LA registrar threatened with suit over verifying DA recall signatures

A high-powered lawyer hired by the group leading the effort to recall District Attorney George Gascón threatened to file a lawsuit if Los Angeles County does not apply what he says is the correct signature verification standards and re-review any rejected signatures.

“As you know, California has taken aggressive steps to liberalize its review of voter signatures. Since 2020, any assessment of a voter’s signature ‘begin[s] with the basic presumption that the signature on the petition ... is the voter’s signature.’ That presumption is overcome only if ‘two different election officials unanimously find beyond a reasonable doubt that the signature differs in multiple, significant, and obvious respects from all signatures in the voter’s registration record,’” Eric M. George wrote Friday to Dean C. Logan, the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder/county clerk.

George declined to comment on the letter.

Supporters of the recall needed to gather the signatures of 566,857 valid Los Angeles County voters to get the measure placed on the November ballot. They turned in 715,833 signatures last month. A sampling of 5% of the total number of signatures submitted found a 22% rejection rate, which narrowly triggered a full review of the signatures.

That set off alarms within the recall group. Former DA Steve Cooley, co-chairman of the Committee to Recall District Attorney George Gascón, told the Los Angeles County supervisors that the rejection rate was “shockingly large.”

He pointed out that the county rejected 2% of signatures on vote-by-mail ballots cast in the November 2018 general election and rejected less than 1% in the 2020 election.

The public relations representative for the registrar-recorder/county clerk did not respond Friday to an email seeking comment.

After Cooley complained to the supervisors, Logan tweeted: “#selectiveoutrage — when confronted with fear of an unknown outcome, invent a fictitious narrative to misinform and cast doubt.”

The recall campaign asked the county for a breakdown of rejected signatures between unregistered voters and non-matching signatures. In Friday’s letter, George wrote that state officials are required to consider whether discrepancies in signatures might be attributed to old age or poor health, the voter’s signature changed or they wrote in haste.

Young people are known to experiment with their signatures and people whose first language isn’t English might inadvertently alter their signature, George wrote.

“Applying the wrong signature verification procedures is not only unlawful, but it disenfranchises thousands of eligible voters,” George concluded.

The recall campaign committee says on its website it wants to remove Gascón from office because he has endangered citizens by refusing to prosecute many crimes; won’t prosecute juveniles as adults no matter what the crime; refused to file prior conviction, gang membership, gun possession or parole violation charges that bring longer sentences; and has banned deputy DAs from attending parole hearings on behalf of victims and their families.

A spokesperson for Gascón could not immediately be reached. Opponents of the recall argue Gascón has kept his campaign promises and attack the recall as a waste of money that ignores the will of the voters who elected the district attorney.

The recall signatures must be certified by Wednesday, Aug. 17 to make it on the November ballot.

George gave Logan until 10 a.m. Monday, Aug. 15, to confirm that he will re-review the rejected signatures and use the correct standard for reviewing signatures going forward.

He and his law firm, Ellis George Cipollone O’Brien Annaguey LLP have taken on several high-profile matters. George represents the city of Los Angeles in litigation stemming from faulting billing software at the Department of Water and Power that resulted in several officials being prosecuted. He also represents The Fox News Network in several high-profile cases.

Logan was formerly head of elections in King County (Seattle) Washington. In a close race for governor in 2004, his office discovered previously uncounted votes on two occasions during a recount that tipped the count first for the Republican and then the Democrat. The Democrat eventually won by 129 votes.

His office later acknowledged that 450 people who voted were not registered voters and that hundreds of provisional ballots were fed into voting machines without verification and by mistake, making it impossible to authenticate their legality, according to a report by the Los Angeles Daily News.

Then, a design flaw resulted in 50,000 ballots in the 2016 presidential primary election initially going uncounted. Logan admitted his office was ultimately unable to count 12,000 votes. His hiring by Los Angeles County drew protests from some election integrity experts who said the mistakes in Kings County showed he was unqualified for the job.

“He’s one of the least qualified people in the country,” Judith B. Alter, a retired emeritus professor at UCLA and director of Protect California Ballots, a volunteer election justice organization, was quoted in the Daily News as saying.

The county supervisors ultimately decided that Logan’s experience grappling with large election issues was an asset, and approved his hiring.

In Friday’s letter, George wrote that in response to a Public Records Act request, Logan supplied the recall committee with outdated policy documents and training manuals for assessing signatures.

“It is therefore clear that none of the hundreds of signature reviewers being used by your office to review the petition’s signatures were trained in, or have been applying, the correct standards,” George wrote.

“Even if some signatures were rejected for reasons other than a mismatched signature — a fact which your office has curiously refused to confirm or deny — such a high rejection rate almost certainly shows that your office’s outdated methodology is having a substantial, real-world impact on the verification process,” he added.