What Went Down At The California Recall Election: Live Results

Though Newsom is the big name on the ballot today, he is not the only California politician who could be recalled this year — or even this week.

Two additional recall elections — one targeting the district attorney in Wine Country’s Sonoma County and another seeking to remove two city councilmembers in Vernon, a small city just south of downtown Los Angeles — are taking place today. And there are at least 30 other recall campaigns, mostly targeting local officials like school board members and city councilmembers, currently underway in the state.

Here are some (but by no means all) of the ongoing recall campaigns in the state and their current status:

• Recall efforts for three of the 15 members of the Los Angeles City Council are underway. Petitions seeking to recall Mike Bonin and Nithya Raman were approved for circulation earlier this summer, while a petition to recall Kevin de León was approved last week. All three recall campaigns cited the city’s ongoing struggle to help its unhoused population. To qualify for the ballot, the recall must gather signatures from 15 percent of the district’s registered voters. For Bonin and Raman, that’s about 27,000 signatures by early November; for de León, the figure will be closer to about 20,500 by mid-December.
• Two progressive prosecutors are also facing recalls. The campaign to unseat L.A. District Attorney George Gascón is in the signature-gathering phase. Opponents of Gascón have until Oct. 27 to collect over 570,000 signatures, or 10 percent of the county’s registered voters. And the district attorney of San Francisco has faced not one but two recall efforts this year. The first effort to get a recall of Chesa Boudin on the ballot failed to gather enough signatures by its August deadline; a second effort has until October to collect approximately 51,000 signatures.
• Finally, petitions to recall multiple board members of the Chico, Los Gatos-Saratoga, Lucia Mar, San Francisco, San Juan and Santa Monica-Malibu school districts have been approved for circulation. Proponents of many of these recalls cited frustrations with how the various school boards handled the COVID-19 pandemic. Petitions have between 120 and 160 days to obtain signatures from 15 percent of the registered voters in their school district. (The amount of circulation time is dependent on the number of registered voters.) So far, only one signature deadline — for three members of the San Francisco Unified School District Board of Education — has passed. Proponents of the recall say they have enough signatures to qualify at least one recall for the ballot; the signatures must be verified before an election can be scheduled.

But regardless of when the election occurs, it will not be the first attempt to recall a school board member in California this year: Two of the five members of the El Rancho Unified School District Board of Education lost recall elections in June (although one of the recalled board members had resigned by the time the actual election came around).

This recall election has been almost 19 months in the making. For those who haven’t been reading our continuing coverage of the recall, here’s how we got here:

• Feb. 21, 2020: Conservative activists filed the fifth recall attempt against Newsom.
• June 10, 2020: The California secretary of state approved petitions for them to circulate, kicking off the signature-collection process.
• Nov. 6, 2020: A judge issued a preliminary ruling extending the deadline for collecting signatures from Nov. 17 to March 17. (The ruling was finalized on Nov. 17.) At the time, the recall campaign had collected fewer than 750,000 signatures.
• March 8, 2021: Recall organizers announced they had collected 1.95 million signatures — easily surpassing the 1,495,709 needed to trigger a recall election.
• April 26, 2021: State election officials officially determined that recall supporters had collected enough signatures — but the recall wasn’t official yet, since people had until June 8 to remove their signatures from recall petitions if they wished.
• June 23, 2021: The secretary of state reported that not enough people had removed their names to avert an election. The final number of valid signatures was 1,719,900.
• July 1, 2021: The California Department of Finance announced the estimated cost of the recall election, the final step before a recall election becomes official. Later that day, the secretary of state officially certified it and the lieutenant governor set the election date for Sept. 14.
• July 16, 2021: The deadline for candidates to file to run to replace Newsom. The secretary of state announced the final list of candidates on July 21.
• Aug. 16, 2021: Recall ballots were mailed to every registered voter in California.
• Sept. 14, 2021: Election day! However, ballots can arrive as late as Sept. 21 and still count as long as they are postmarked by Sept. 14.

On Monday, Elder’s campaign pushed false claims that it had detected voter fraud — even though no results have been released yet and many voters haven’t even voted yet. These unfounded fraud claims are just the latest example of Republican efforts to cast doubt on election results before they happen, following in the footsteps of Trump’s lies before and after the 2020 election. Among the supposed proofs of voter fraud, Elder’s campaign claimed Benford’s Law showed evidence of rigged results.

“Benford’s Law” sounds sophisticated and impressive, right? As we’ll get to in a moment, it doesn’t really work with election results. But first: What is it?

At its core, the law finds that when looking at a large series of records, the first digit in each number — like the 1 in 12 — is not equally likely to be between 1 and 9. Instead, 1 is the most likely number to be observed, followed by 2, 3, and so on until 9, which is the least likely. This mathematical pattern is often used to look for potential fraud in accounting data, as juked stats might fall far from the typical pattern of first-digit distribution, shown below from Wikipedia.

We saw Republicans make fraud claims based on Benford’s Law after the 2020 election, too, but applying Benford’s Law to election results is hazardous because election data often doesn’t conform to the law’s assumptions. For the law to hold, the numbers in the data set need to be independent of one another — that is, not directly influenced by another data point — and must range across many orders of magnitude, which means having many small numbers like 10, but also many larger numbers like 100, 1,000, 10,000, 100,000, etc.

But when looking at precinct-level results from an election, we can see how the tallies often violate those assumptions. For one thing, the usual range of vote totals is constrained because precincts are designed by election officials to not have dramatically different numbers of voters in them. And secondly, one candidate’s vote totals are mostly dependent on another candidate’s tally, especially in our two-party system. So if most precincts have, say, around 1,000 votes, and about 30 percent of Candidate A’s vote totals begin with a 1 as the law suggests, that means about 30 percent of Candidate B’s vote totals will begin with 8s or 9s, a seeming violation of the law. That is, in our example, Candidate A getting 125 votes means Candidate B got about 875 — those totals are largely dependent upon one another.

So long story short: Benford’s Law, by itself, is not a good tool for detecting election fraud.