On November 20, California elections officials announced that the petition to recall Assemblymember Anthony Adams does not have enough valid signatures. The petition needed 35,825 valid signatures (12% of the vote cast in the district for Governor in 2006). Although recall proponents submitted 58,384, a random sample shows that only 24,579 signatures are valid, a validity rate of only 42.1%.
The recall effort was launched by a group that was angry at Adams for voting for certain tax increases earlier this year. Adams is a Republican representing the 59th district, which is mostly in San Bernardino County, and partly in Los Angeles County.
There’s a bigger story here.
There has NEVER been a 60% failure rate in ANY legitimate signature gathering initiative.
The company that was hired to do the gathering has a GUARANTEED 70% validity rate and is obligated to give the money back if they don’t achieve this.
The company (in business for 20 years) was live checking the credentials for all the people who signed the petitions.
So the signature gatherers claim to achieve a 70% validity rate and the secretary of state claims the exact opposite?
Something stinks worse than Adams. I think that the corrupt legislature (both Dem and Repub) were so scared by the momentum that this recall effort gained and recognized the threat to their way of doing business that they shadily put the brakes on this effort to ensure the voters of the state don’t try to question them again.
This needs to be investigated further.
I wonder if they were getting a lot of out-of-district voters. The district uses the San Gabriel and San Bernadino Mountains to connect a lot of communities over a large area, from La Canada-Flintridge to Highlands and Apple Valley and Hesperia.
The validity rate for San Bernardino County was only 35%. The district (based on the 2000 Census) is almost equally divided between Los Angeles and San Bernadino counties 210K and 212K, respectively, though the Apple Valley and Hesperia areas have had lots of growth since then, while the Los Angeles areas are pretty well settled.
NO WAY did they not have enough signatures. Get out your pitchforks and torches folks (figuratively speaking of course). There’s some VERY bad people running things and they need to be sent packing.
Looking at the facts you can’t make a single argument for Bureaucratic wrongdoing here. Maybe if the invalidation of signatures was purely based on non-registered voters you could say that County officials if you reviewed the bounce signatures. But here you have a large amount of signatures invalidated because they are out of the District. That is a blatant disregard within the quality control processes of the firm responsible for the collection, whoever that may be.
$110,000 is a lot of money to be thrown down the toilet. Not to mention that the residual effect from launching a recall and not even getting it on the ballot takes the political muscle out of those backing it. Sometimes the effects last forever.
What a shame.