Effort To Recall Chesa Boudin Fails Due To Lack of Signatures

Well, that’s $277,000 worth of tech donors’ money down the drain. After raising $277,000 to recall San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin, that movement faced a deadline of today to submit the necessary 51,325 signatures to the Department of Elections in order to make the ballot. They fell short and failed.

BREAKING NEWS: First effort to recall DA Boudin fails to gather required signatures https://t.co/aZKUnleghj

— SF Examiner (@sfexaminer) August 11, 2021

The San Francisco Examiner reports that the Recall Chesa team did not have enough signatures by today’s deadline to make the ballot. Per the Examiner’s Michael Barba, the committee claims they “missed the mark by 1,714 signatures,” and also claims they “collected 52,990 signatures, but determined that 3,379 were either invalid or blatantly fake, filed with fictitious names such as ‘Ben Dover.’” 

They did not even bother asking the Department of Elections to verify the signatures, and the petitions will be destroyed.

In fact brothers been the main ones pushing these signatures since the start of this campaign.

Who decided to hire Black men to recall someone like Chesa?

Let's talk about the racial, class, and gendered politics of the effort to get this recall on the ballot (2/x)

— Destin Jenkins (@DestinKJenkins) August 8, 2021

In a statement from San Franciscans Against the Recall of Chesa Boudin, spokesperson spokesperson Julie Edwards said that this Recall Chesa campaign “had hundreds of thousands of dollars from wealthy donors, sustained media coverage and 160 days and he couldn’t approach the number of signatures he needed to even get the Department of Elections to count them. Voters in San Francisco and California will reject radical recalls because they do not represent our values.”

Here are the eight people who donated big money to the Chesa Boudin recall efforts in June. https://t.co/EPnhVBPFxB

— SFGATE (@SFGate) August 6, 2021

Mind you, there is still another campaign also collecting signatures to recall Boudin. They have a lot more money, and they’ve got until October 25 to gather their 51,000 signatures. That committee has $715,000 in its war chest, and according to SFGate, $670,000 of it (93%) is from the same eight wealthy donors.

That recall effort will probably make the ballot, and we will probably vote on a recall of Boudin next June. But it remains to be seen if those donors aren’t also throwing their money down the drain.