A judge ordered Los Angeles County Registrar Dean Logan to release additional voter information to a committee seeking to overturn the failed recall effort of District Attorney George Gascon.
The committee claims Logan wrongly dismissed thousands of voter signatures that were seeking to put a measure on the ballot to remove the district attorney for malfeasance, according to the Washington Examiner.
The initiative fell short by 46,807 signatures on Aug. 15, but undeterred committee volunteers have been scrutinizing petitions searching for errors. A lawsuit claims the process has been frustrated by Logan.
"I'm ordering the parties to meet and confer, that the counting would be done by March 31," Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge James Chalfant said.
Chalfant also criticized a process Logan enacted that would slow the review process of all disqualified petitions by almost two years. Gascon would be up for reelection at that point.
"I'm not going to take 18 months to do this — you've got 400 [temporary] workers," Chalfant told county attorneys, according to the Examiner. "Bring them back."
Committee attorney Marian Thompson said the county has stymied efforts to inspect the voter profiles of each of the 195,783 invalid signatures by refusing to provide a list of valid signatures and limiting computer access, inspection hours, and the number of volunteers allowed on site.
County lawyers have said there are privacy concerns with the voter database and volunteers need to be supervised, which has been made difficult because of staffing issues.
"Why can't [an employee] sit at a computer and have all the signatures, the committee makes notes and says, 'Next!'" Chalfant said. "Does it matter if access to private information is on the page if the registrar employee is the one doing the button punching?"
County attorney Deborah Caplan said Logan has the right to decide how his office operates, pointing to upcoming elections in January and March that require resources.
"He should have the flexibility for requirements to his own [office] space," Caplan said.
"It's hard to fill positions," she added.
According to the Examiner, Chalfant responded by saying the recall committee is "first in line" to access those resources and ordered the two sides to report their progress in January.
In his two years in office, Gascon has needled law enforcement, victims' rights organizations, and his own prosecutors with a number of mandates that relaxed penalties for offenders, including those convicted of violent crimes.
A bipartisan group formed to recall Gascon submitted 715,833 signatures to place the measure on the ballot, 148,976 more signatures than needed.
Believing that enough valid signatures had been collected, former District Attorney Steve Cooley pledged to investigate why the effort failed.
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