In August, I reported the second effort to force the highly progressive Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. George Gascón into a recall election fizzled out after officials determined that the petition failed to gain enough valid signatures.
Now, the Recall Gascon Committee is taking the county registrar to court, claiming the signatures were improperly invalidated.
As early as this week, lawyers for Recall George Gascón will take the Registrar’s office to court, hoping a judge will reopen a path for the lighting-rod district attorney’s removal from office.Recall DA Gascon Committee members say the Registrar’s office has created roadblocks to a timely inspection of all 195,783 invalidated recall signatures. From a partial review of thousands of the signatures tossed by the Registrar, they say 39% showed cause for “clear, obvious, and legitimate” signs of improper invalidation. If true, this would mean the threshold to overturn the outcome of the recall has been surpassed.Committee members will argue that the Registrar’s office threw out thousands of signatures for reasons ranging from specious claims they were “non-matching,” despite showing “substantial similarities to the signatures on file” to incorrectly invalidating them as “‘not registered’ when, in fact, the person was a registered voter who could easily be identified in the voter database,” according to a preview of the lawsuit obtained exclusively by LAMag.
The committee’s assertions were damning of the registrar’s validation process, indicating it would “for injunctive relief imminently.”
Recall campaign officials said the registrar’s counting process was “seriously flawed, resulting in substantial errors, the wrongful invalidation of many valid signatures” and the disqualification of thousands of voters.”These extremely disturbing findings necessitate a complete and timely review of all invalidated signatures. This review is currently being obstructed by the Registrar’s office,” it said in a statement on Monday.They said they would file “for injunctive relief imminently” and are looking into whether the “inflated number” of required signatures on the recall petition was due to “bloated” voter rolls.The recall group said volunteer attorneys have been reviewing the invalidated signatures since Sept. 6 and “legitimate challenges” have been identified for 39% of those tossed.
Hopefully, the committee will be able to prove its case in court, and Los Angeles Country residents will get the recall election they deserve.
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