The Recall Joel Engardio campaign announced early victory at a Thursday afternoon rally that drew about 50 supporters to San Francisco City Hall.
The campaign has collected over 14,000 signatures, it announced, but declined to provide the number of internally vetted signatures it today submitted to the Department of Elections. But according to a document viewed by Mission Local, the campaign submitted a total of 10,700 signatures.
Now it’s up to the Department of Elections to verify the signatures and determine if the recall qualifies.
“Let’s do this! Bring the recall to the ballot!” supporters of the recall chanted, standing on the City Hall steps as they posed for a photo hosting the yellow “Recall Engardio” signs.
“He ran on promises to represent District 4, but acted against the very people who elected him,” said Selena Chu, a volunteer at the recall campaign, from a podium flanked by eight boxes containing the petitions. Chu did her speech in Cantonese first, “due to respect for my community.”
Following the rally, recall supporters flocked to the entrance to City Hall on Grove Street, leading up to the Department of Elections, causing a brief bottleneck at the entrance.
“Scoot over! Form one line! ‘Cause you guys are overwhelming,” one sheriff’s deputy said to the crowd.
After the reprimand, the campaign staff and volunteers carried the boxes containing the signatures down the dimly lit City Hall hallway. “Eight boxes. It’s a lucky number,” said Albert Chow, one of the supporters of the campaign. With cameras and journalists filling the room, the signatures were handed over to elections staff at around 1:50 p.m.
Both campaigns supporting and opposing the recall said it will be a contested qualification process. The recall campaign, on Wednesday night, said it aimed to be extremely stringent when vetting the signatures and determining which ones to submit, so they would pass muster with the election department.
“We want to make sure that we are applying the very highest standard to every signature that comes to us,” Otto Pippenger, the campaign’s field organizer, said on Wednesday night. “We’re not looking for any surprises.”
Engardio supporters are cautiously optimistic the signatures are not enough for the recall to qualify.
“They say they collected 14,000 initially and had to throw out well over 3,000 bad signatures,” wrote Jason Galisatus, a spokesperson for the Stand With Joel anti-recall campaign, via text message. “It’s not over ‘til it’s over, but they’re cutting it awfully close.”
In the next two months, the Department of Elections will determine if the recall qualifies, but stated it will likely take a shorter time than the state-mandated 60-day maximum.
The best-case scenario for the pro-recall side is a forthcoming burdensome Department of Elections vetting of every last signature. The recall campaign submitted too few signatures to possibly elude a total vetting.
The Department of Elections will commence a random sampling of 5 percent of the signatures — 535 of them. The percentage of valid signatures will be multiplied by the 10,700 total submissions. If the result is between 90 and 110 percent of the required 9,911 signatures, the department’s vetting of every last signature will commence.
But if the percentage of valid signatures in the sample is low enough that, when multiplied by 10,700, it falls below 90 percent of 9,911 (8,909 signatures) — then the recall will fail.
In comparison, Prop. L, the 2024 popular ballot measure to fund public transit that was placed on the ballot after a successful signature-gathering petition, had a validity rate of about 79 percent.
The Prop. L campaign used a software program that scanned signatures to rule out obviously invalid submissions, such as signatures with unfilled fields and duplicates. “We didn’t do a lot of crossing out,” said Chris Arvin, co-author of Prop. L. “We knew for sure it would be valid.”
It’s possible that the recall campaign has done more stringent vetting work, Arvin said — but the necessary 92.6 percent validity rate for the 10,700 signatures will still be difficult.
I’m no fan of Engardio nor his shameful abuse of the recall provision to bring down an ideological opponent like Chesa Boudin. But I would not vote for his recall. D4 voters should wait him out till reelection time.
No more recalls in the absence of crimes committed!
He came into office calling for recalls for lesser offenses, like disagreeing with Breed.
The fact is he lied to his district and broke CA law in the process, deliberately.
Lying to the public deliberately OUGHT TO BE A CRIME, yes.
It’s probably close to 50/50 whether he’ll be recalled outright or just voted gone in 2 years time, but either way the Sunset is done with his lies. He dimmed his own future by pushing his proposal in an extremely dishonest charade of a process, underpinned by ridiculous legal precepts of skipping CEQA and bypassing community input, and if the consequence of all this is that his “springboard” to the CA State Legislature is damaged, I can think of no one more deserving – perhaps London Breed or Ed Jew. He revels in being loathed by over half the district he represents, so be it.
Your assessment is still rather hyperbolic — yet you are now, at least, acknowledging your doubt as to whether the recall will even qualify for the ballot. As a D4 resident I appreciate all the day-to-day work Engardio has done for the district — leaps and bounds better than the god-awful Mar and right up there with Katy Tang.
99.3% of the sampling passed muster.
I guess “hyperbole” is sometimes hyper-accurate, Karle? 🙂
So there you have it, 99.3% valid.
You can be as upset as you like.
There’s nothing “hyperbolic” about it really. I have no reason to believe the signatures they submitted will not qualify and the opposite is true. I’d say your analysis is shambolic. Again this isn’t a vote against Mar or a request for a shout-out for Engardio, neither one matters. What matters is the Sunset getting a representative who represents THE DISTRICT and not downtown Billionaire dark money goons who push PR campaigns. I don’t personally care if you like Engardio, love him or hate him, that’s irrelevant to the fact that he lied to the district and lost our trust massively. Replacing him will happen whether in 6 months or 2 years, I have zero doubt – and we will find someone better than all 3 you mentioned. That’s our right. Engardio came into office on a wave of dark Billionaire donations and recall fervor so again, it’s only fitting that he’s made that bed only to lie in it also.
Meanwhile his dubious PR puff pieces circulate our local newspaper the Richmond/Sunset Review and the comments there tell the real tale, as opposed to this publication’s more citywide focus and opinion spread. People do not like being lied to and repeatedly gaslighted. Fact.
“Recall’s for thee, but not for me!”
A drunk driver on Sunset Blvd ruined an innocent family trying to get home. No
One has reported about them. I wonder if the rookie officer was trying to get to the Richmond and could not use the Great Highway because it is closed and now a park. Closed because Joel let it happen. My wife’s friend kept says she wants to run and represent D4 because she could do better than Greg and Joel combined.