Recall organizers targeting Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price turned in thousands of signed petition forms Monday morning, marking a significant step in their potentially unprecedented bid to remove the county’s top prosecutor barely a year after she took office.
Leaders of the group Save Alameda For Everyone said they delivered 10 boxes containing 123,387 signatures to the county’s Registrar of Voters, Tim Dupuis. His staff now must begin validating the signatures by weeding out duplicates and ensuring that each one belongs to a registered voter living in Alameda County.
If 73,195 of the signatures are found to be valid — totaling 59% of the submitted signatures — then the recall matter would meet the required threshold to be put before voters.
Chanting “Recall Price” and holding signs reading “severely punish violent crimes,” dozens of recall supporters rallied Monday outside Rene C. Davidson Courthouse in downtown Oakland to celebrate the submission, which came just a day before the group’s deadline to turn in the forms.
“We shouldn’t have to do this,” said Brenda Grisham, a recall leader. “But for the safety of our community, for the safety of our children, the safety of our businesses, this is something that had to be done.”
Grisham and other SAFE members showed up at the courthouse with six masked security guards, some of whom were armed with handguns, because Grisham said she had been “intimidated” by Price’s campaign team and feared for their safety.
Standing behind her were several families of crime victims, many holding pictures of their loved ones. Among them was Patricia Harris, 61, who wore a shirt depicting her son, Jarin Purvis. He died in a 2020 shooting that garnered headlines last year when Price downgraded murder charges against Purvis’ accused killer to involuntary manslaughter after determining the shooting was unintentional.
“It’s not right,” Harris said. “She has to get out of office. It’s not fair to the victims’ families and to the victims.”
In a statement released ahead of the rally, Price’s campaign said the recall effort threatened to be “a serious regression for democracy in Alameda County,” one that would “undermine the results of a free and fair election” and “jeopardize the historic progress achieved in recent years.”
Her team has framed the recall effort as an attempt by “a handful of super-rich people” to sway “a smaller number of political actors to make it appear that Alameda County residents are the motivational force behind this effort.”
“They basically have money, and they’re loud, but they have no solutions whatsoever,” said William Fitzgerald, a campaign spokesman, who lampooned the recall organizers for not putting forward any potential replacements or specific policies they’d like to see implemented.
The county’s election office has 10 days to validate the signatures — a task complicated by the fact that the office must also preside over Tuesday’s primary election. On the ballot is a question asking voters to reform the county’s recall laws, including by lengthening the validation timeline from 10 days to 30.
The amount of signatures collected is “substantial,” said Joshua Spivak, senior research fellow at Berkeley Law’s California Constitution Center. He analyzed 51 recall efforts across the state since 2011 and found that the vast majority had a validation rate of 80%, meaning four of every five signatures were OK’d by local election officials.
“When you compare it to other recalls, this seems to meet the threshold, probably,” Spivak said. “They’ve handed in a very significant number of signatures.”
If too many signatures are invalidated to qualify for the ballot, the county’s charter allows recall organizers 10 additional days to make up that gap. The provision is one of several differences between local and state recall election laws that county officials have asked voters to reconcile with Measure B in Tuesday’s election.
It remains unclear exactly when a recall election might be held should Price’s opponents turn in enough valid signatures. One outsized factor may be whether voters approve or deny Measure B, according to an analysis released last year by Dupuis. His estimates for a potential election ranged from early May — particularly in the event that Measure B fails — to late summer or even fall 2024.
Monday’s submission comes about 14 months into Price’s tenure as the first Black woman to serve as the county’s top prosecutor. And it marks the second recall effort aimed at a Bay Area district attorney in just the last few years, after voters in San Francisco booted their own progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin, from office in a nationally watched campaign in June 2022.
The effort has little precedent in Alameda County’s history. A statement by Alameda County Counsel Donna Ziegler in mid-August said that no recall election had been held in the county for at least 30 years — “if ever.”
Price has faced a vocal opposition since the earliest months of her tenure, with opponents first holding a rally in April 2023 calling for her removal from office on the same courthouse steps where Monday’s gathering was held.
Recall leaders say Price has been too lenient on crime since taking office, and they have criticized her efforts at curtailing prison sentences and reducing the number of sentencing enhancements filed against criminal defendants. They have pointed to her handling of multiple high-profile murder prosecutions — including a plea deal for a man once accused in three killings as a teenager — as signs of Price not being tough enough on crime.
Price, a longtime civil rights attorney who became DA in January, has called lengthy prison sentences a vestige of the country’s racist overreaction to crime, one that has devastated communities of color and led to unnecessary mass incarceration of criminals. A vocal critic of law enforcement, she also has taken steps to re-open misconduct cases against police and sheriff’s deputies.
