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Gascón Recall Committee Accuses Logan of Obstructionism
By a MetNews Staff Writer
The Committee to Support the Recall of District Attorney George Gascón has filed a petition for writ of mandate and complaint for declaratory and injunctive relief in which it accuses the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder of obstructing the effort of the committee to determine if signatures on recall petitions were erroneously rejected to the point of rendering completion of the task impossible.
Logan’s office announced on Aug. 15 that the number of valid signatures on petitions to place on the ballot the question of whether Gascón should be ousted from office fell 46,807 short of the 566,857 signatures that were needed, saying that 520,050 were found to be valid and 195,783 were deemed invalid. The committee responded that workers in Logan’s office had been following guidelines in an obsolete manual rather than applying the presumption in favor of validity that is now in force, and it vowed to review the petitions, in accordance with a statutory right, to determine if there was a failure to count presumptively valid signatures.
The committee’s review of the petitions began On Sept. 6, 2022.
At 5:18 p.m. on Monday, a verified petition was filed. In addition to claiming that Logan has impeded the effort to determine if enough valid signatures were gathered, it sets forth a previously undisclosed basis for a challenge, saying:
“[T]he Committee is informed and believes that the voter rolls in Los Angeles County contain up to 500,000 inactive voters who should have been removed from the list of registered voters, thus potentially inflating the number of signatures that was actually required to qualify the recall petition by up to 50,000.”
Allegations of Pleading
The petition/complaint says:
“California law specifically guarantees the proponents of a recall the right to review whether public officials have properly rejected a recall petition. Without such review, public officials would effectively have the ability to thwart the very recall mechanism meant to ensure the accountability of public officials. This case presents the question whether that legal review right is meaningful or hollow.”
It notes that “a remarkable 195,758 supporting signatures—just over 27% of the total submitted” were rejected and that the committee advised Logan that “ it intended to exercise its statutory right to review the recall petition under Elections Code section 11301 and Government Code section 6253.5,” reciting:
“The Registrar promised the Committee that the review process would include access to ‘the voter record data or information that led to the disqualification of [each] signature’; the Registrar would ‘review and respond to’ ‘any questions in connection with the examination of the Petition to determine which signatures were disqualified and the reasons therefor’; and the Registrar would permit the review to take place at its offices ‘during normal business hours.’ ”
Reneging on Pledge
It asserts:
“Four weeks into the review process, the Registrar has broken each one of these promises. The Registrar has instead erected a series of barriers that render the review process all but meaningless.”
The petition, signed by former Deputy District Attorney Kathleen M. Cady, now a victims rights lawyer, alleges that Logan is “spoon-feeding the Committee only those records that support the Registrar’s rejection decision, while suppressing the data that might demonstrate that a rejection was improper.”
It complains that he has limited the reviewing of petitions to three days a week, with only 14 checkers permitted on the premises, and being allowed access to only seven computer work stations with one of his staff members operating each computer. The pleading declares:
“Under these conditions, the Committee has been able to review only 1.200 signatures per week. With over 195,000 invalidated signatures—at least 107,000 of which must be reviewed on-site—it will take the Committee over eighteen months to complete its review. This is plainly unreasonable. Indeed, the Registrar is statutorily required to destroy the recall petition eight months after the certification of insufficiency absent pending litigation—which is ten months before the Committee could even plausibly complete its review under current conditions.”
The petition/complaint adds that of the rejected petitions reviewed so far, many of the rejected signatures are actually valid. Among the discrepancies it cites are that signatures “marked as ‘VS’—for ‘validated signature’—on the petition itself are nonetheless marked as invalid in the Registrar’s computer system” and signatures “were incorrectly invalidated as ‘not registered,’ even though the Committee was easily able to locate the voter in the voter database.”
It comments:
“Rejecting valid signatures disenfranchises voters and undermines the people’s constitutional right to recall elected public officials. The Committee, as the official proponent of the recall petition, has a right to determine for itself if this is what happened, and it has a right to make that determination within a reasonable period of tune after the Registrar’s finding of insufficiency. Nothing corrodes a democracy more than the public’s distrust in the electoral process. The only way the Committee can determine if the petition was properly rejected is if it has access to the same voter record data and information as the Registrar and is given comparable access to resources to undertake its review. This Court should immediately grant that relief.”
The petition seeks a writ directing Logan to allow review of petitions five days a week by 25 persons with access to 25 computer work stations and use of personal electronic devices. The pleading also calls for injunctive relief requiring that records that are being withheld be provided, pursuant to the Public Records Act, as well as declaratory relief.
The case was assigned to Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James Chalfant.
Logan has previously evinced antagonism to the recall effort. In response to an Aug. 8 letter to members of the Board of Supervisors by attorney Marian M.J. Thompson complaining of procedures used by Logan’s staff in reviewing signatures, Logan tweeted:
“[W]hen confronted with fear of an unknown outcome, invent a fictitious narrative to misinform and cast doubt.”
Copyright 2022, Metropolitan News Company