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Recall milestone claimed Sacramento anti-tax crusader Ted Costa, who is coordinating the signature-gathering drive on behalf of three separate anti-Davis committees, said his group had turned in 924,847 signatures. The measure needs 897,158 valid signatures of registered voters to qualify for the ballot. ``There's another 300,000 lying around here somewhere,'' Costa said. ``The steam engine is still building speed.'' Recall opponents said they doubted the numbers, because the pro-recall forces had inflated them early on. ``They've been making these claims all along that have never matched up to reality,'' said Carroll Wills, a spokesman for Taxpayers Against the Governor's Recall. A telephone survey of a third of the state's 58 counties, including the most populous, showed about 600,000 signatures have been turned in. The totals varied widely, and sometimes did not reflect the size of the county. San Francisco and Ventura counties, for example, are roughly equal in size. But in liberal San Francisco, where recall advocates say their signature gatherers have been harassed, proponents turned in just 903 signatures. In conservative Ventura County, they turned in 20,831. Other Bay Area counties reported these estimated totals: Santa Clara, 14,153; San Mateo, 4,775; Alameda, 6,304; Contra Costa, 6,170. Los Angeles reported about 125,000; Orange, 121,131; Riverside, 32,524; and San Diego, 122,000. Pro-recall forces have been racing to meet a self-imposed deadline in mid-July to turn in the signatures and qualify for a special election this fall. Because conservative voters tend to turn out in higher numbers for special elections, a fall recall vote is expected to have a greater chance of removing Davis from office. But Secretary of State Kevin Shelley threw the prospect of a special election into doubt when he sent a memo Monday to county voting officials that told them they could take a slower approach to verify signatures. That could delay the election until March, when it would coincide with the presidential primary. Davis is expected to have better odds of surviving a recall effort then, because Democrats would be turning out to pick a presidential nominee. But Shelley left it up to county election officials to decide how to count the ballots. It appears some are counting every signature as it comes in, a speedier approach, instead of the slower method Shelley outlined Monday. James Sweeney, a former legal counsel to the secretary of state's office who is now working for one of the recall committees, said he is talking to counties to find out what they are doing. Sweeney contends that Shelley wrongly told counties they could slow down the count by tallying signatures in batches, and says the law requires signatures to be counted as they come in. Recall proponents hope to turn in more than enough signatures to qualify in order to speed up the counting process. If they turn in 1.2 million signatures, counties will be able to verify them by sampling a small portion of the total, instead of checking every one. With the recall looking more likely to land on the ballot, several Republican activists in San Diego launched an effort Wednesday to quash it. ``This could result in a new, popular Democrat in the statehouse and that would harm GOP election chances in 2004 and 2006,'' said Scott Barnett, former chief executive officer of the San Diego Lincoln Club, a donor group. Barnett said the newly formed group, known as Republicans Against the Recall, would expand statewide to raise money against the recall.
``This is not a `We-love-Gray-Davis effort,'
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