Counties Struggle to Handle Recall Bid

Every morning this week, boxes packed full with some of the last few hundred thousand signatures collected in the drive to recall Gov. Gray Davis have arrived via special delivery at county registrars’ offices around the state.

“We got hit yesterday with 30,000 new signatures,” said Suzanne Slupsky, Orange County’s assistant registrar of voters, on Friday. “And we got some more boxes in today.”

The recall effort, which has turned California politics upside down, now has county elections officials reeling as well. Some counties, facing budget woes, said they were struggling to pay for counting and verifying the recall signatures.

In San Mateo County, elections manager David Tom said he was scrambling to come up with money to pay temporary employees to plow through stacks of petitions. Extra staffing was needed, he said, because all counties face a legally mandated Wednesday deadline to hand-count the signatures they have received since mid-June.

Counties are also trying to complete random checks to ensure that signatures on the petitions belong to registered voters, a crucial step in the process of qualifying the recall for an election.

“The work needs to get done,” Tom said Friday, noting that the county has received 9,000 new petitions since Monday.

Faced with the deadline, San Mateo County’s finance chief granted Tom’s office an exemption from a countywide hiring freeze.

“There’s no other way for us to deal with the barrage we’ve been getting the last five days,” he said. “When the state is in financial trouble, it falls on the counties’ backs. It just adds to my problems that I have to pay for these people.”

The secretary of state’s office has estimated that the recall will cost the state $25 million to $35 million, but that figure includes only the cost of organizing a special election. Counties are spending anywhere from a few thousand to several hundred thousand dollars just to get the petitions counted and verified.

Counties worry that they will have to spend even more if a recall election is set. A special election in the fall would cost the most -- an estimated $3 million in Sacramento County, for example. If the election is part of the scheduled March primary, the cost would be much less.

Either way, “it’s a very expensive thing in a year when we don’t have any extra money,” said Alice Jarboe, who runs the elections division in Sacramento County. “But the Board of Supervisors has to figure out how to fund it, because it’s not an option to just not participate.”

Jarboe said she delayed signature verification until this week. Now, she has about 60,000 petitions to count and verify. Sacramento County also has a hiring freeze, and Jarboe said her employees are strained and tired.

“We’re trying to do this right,” she said. “But tired people can’t do it right.”

Supporters of the recall are agitating for registrars to finish verifying a random sample of signatures against voter registration records before Wednesday. The main group behind the recall, Rescue California, says it has sent 1.4 million signatures to the counties, about 150% of the 897,158 total legally required to certify the recall for an election. An early certification date increases the probability that an election will be scheduled for the fall, which would favor Davis’ opponents, Republican strategists believe.

Late Thursday, former GOP Assemblyman Howard Kaloogian of San Diego filed a lawsuit in Sacramento appellate court against Secretary of State Kevin Shelley and five counties -- Sacramento, San Mateo, Santa Barbara, Solano and Tehama -- demanding that they move to verify all signatures received to date before Wednesday. Santa Barbara County has since been dropped from the suit.

Political consultant Sal Russo, who is working with the recall group that filed the suit, acknowledged that some counties are struggling with the workload associated with the signature counts. But he said their legal responsibility trumps budget concerns. “It’s what the voters are entitled to,” he said.

Verification requires registrars to check a random 3% sample of signatures against voter registration cards. That process can take anywhere from one to five minutes per signature, registrars say. According to a Times survey of all 58 counties, more than 1 million signatures have been received -- which means 30,000 will have to be verified.

Larger counties such as San Diego and Riverside are taking the effort in stride. “We’re staying on top of the verification,” said Sally McPherson, San Diego County’s registrar, adding that she expects to have 122,000 petition signatures verified by next week. “The election will be more of a strain.”

In Los Angeles, where the county receives a million initiative signatures every year, employees are steadily working through the nearly 200,000 signatures that have flooded into the office so far. But Conny McCormack, the county registrar-recorder, said it would be a stretch to finish verifying all the signatures by the deadline.

“I don’t anticipate it happening, given the numbers we’re getting in,” she said late Thursday. “I mean, we just got 24,000 today.”

Shasta County has two people to count the roughly 10,000 signature petitions it has received, said Cathy Darling, assistant county-clerk registrar. But the county has a hiring freeze on temporary staff, and is in the midst of implementing a new touch-screen voting system in accordance with a state initiative passed last year.

“This is an added burden we weren’t anticipating,” Darling said. “But we will get it done, one way or another.”