(Mark Pellin, Headline USA) Dire predictions that Los Angeles County officials were playing fast and loose with the rules for signature verification on a petition to recall the crime-plagued county’s Soros-funded district attorney appeared to come true Monday.
The LA county clerk’s office ruled that the petition effort to recall radical DA George Gascon came up short of “valid” signatures required to have the measure placed on the ballot, according to ABC7.
While recall organizers had collected more than 715,000 signatures from citizens outraged by the skyrocketing crime Gascon’s leftist policies have produced, officials only deemed 520,000 to be valid, short of the 570,000 required.
LA County officials said that more than 195,000 signatures were found to be invalid based on their interpretation of the rules, including whether the person signing lived in the county or was a registered voter. Almost 44,000 signatures were found to be duplicates.
The announcement was met with widespread skepticism and allegations of a corrupt system that favors those in power.
“LA County mails ballots en masse to dead people, does not properly maintain their voter rolls, and takes a month to count votes,” wrote Joshua Scott, executive director of Fix California.
“Now, the Recall Gascon Campaign claims that LA County is NOT complying with signature verification laws. Are you awake yet?”
Recall organizers had previously alleged that the county was failing to adhere to current laws for signature verification, which presume that a signature is valid unless there is evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that the signature on the petition differs in “multiple, significant and obvious” respects from the one on file.
“We’ve never seen a vetting this thorough from LA County,” one recall supporter wrote after the county’s decision was announced.
“They don’t clean up their voter rolls with this level of detail BEFORE they send out the ballots…. But they toss out more than 1/4 of the Gascon Recall signatures?”
They reject nearly 30% of the signatures to recall a radical Democrat, then expect people to believe < 1% of mail-in ballots in a general election are invalid. https://t.co/rpOitnpIEi
— Joel Pollak (@joelpollak) August 15, 2022
After the county clerk’s announcement, the recall campaign said it intended to review the rejected signatures.
“While the initial results are surprising and disappointing, the Recall Committee intends to exercise its full statutory and legal authority to review the rejected signatures and verification process that took place, and will ultimately seek to ensure no voter was disenfranchised,” the group tweeted.
They also pointed to the more than half a million signatures that were deemed valid, arguing that “to deprive them of the opportunity to restore public safety in their own communities is heartbreaking.”
“And to interpret this in any other way other than a wholesale rejection of Gascon’s dangerous polices would be disingenuous, or naive at best,” recall organizers said of the hundreds of thousands of citizens who signed the recall petition.
“The removal of George Gascon from office has never been a matter of if, but when,” they wrote. “The citizens of Los Angeles cannot afford another two years of Gascon unleashing havoc on their streets – people’s lives are at stake.”
