Alameda County election officials will manually count the petition signatures submitted to recall District Attorney Pamela Price after an initial attempt failed to establish whether there are enough valid signatures to trigger an election.
The manual count, by California law, is allowed to last 30 days — and that’s close to how long it will likely take, county Registrar of Voters Tim Dupuis said Thursday afternoon in an interview.
The process will extend an already drawn-out battle over whether Price can complete her term in office, which would naturally expire after the Nov. 2028 election.
The DA’s progressive approach to criminal justice — which involves relaxing some enhancements that would otherwise beef up prison sentences — has attracted national attention and triggered backlash from critics who accuse Price of being soft on crime.
Dupuis’ office initially took a random portion of the 123,374 petition forms submitted by the Price recall campaign and tried to use that sampling to project if enough of the signatures were valid. The necessary threshold is 73,195 signatures, or about 59%.
But from that 5% sample, election officials projected a total number of valid signatures that California law would deem inconclusive — not too low to outright cancel any election plans, and not too high to automatically compel one.
Now, as further required by state law, the registrar staff will begin a manual count of all those forms, one by one, to see if the threshold of valid signatures was met by the recall campaign.
“A manual count of the verified signatures will ensure that everyone can be confident” about whether there’s a sufficient number, the registrar’s office said in Thursday’s announcement.
To be valid, each signature will need to belong to a registered voter in Alameda County, with no duplicates. The recall campaign submitted the forms March 4 after gathering petitions for many months at public places around the county.
Dupuis, in an interview, stressed that the initial random-sampling method was inconclusive — meaning there’s no reason to be confident one way or another about whether the threshold was met.
But the Price campaign celebrated Thursday’s announcement, chiding the recall organizers for not passing “the first test” despite spending millions of dollars.
“We’ll wait to crack up the Guinness until the votes are manually counted, but things are looking good,” the campaign’s spokesperson, William Fitzgerald, said in a news release. “Their whole campaign is nothing but a hack job trying to oust a democratically elected DA.”
This story will be updated. Staff writer Jakob Rodgers contributed reporting.
