With the campaign to recall California Gov. Gavin Newsom nearing its final stretch, the two committees behind the effort submitted thousands of new signatures March 5.
The campaign turned in 65,000 signatures to the Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters and 35,000 signatures to the Orange County Registrar of Voters, organizers said.
“It’s not a question of whether there will be a recall, it’s a question of when,” Orange County Supervisor Don Wagner told The Epoch Times.
The campaign has collected 1.95 million signatures so far, although many are still being processed, said Rescue California campaign manager Anne Hyde Dunsmore.
“We’ve gotten in a surge of signatures in the last few weeks, due to the energy and excitement basically about the inevitability of the recall and it’s especially wonderful because nobody thought it was possible,” Dunsmore told The Epoch Times.
“So, they’re starting to feel it, they’re starting to feel good, and they deserve it, they deserve to feel this good.”
While the campaign has until March 17 to turn in all the signatures they receive, March 5 was the submission deadline to ensure they'll be reflected in the Secretary of States’ upcoming report.
During the past week, the campaign has turned in about 200,000 signatures, which will soon mean the campaign has turned in 1.8 million signatures to registrars across the state, Wagner said.
While the campaign only needs 1,497,709 validated signatures to initiate a recall election, signatures are often thrown out for various reasons, which is why the recall campaign wants to greatly exceed the required number.
“We have another roughly two weeks to go before the campaign’s officially over, and we expect to reach 2 million or come very close to 2 million [signatures],” Wagner said. “We’ve been internally validating the signatures ourselves, so we’re very confident that they’re going to have a very high validation rate, to the point where there’s no question in my mind, we are going to be over [the number of] valid signatures that we need.”
Wagner said he wants the governor recalled for a number of reasons, including his handling of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
“The governor has done such a poor job on so many different fronts that we need the people of California to have an opportunity to come up with something better,” he said.
“It’s not just the COVID response, which has been erratic and has been absolutely devastating to the mental, the physical, and the emotional health of so many people in California.
“We have the highest poverty rate in the nation. We have almost, if not the highest, unemployment rate in the nation. We are seeing people leave this state in droves. And it’s a result of very bad policies coming out of Sacramento, that all have Gavin Newsom’s thumbprint all over them.”
Nancy Vu-Ker, a volunteer for the recall campaign, told The Epoch Times she’s concerned about the effect the state’s lockdowns have had on businesses.
“This whole lockdown, it’s not justified,” she told The Epoch Times. “This is a virus that has an over 99 percent survival rate. So many businesses are being destroyed through it.”
Vu-Ker also said she wasn’t into politics before joining the recall campaign, but she grew tired after seeing the governor’s response to the pandemic.
“It’s all the hypocrisy, too, [from Newsom,] shutting everyone down while keeping his winery open, being caught out at the French Laundry and just recently another restaurant,” she said. “I was not political before this, I knew nothing about politics. And I think there’s a lot of people like me where they were never political, but they just see that something is not right.”
