Alameda County Registrar to manually recount 123K signatures to recall D.A. Pamela Price

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Pamela Price, Alameda County District Attorney, talks to the Chronicle editorial board on Wednesday, May 23, 2018 in San Francisco, Calif. (Photo By Lea Suzuki/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)

OAKLAND, Calif. - Alameda County election officials said Thursday 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 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.

KTVU reached out to Price's campaign for comment. They said this development was a win for the D.A.'s grassroots campaign.

"This afternoon we learned that despite paying signature gatherers $9 a signature and spending almost $3,000,000, they failed to meet the initial threshold of sufficient signatures to trigger an election."

The campaign thanked the registrar for following the 10-day rule to count the signatures.

"After all that noise, they've failed their first test," campaign manager William Fitzgerald said in part. "Their whole campaign is nothing but a hack job trying to oust a democratically elected D.A."

The campaign said it's unclear as to how long the County has to count. "Under state law they have until early May to count all signatures."

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