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2112749.1
2121 Avenue of the Stars
30th Floor
Los Angeles, CA 90067
310.274.7100
egeorge@egcfirm.com
egcfirm.com
Admitted in California,
New York and District of Columbia
File No. 10031-001
Ellis George Cipollone O’Brien Annaguey LLP | www.egcfirm.com
September 21, 2022
Via Hand Delivery
Dean C. Logan
Los Angeles County
Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk
12400 Imperial Highway
Norwalk, California 90650
Re: Committee to Support the Recall of District Attorney George Gascón
Elections Code Section 6253.5 Recall Signature Inspection
Dear Mr. Logan:
This firm, along with Marian M. J. Thompson, are counsel for the Committee to Support
the Recall of District Attorney George Gascon (the “Committee”). We have learned from the
Committee that the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s Office has made
arbitrary and capricious decisions that restrict the Committee’s inspection of the 195,783 recall
signatures invalidated by your office under Government Code section 6253.5. The recall
signature inspection commenced on September 6, 2022 and is currently ongoing.
In the two weeks since it began the review process, the Committee has already uncovered
a substantial number of improperly rejected petition signatures. For example, even though your
office has adopted a policy that requires each signature be reviewed “at least 3 times” by
elections officials before being invalidated, the official markings on the petition pages frequently
make clear that fewer than three persons reviewed them. Likewise, there are multiple instances
where signatures were rejected because the voter’s address on the petition supposedly did not
match their address in the voter file—yet, upon the Committee’s review, the address on file for
the voter was an identical match to that on the petition. Many signatures were incorrectly
rejected as “printed” even when the voter’s signature on file was itself printed, and many more
signatures were rejected as duplicative without your office counting any one of the alleged
duplicates. In addition, the Committee has determined that your office failed to properly update
voter addresses following notification of a change of address from the U.S. Postal Service
through the National Change of Address database, potentially leading to thousands of signatures
being improperly rejected for having a different address. So far, the Committee believes that
almost half of the signatures it has reviewed were improperly rejected.
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Dean C. Logan
September 21, 2022
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2112749.1
ELLIS GEORGE CIPOLLONE
O’BRIEN ANNAGUEY LLP
Code of Regulations, title 2, sections 20910 – 20962 require elections officials to
review all signatures on file. This makes inspection of signatures invalidated for
“Mismatch” unnecessarily difficult and potentially inaccurate.
7. California election law requires elections officials to maintain all prior addresses in a
voter’s file. For those signatures rejected for “Different Address,”2
representatives
have been denied access to all prior addresses on file for each voter who signed the
petition. This information is necessary to determine whether a signature was
improperly invalidated.
8. Representatives have also been denied access to information that would reveal what
event or action triggered a change of address (COA) in the voter file, whether the
voter was notified of the COA, how the voter was notified, and the date of any such
notification (the law requires elections officials to notify the voter when their voter
file is updated). In this instance, your office invalidated the signatures of 32,187
registered voters for “Different Address” who were directed to enter their “residence
address” instead of their “address as registered.” Rejecting voters’ signatures because
they followed your office’s directions effectively disenfranchises them, and we
require this additional information to determine which voters (if any) were
legitimately rejected on the basis of a different address.
9. Representatives have been instructed to submit all questions about invalidated
signatures in writing. This is even though the answers to a substantial number of
questions are readily available to your staff through the petition module system and
DIMS.net. This has forced the Committee representatives to submit hundreds of
written questions, almost none of which has been answered.
10. The Committee, through its counsel, Marian M. J. Thompson, submitted several
written requests directly to Emmanuel Anyiwo, Division Manager, Voter Records.
These requests were for additional information relevant to the signature inspection
2
A signature may be invalidated as “Different Address” if the “residence address” listed
by the voter on the petition does not match the “address as registered” in the voter’s file.
California Code of Regulations, title 2, section 20931 provides that if an address change to a
voter’s file occurred during the dates between which all signatures were obtained as reported in
the declaration of circulator, “it shall be presumed that the voter signed the petition with their
previous address prior to the effective date of the address change.” Without access to the voter’s
prior address, it is impossible to determine whether a voter’s signature was improperly
invalidated.