Organizers of the effort to recall Los Angeles district attorney George Gascón failed to receive enough valid signatures to qualify for the ballot, L.A. County officials announced Monday.
The Los Angeles County registrar-recorder/county clerk’s office said that upon completing its examination and verification of the petition signatures submitted by the recall campaign, only 520,050 signatures of the 715,833 signatures submitted were deemed valid.
“To qualify the recall for the ballot, the petition required 566,857 valid signatures; therefore, the petition has failed to meet the sufficiency requirements and no further action shall be taken on the petition,” the statement reads.
More than 88,000 signatures were invalid because they were not from registered voters, while 43,594 signatures were duplicates. Other reasons that signatures were invalidated included signatories having a different address (32,187), mismatched signature (9,490), or out-of-county address (5,374). More than 7,000 signatures were “canceled,” and 9,331 signatures were invalidated for “other” reasons.
Organizers of the second effort to recall Gascón — a first attempt last year also failed to receive enough signatures — had blasted the DA’s policies as “soft on crime” and argued that it was necessary to recall him to “keep communities safe.”
When Gascón took office in December 2020, he vowed to stop prosecuting juveniles as adults or pursuing sentences of life in prison without parole. However, he later said he would review the specific circumstances of each case before making a judgment.
Gascón has been widely criticized for his handling of the case of Hannah Tubbs, a 26-year-old transgender woman who was sentenced to just two years in a juvenile facility for sexually assaulting a 10-year-old girl.
The DA himself acknowledged earlier this year that he may not have properly handled the case.
“While for most people several years of jail time is adequate, it may not be for Ms. Tubbs,” the progressive DA said in a statement, adding that he may have handled Tubbs’s case differently if he knew about the molester’s “disregard for the harm” committed against the young victim.
“After her sentencing in our case, I became aware of extremely troubling statements she made about her case, the resolution of it and the young girl that she harmed,” he added.
Fox News obtained jailhouse recordings of Tubbs’s speaking with Tubbs’s father in which the molester laughs about the lack of consequences for the crime.
The conversations also include “explicit remarks about the victim that are unfit to print,” according to the report.
Los Angeles County sheriff Alex Villanueva told Fox News in May that his office presented 13,238 cases that the district attorney’s office ultimately declined to prosecute under Gascón’s new soft-on-crime special directives.
“Astonishing number of cases,” Villanueva told the outlet. “These are people that did bad things that left a victim, have the evidence presented and they said ‘don’t bother.’”
“There’s no deterrence in this current scheme,” Villanueva said. “We have to have teeth in what we’re doing.”
“The deputies are going to continue doing their job, they make the arrests, they’ll write the reports, but then what happens after it’s submitted to the D.A is where it all falls apart,” he added.
Villanueva said his department does not have a working relationship with the DA’s office and that he has never met Gascón in public, having only ever had one phone call with him.