California: 123,000 Signatures handed in for the Alameda County District Attorney recall -- is that enough?

Petitioners have announced that they are handing in over 123,000 signatures for the recall of Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price and they need 73,195 valids. Are they handing in enough? Recent history suggests that they should succeed, with some room to spare.

I have records of 51 recall efforts where signatures were turned in in California since 2011 (out of 188, of which at least 134 got to the ballot). Among those, all but six seem to have a signature verification rate above 72%, which is quite a bit higher than the 59.5% that it seems the petitioners need for the Price recall (if they actually hand in 123K). The vast majority of the recalls had a signature verification rate above 80%, topping out with a 97% rate for the recent Shasta County recall.

The biggest recalls in the state seem to have a verification rate in the neighborhood of 20%. The 2021 Gubernatorial Recall against Governor Gavin Newsom saw an 81% rate and the 2003 Governor Gray Davis recall saw a rate just over 82%.

In San Francisco, where they used a statistical sampling method to test the signatures, the rate for District Attorney Chesa Boudin was 79% and for three school board members it was 80-81% verified.

In the largest recall outside of the gubernatorial one, the 560,000-requirement against Los Angeles District Attorney GeorgeGascon, 72-73% were valid (the lawsuits are still ongoing).

Among other notable recalls: State Senator Josh Newman in 2018 with a 73.6% rate; Santa Clara Judge with a 71.6% rate; Sonoma County District Attorney, also with 74%, and a Los Angeles Councilmember with a 66% success rate.

The most prominent high failure rate that got on the ballot was the 2008 recall against State Senator Jeff Denham, which had a 58.5% success.

In Alameda County, there is very little to work with. The verification rate for the Alameda portion of the Newsom recall was a very high 88% (albeit, not that many signatures handed in). Recalls against a Dublin City Councilmember and School Board member in 2018 did not get to the ballots, but both saw a 76% rate.

Do initiatives tell us anything on this front? Prop 22 was the most high profile initiative in the 2020 race, as petitioners spent more than $6.4 million to get on the ballot. Petitioners needed 623,212 and handed in 987,813 signatures. Once again using the random sampling method, 22.5 percent were found invalid (77.5 percent were verified). A similar result can be seen in a Proposition that required a higher signature total. Prop. 15, which spent nearly $6 million to get on the ballot, was a Constitutional Amendment, which therefore required 997,139. Once again, the random sampling method found 25.4 percent invalid (74.60 percent were verified).

We’ve seen some pretty crazy recalls with very high signature failure rates, most notably in New Orleans, where they handed in photo copied duplicates. But that seems to be the exception.

As we can see, failure rates are the norm. As we’ve seen so often with recalls (and petitions in general), signatures will be tossed out. The reasons are usually mundane, which is what happens when you’re collecting signatures on the street and frequently paying people to collect. The problems range from the signers not being registered or have a wrong address, to signing more than once to signatures not matching, to registering late to living out of district or state or (in rarer instances) using fake names. We probably should just expect the same here.

We have two potential complicating factors. One is that the Alameda County Ballot Measure B would increase the signature requirement to get on the ballot. Presumably, it would not impact this effort (one of the reasons the petitioners are handing it in the day before the ballot measure goes to a vote), but perhaps that would be challenged.

The other factor is Price’s campaign charge that out-of-district petition gatherers are not allowed under Alameda law. This is what the law says, but the U.S. Supreme Court may have overturned this limitation, when it held a similar law related to ballot measures unconstitutional. It is presumed that a similar challenge would fail here, but that’s not certain at all.

So as of right now, and barring court decisions, it would take an extraordinarily poor effort for these signatures not to meet the threshold to get a recall on the ballot.