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Davis Allies Explore Challenge The likelihood and timing of an election will be determined in the next several weeks as county officials pore over thousands of petitions turned in by recall proponents. While a number of counties surveyed by The Times said they expected to complete the validation of signatures by July 23, the next deadline counties face for reporting the number of verified and unverified signatures to Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, several said they might not complete work until August. Among those was Los Angeles County. The timing is key; according to analysts, if the count is delayed until late August or September, the election could be consolidated with the March presidential primary. That is widely perceived to be helpful to Davis, since that election is expected to draw a strong Democratic vote to help pick the party's presidential nominee. Recall supporters say they fear delaying tactics by Shelley and even some county election officials with Democratic sympathies as the campaign nears the ballot, a circumstance that none of the previous 31 attempts to unseat California governors has ever achieved. But county election officials around the state said they were working as fast as they could in the face of budget constraints and other duties unrelated to the recall. Under provisions of the state election code, the counties are required to validate a 3% random sample of the batches of more than 500 signatures submitted for verification. In the case of Los Angeles County, which reported having slightly more than 125,000 unverified signatures on hand as of Tuesday, that would require the validation of only 4,167 signatures, which are randomly selected by a computer program. It can take two to five minutes to verify the address and signature of each person signing a petition, and sometimes longer if the signatory's handwriting is poor or the address is incomplete, said Conny McCormack, Los Angeles County election registrar, who said she has assigned five or six people to examining the recall petitions submitted in the county. Registrars Are Busy Steve Rodermund, Orange County's interim registrar of voters, said he had more than 156,000 signatures on hand in 32,000 pages of petitions and cover letters — stacks of documents at his offices. Of the more than 100,000 signatures already checked, Orange County has found a validation rate of more than 83%, Rodermund said. In Orange, as well as other counties, that validation rate is multiplied by the total "raw" count of signatures received and the resulting sum is reported to the secretary of state as the number of valid signatures. Orange County expects to complete its count by a July 23 deadline for reporting the latest results to the secretary of state. It took two members of Rodermund's staff three days to verify about 1,950 signatures, or 3% of a single batch of 65,000 signatures, he said. "We're not doing anything out of the ordinary to more quickly get these out," he said. The verification of signatures is just getting underway in some counties, such as Sacramento, which have experienced computer glitches. Sacramento County election officials have had to reprogram their computers to conduct the random samples of signatures by batches, said Alice Jarboe, who is supervising the signature validation operation for the county.
Times staff writer Allison Hoffman contributed to this report.
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