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Signatures come easy for recall "Recall Davis?" "Recall Davis?" "Recall Davis?" "Sure, I want to be counted," said Debra Cheli, a store manager from Ojai. "Why not?" said Michael Lee, an account executive from Northridge. "Tsk, tsk, tsk," said Sandy Emberland, a Thousand Oaks computer trainer. "I'm going to talk to the manager of this building. This isn't right." In the first half-hour Thursday, Robinson had 14 signatures to recall Gov. Gray Davis. They came from Republicans citing the electricity crisis and the state's budget crisis and Democrats concerned about their car registration fees. Emberland, though, insisted Davis has done the best job possible, considering the bad economy and an uncooperative Legislature. An hour later, Audra Strickland, who is running against Robinson for state Assembly in the 37th District, set up another table in front of a Thousand Oaks Ralphs. She collected 60 signatures in less than three hours. "Initially people think you're a regular petition gatherer, and they want to walk away," Strickland said. "You say, 'Hey this is Gray Davis,' and they stop and say they want to sign a hundred million times." The Recall Davis campaign is heating up statewide and in Ventura County. Friday, Ted Costa, a leading sponsor of the recall and CEO of the anti-tax lobbying group People's Advocate, said backers have collected more than a million signatures. Recall advocates need 897,158 valid signatures by Sept. 2 to put the recall on the ballot. If Ventura County is any indication, getting valid signatures won't be a problem. A random sample Friday of the first 19,115 petition signatures showed that 88.5 percent were valid, said Bruce Bradley, the assistant registrar of voters. "That's a very high percentage," Bradley said. "Our normal is about 80 and the Secretary of State told them to expect 75 percent." Costa said he expects to turn in 1.3 million signatures by Friday, the Fourth of July. "We're going to have 40,000 out of Ventura County," predicted Costa. "We've had a tremendous boom this last weekend. I don't know if it's the car tax or what, but there's been a boom. "We're in high gear." Some counties, like Ventura, generated a high number of signatures, while others are extremely low. When Secretary of State Kevin Shelley released an "official number of unverified recall petition signatures" this week, it showed that as of June 16, there were 11,270 Ventura County signatures, but only 851 from Santa Barbara County. The state's largest county, with 9.5 million people, Los Angeles County had 69,569 signatures. The second-largest county, with 2.8 million people, Orange County had 65,285. Ventura County is the 12th-biggest county with 753,197 people, but had the 10th-highest number of signatures, according to the secretary of state's numbers. To fight the recall, Ventura County union members are being urged to write letters to the editor in support of the governor, said Oxnard resident Marilyn Valenzuela, executive secretary-treasurer of the Tri-Counties Central Labor Council. She said her members have seen little petition gathering. If they did, they would show up with anti-recall leaflets. For now, they remain watchful. "Why rally our troops if they aren't going to get the signatures," she said. "We haven't seen the activity it requires to get the signatures that are required."
Most of the signature gathering, though, has been invisible from the streets. The main effort has focused on sending letters to Republican households, Strickland and Robinson said. Petitions also are available on the Web and at local
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