelation Thursday that the petitions did not soar past the minimum threshold sparked celebration in the Price campaign. Its representatives taunted their opponents on social media.
“After all that noise, they’ve failed their first test,” Price campaign spokesperson William Fitzgerald said in a statement. “Their whole campaign is nothing but a hack job trying to oust a democratically elected DA.”
Indeed, the outcome proved surprising to observers who wondered how the recall organizers had let so many invalid or duplicate signatures slip through the cracks.
“No campaign ever hopes to have that many signatures declared void,” said Steve Hill, an expert with the election advocacy group FairVote. “If the campaign was really organized, they should’ve been checking them before they turned them in.”
But the 102% projection still means that the numbers, however uncertain, could ultimately lead the recall petition to be certified. Price isn’t yet out of the clear.
Carl Chan, a prominent recall organizer, had a number of explanations for what went wrong in the submitted petition forms: immigrants who used their pre-citizenship names, signatories who forgot to check a box, addresses that changed between the signing date and now.
“We don’t need to worry, because we’ve done our internal validation already,” Chan said, promising that the campaign’s internal vetting had already confirmed that between 80,000 and 90,000 signatures were valid.
Save Alameda (County) For Everyone supporters take part in a rally to recall Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price on the steps of the René C. Davidson Courthouse on Monday, March 4, 2024, in Oakland, Calif. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
When will the manual hand count be finished?
Local election officials are allowed 30 days, excluding weekends and holidays, to verify the validity of recall petition signatures, per the state’s election code.
Dupuis, who has faced criticism over his handling of past election results, said in an interview that his office may end up needing that entire time period to finish the count.
Alameda County’s charter, if enforced, would require the office to finish certifying the petition within 10 days of when the signatures were filed, which was March 4.
But the charter’s language is in the process of being reformed via Measure B, a ballot initiative approved by nearly two-thirds of county voters earlier this month in the primary election. When implemented, the charter language will simply reflect the state’s election code, removing confusion.
That won’t happen before Dupuis’ office is expected to finish checking signatures, and it could open the door to a legal challenge.
But given his insistence that there’s no way election officials could feasibly count 123,000 petitions in a 10-day timeline, voters should fasten their seatbelts — a month of waiting likely lies ahead.