Alameda County voters will decide March 5 whether to change how to recall — fire, basically — elected county officers. But the rules change itself, a labyrinth of overlapping state and county regulations, has played out more as a proxy battle in the ongoing campaign to recall District Attorney Pamela Price, one of the county’s top elected officials.
Berkeley Election 2024
Voting basics: How to register, where and when to vote, what’s on the ballot, and other important information.
All of our coverage: Meet the candidates running in state Senate District 7 and for Alameda County Supervisor in District 5. And learn about Prop. 1, Measure B, and the BSEP parcel tax.
In a 3-2 vote in November, the Board of Supervisors opted to place Measure B on the March 5 primary election ballot. If it passes, with a simple majority, the ballot measure would eliminate the nearly century-old language in the county charter that governs county-level recall elections and replace the charter language with the procedure spelled out by the state, a procedure county officials said most other counties are using anyway.
Elisa Mȧrquez, Lena Tam and Keith Carson backed the measure; David Haubert and Nate Miley opposed it.
How, if indeed at all, the rules change might affect the Price recall effort remains to be seen, with her opponents scrambling to get the machinery of recall in motion before the ballot measure comes up for a vote.
The processes are, at least in theory, completely separate. The recall campaign against Price had not yet submitted the required signatures to trigger a specific recall election, so whether such an election would ever come to pass was still uncertain.
But many of the same advocacy groups pushing for the recall are also pushing against the ballot measure and vice versa. But the groups vying for a recall election to unseat Price could theoretically get the process rolling before the ballot measure even comes up for a vote.
What would change?
The major practical changes to the process would be an increase in the number of signatures required to get a recall election onto a ballot and a threefold increase in the time the county would have to verify those signatures.
Under the current charter language, the county registrar only gets 10 days to verify signatures, which must total 15% of the most recent voter turnout in a governor’s race. If enough signatures are verified, the Board of Supervisors must schedule a recall election “not less than 35 nor more than 40 days” later, according to the charter. The recall election can be delayed up to another 20 days if it can be appended to another election in that timeframe.
If Measure B passes, a recall campaign would have to collect signatures totaling 10% of registered voters, and the registrar would then have 30 days to examine the signatures, or 60 days in some cases. If the petition passes inspection, the Board of Supervisors would then have 14 days to schedule a recall election within the next 88 to 125 days. The recall election could be delayed up to another 55 days if it can be consolidated into another scheduled election.
The current language requires approximately 74,000 signatures; if Measure B succeeds, the new threshold would be a little less than 94,000, according to county data.
The state regulations, based on the county’s population, would limit recall campaigns to 160 days to gather signatures if Measure B succeeds. While the charter does not explicitly spell out a time limit to collect signatures, the state election code already imposes the same 160-day time limit, according to a how-to guide on recall campaigns from the Alameda County Registrar of Voters.
The current language in the charter also mandates that only voters registered within the county may collect signatures for recall petitions, such as the one recently circulated to recall Price — a mandate the County Counsel’s office has said may belie Supreme Court rulings.
“We are the only county in California that has recall election rules that substantially deviate from state law’s key recall procedures,” according to a statement in favor of Measure B, signed by Helen L. Hutchison, chair of the League of Women Voters of the Alameda County Council, and Rebecca Perata, a board member of the Alameda Chamber & Economic Alliance, among others.
Recall campaigns in Alameda County frequently fall short of triggering actual recall elections. An attempt to recall then-Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley in 2021 never made it to a vote. The last recall campaign at the county level was in 2010, when an advocacy group began but ultimately called off an attempt to recall three members of the Alameda Unified School District Board of Directors.
And district attorney elections — and vacancies — have a peculiar history in Alameda County. Though the position is, at least in name and law, an elected one, the Board of Supervisors can appoint a district attorney to fill a vacancy. Historically, retiring district attorneys have influence over whom the board appoints to succeed them, and those successors typically go on to serve several terms, though they have to run for each subsequent term. The 2022 race Price won was the first in decades without an incumbent in the race.
Why is Alameda County different?
Of all California’s other charter counties, three have no recall provisions at all, and the rest all refer directly to the state guidelines, meaning they all effectively use the same process that Measure B would bring about, according to the County Counsel’s analysis. The rest of the state’s counties, which are general law counties, adhere to state law by their natures.
“This isn’t special, we’re sort of at the back of the line,” Alameda County Counsel Donna Zeigler told the supervisors in October when they first considered Measure B. “The goal here is to recognize that our charter is out of date and to fix that problem.”
Like most governing bodies at most levels of government, the Board of Supervisors has some authority over county administration employees. While the county has its own human resources department that performs the logistical work of much county hiring, the supervisors are, at least nominally, empowered “to appoint all county officers other than elective officers, and all officers, assistants, deputies, clerks, attaches and employees whose appointment is not otherwise provided for by the charter,” according to the county code.
By eliminating the old county language referring to “appointed” officers, Measure B would limit the recall to elected ones, and “we do not support using recalls to remove appointed officers,” according to the statement in favor of the measure. “Elected officers are the people we can and should hold accountable for the work of the people they appoint.”
Opponents of the revision hoping to keep the charter the way it is have painted the ballot measure as a power grab by the Board of Supervisors, claiming the changes would restrict voters’ rights to choose or remove party officials.
“If Supervisors are so concerned about flaws in existing Alameda County recall law, they should instead put forward ‘surgical amendments’ targeted to fix the small parts that need modification,” according to an argument against Measure B submitted Dec. 18 to the Registrar of Voters. “They shouldn’t destroy our entire Alameda County recall law.”
The argument against Measure B was signed by Marcus Crawley, president of the Alameda County Taxpayers’ Association; Jacqueline Carron-Cota, chair of the Election Integrity Team of Alameda County, California; and Edward Escobar, founder of Citizens Unite and a leader in the movement to recall Price.
Escobar told Berkeleyside that the recall campaign is aiming for 110,000 signatures and will turn them in as soon as possible “to avoid any potential conflict” from the county Registrar of Voters or pushback from the District Attorney’s Office.
The opponents to Measure B also took the stance that, were Measure B to succeed, it would throw “a monkey wrench into recalls now in progress, by changing the law mid-process.”
And even if the measure is successful, it may not take effect immediately, since state laws spell out that charter amendments do not take effect until ratified by the Secretary of the State.
Another recall underway — albeit at a city level, not countywide — is that of Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao. Like Price, Thao began her current job in January 2023. Unlike the county, Oakland’s municipal-level recalls already operate under the same procedures set down by the Secretary of the State. The change to county-level recalls does not apply to citywide recall elections.
