California’s Secretary of State has rejected nearly 20% of all the signatures gathered thus far to force a recall election of Governor Gavin Newsom, according to figures released on Monday.
In a statement, Secretary of State Dr. Shirley N. Weber’s office announced that “the threshold of verified signatures reported by counties has been met for the recall of Governor Gavin Newsom. The valid signatures in the 10th report are 1,626,042, which exceeds the total of 1,495,709 signatures required. Counties still have until April 29th to verify the validity of any remaining signatures.”
In an accompanying table, the Secretary of State reported that in addition to the 1,626,042 valid signatures, the state had rejected 400,575 signatures to date, out of a total number of 2,026,617 signatures gathered.
That means that state officials have rejected 19.8% of the total number of signatures as they have reviewed the recall petitions.
Signatures can be disqualified if signatories are found not to be registered to vote in California, for example, or if they sign more than once.
In the 2020 election, according to FiveThirtyEight.com, the rejection rate for absentee ballots in California was just 0.6%, the same as the national average (as determined from 27 states plus the District of Columbia). The rejection rates had reportedly been as high as 6 percent in previous elections.
The low rejection rate for absentee ballots in 2020 defied predictions, as late as August 2020, that nearly a quarter of absentee ballots might be rejected, based on the experience of mail-in voting during primary elections.
Many states lowered their standards for absentee ballots as a result of lawsuits by Democrat-aligned groups, decisions of state election officials, and the unprecedented volume of votes submitted by mail during the coronavirus pandemic.
Democrats have attacked Republicans who want to tighten rules regarding absentee ballots, accusing the GOP of racism and imposing a new “Jim Crow,” in the words of President Joe Biden.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.