Alameda County election officials said this week that they will conduct a manual count of signatures submitted in a petition to recall District Attorney Pamela Price.
The county registrar of voters said Thursday the results of a random sampling of the 123,374 signatures submitted on March 4 “are not sufficient to determine whether the signature threshold to call for a recall election has been met.”
The recall effort needs 73,195 signatures to qualify, Alameda County Registrar of Voters Tim Dupuis said in a news release.
State law mandates that the registrar conduct a manual count because the random sampling didn’t produce a “statistically confident determination of the sufficiency of the petition,” Dupuis said.
The registrar said it was in the best interests of both Price and the recall proponents to ensure the signatures are counted reliably.
News of the upcoming manual count of signatures was welcomed by a spokesperson for the campaign to defeat the recall.
“After all that noise, they’ve failed their first test. We’ll wait to crack up the Guinness until the votes are manually counted but things are looking good,” said Protect the Win spokesperson William Fitzgerald. “Their whole campaign is nothing but a hack job trying to oust a democratically elected DA.”
Save Alameda For Everyone (SAFE), the group working to recall Price, did not immediately release a statement about the manual count announcement.