|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Alameda County election officials have announced that they will conduct a manual count of signatures submitted in a petition to recall District Attorney Pamela Price.
The county registrar of voters said the results of a random sampling of the 123,374 signatures submitted on March 4 “are not sufficient to determine whether the signature threshold to call for a recall election has been met.”
The recall effort needs 73,195 signatures to qualify, Alameda County Registrar of Voters official Tim Dupuis said in a news release on March 14.
State law mandates that the registrar conduct a manual count because the random sampling didn’t produce a “statistically confident determination of the sufficiency of the petition,” Dupuis said.
The registrar said it was in the best interests of both Price and the recall proponents to ensure the signatures are counted reliably.
Brenda Grisham and Carl Chan with the Save Alameda For Everyone group said in a statement the next day that they welcome the registrar’s manual count.
The recall organizers have accused Price of being soft on crime since taking office as district attorney in January 2023. “In this way, it further protects the recall’s petition gathering process from any legal challenges,” they said.
The campaign opposing the recall of Price has alleged that there were deceptive and fraudulent efforts by organizers to get enough signatures to get the recall on the ballot and said on March 14 they too welcomed the manual count.
“After all that noise, they’ve failed their first test. We’ll wait to crack up the Guinness until the votes are manually counted but things are looking good,” said Protect the Win spokesperson William Fitzgerald. “Their whole campaign is nothing but a hack job trying to oust a democratically elected DA.”
