As the count continues in the signature verification for the campaign to Recall George Gascón, things between the Recall organizers and the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder’s Office have become more tense.
As our Deputy Managing Editor Kira Davis reported, the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder is refusing to allow outside observers to oversee the signature counting, citing that this is not a normal election, therefore the same standards do not apply. With the constant mess and corruption that masquerades as electioneering in L.A. County, can we really call any of their elections normal?
From Just The News:
Monitors will not be allowed to view the vote counting in the recall balloting for Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascon because the county does not consider the process as an election, officials say.
The organizers of the recall campaign say they wants to make sure the voter petitions are accurately counted to place the measure on a ballot, as early possibly as November.
And supporters of the effort argue the law clearly states the recall is an election and the process should be public.
“We are concerned about it, and we have attorneys looking at it,” retired LAPD Sgt. Dennis Zine, one of the campaign organizers, said of the petition counting.
As Kira confirmed, L.A. R-R is lying through its teeth.
The law does indeed clearly identify recalls as elections, and supporting language can be found in the Procedures For Recalling State and Local Officials handbook provided by the state. Page 13 says:
Election
An election to determine whether to recall an officer and, if appropriate, to elect a successor, shall be called by the Governor and held not less than 60 days nor more than 80 days from the date of certification of sufficient signatures. (Cal. Const., Art. II, Sec. 15(a))
The recall election may be conducted within 180 days from the date of certification of sufficient signatures in order that the election may be consolidated with the next regularly scheduled election occurring wholly or partially within the same jurisdiction in which the recall election is held, if the number of voters eligible to vote at that next regularly scheduled election equal to at least fifty percent (50%) of all the voters eligible to vote at the recall election. (Cal. Const., Art. II, Sec. 15(a))
Officers charged by law with duties concerning elections are required to make all arrangements for such election. The election must be conducted, returns canvassed, and the result declared, in all respects as are other state elections. (Elections Code § 11110)
Sounds like Registrar-Recorder Dean C. Logan got the bat signal from on high. It’s been full-court interference since the Recall Gascón effort turned in 717,000 signatures for verification to the Registrar-Recorder’s office. The Registrar-Recorder is authorized to verify the signatures in a timely manner in order to meet the August 17 deadline for full verification and possible certification. If 566,857 of those signatures are officially verified, then the Registrar-Recorder must certify that number, clearing the way for the decision on whether George Gascon should be recalled to be placed on the November 2022 ballot.
Today we submitted to the LA County Registrar 717,000 signatures to recall DA George Gascon — 150,000 more than required to force an election. The Registrar has 30 days to "verify" that we've crossed the 566,857 signature threshold.
Thank you LA! #RecallDAGeorgeGascon pic.twitter.com/9fbDzEnfnC
— RecallDAGeorgeGascon (@DAGasconRecall) July 7, 2022
You know that the powers that be do not want to see what happened to San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin happen to Gascón, so they are slow-walking the verification of signatures in order to find a way to disqualify the effort.
On August 2, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors was scheduled to discuss the Gascón Recall and potentially order the recall be placed on the ballot.
According to the Santa Clarita Valley Signal, the agenda item was “postponed.”
An agenda item for the Board of Supervisors to possibly discuss and/or order a recall election for L.A. County District George Gascón was postponed on Tuesday as the counting of the signatures remains ongoing.
According to county officials, despite the petition’s presence on the agenda for the Tuesday’s regular meeting of the Board of Supervisors, the motion was “referred back,” meaning that the Office of the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk pulled back the motion.
There was no vote or discussion because the RRCC, according to officials, is still attempting to verify the hundreds of thousands of signatures that were submitted to remove the county’s top prosecutor.
Yeah, they’re scared, and the Recall organizers strongly suspect foul play, as is Registrar Recorder Dean C. Logan’s way. In 2004, Logan was the King County, Washington Registrar-Recorder who was instrumental in ballot stuffing the governor’s election in favor of the Democrat Christine Gregoire. The Republican candidate Dino Rossi was first declared the winner by 261 votes, which triggered an automatic recount. The first recount rendered even less votes (42!), but Rossi was still declared the winner. This is when Logan really went into action. As disclosed in the lawsuits filed, as reported by Seattle’s KIRO Radio:
What was revealed in subsequent lawsuits was remarkable. On the third recount, they miraculously found a few hundred more votes for Gregoire to steal away the governor’s race. Apparently, there were 300 illegal votes, 400 more where the voter could not be verified, 240 felons who voted illegally, 44 votes from dead people, and 10 people who voted twice. When all of those votes were counted, the third time around, all of a sudden Christine Gregoire was the governor.
The article discusses how after Logan resigned in disgrace, he somehow wound up as Registrar-Recorder in Los Angeles.
And thus, here we are.
Former L.A. District Attorney Steve Cooley and the other lead organizers are not backing down. They decided to expose Logan’s current malfeasance to The Washington Examiner. The paper reported that the organizers have submitted a Public Record’s request to determine what standards Logan is really using to verify signatures:
The campaign asked the county to divulge its standards for verifying signatures and was given a training manual written by a forensic analyst from 2015.
State law changed in 2020 to make it easier for county officials to declare that a signature is valid. The standard now is to presume the signature is correct unless it looks substantially different. At that point, two additional officials must unanimously agree that it is invalid.
When the law changed for the 2020 election, the number of rejected ballots decreased by 83%, said former District Attorney Steve Cooley, who is one of the lead campaign organizers.
“Something is not adding up. Almost everything is not adding up,” Cooley told the Washington Examiner.
That’s an understatement.
“The county’s failure to follow current law and uniform guidelines in the examination of the random sampling … is a violation of the rights of every Los Angeles County voter who signed their name to the recall petition to a fair, lawful and appropriate signature verification,” the letter said.
Fox News Correspondent Bill Melugin quote tweeted a response by Dean Logan. In Logan’s tweet, he did not name names; but the animus and allusion toward the recall effort is felt.
The L.A. County Registrar-Recorder, in charge of counting the petitions to recall L.A. DA @GeorgeGascon, tweets this hours after the campaign to recall Gascon accused the Registrar of using illegal & outdated standards that make it easier to throw out recall petitions. Subtweet? https://t.co/fVZVkgh2Mb
— Bill Melugin (@BillFOXLA) August 9, 2022
#selectiveoutrage — when confronted with fear of an unknown outcome, invent a fictitious narrative to misinform and cast doubt.
Fictitious narrative, eh? I guess this would be along the lines of all those fictitious, dead, and departed voters that Logan allows to stay on the Los Angeles County rolls, despite being legally required to clean them up. Let’s hope the Recall Gascón legal team can steamroll this through. There is less than 10 days before the August 17 certification date. We wait with bated breath to see whether the exposure and pressure placed on Dean Logan by the Gascón Recall organizers will force a more transparent process and a fair and judicious count.
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