(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao to face recall in November election [1] ['Shomik Mukherjee'] Date: 2024-06-18 OAKLAND — Efforts to remove Mayor Sheng Thao from office are likely headed to the November election after city officials confirmed Tuesday that a recall campaign against the mayor gathered enough valid petition signatures. A progressive mayor who took office as the city struggled to recover from the pandemic, Thao may now be forced back into campaign mode. The City Council is expected to discuss placing the recall on the November ballot during a July 2 meeting. Earlier this month, recall organizers submitted around 40,000 petitions to the city — far more than the 24,644 valid signatures needed to compel a new election. After randomly sampling a portion of the petitions, Alameda County’s elections office estimated last week that the whole batch would exceed 110% of the necessary threshold. That’s enough to trigger an election outright without a full manual count of signatures. Organizers of the recall campaign, led by retired county Judge Brenda Harbin-Forte and former mayoral candidate Seneca Scott, celebrated news of the validated signatures on social media. “Thao’s actions have pushed Oakland to the brink, but the community is saying, ‘NO MORE. We want Thao gone,’ ” Harbin-Forte said in a written statement. They also boasted that of the 40,000 petitions they submitted, nearly all were deemed valid — but this is incorrect, according to public records. Instead, the random sample projected that roughly 26% of the petitions, or somewhere around 10,753 signatures, were not “valid signatures of qualified registered voters” in the city, per records obtained by this news organization and first reported by the Oakland Observer on social media. The distinction could prove important in a city that has been politically divided ever since Thao eked out an election victory in 2022 over a more moderate candidate, Loren Taylor, whose close loss prompted the local NAACP chapter to seek a recount. Thao received 39,909 first-place votes in that race, fewer than Taylor, but enough voters placed her as their second-choice preference that she emerged victorious under the city’s ranked-choice voting system. The race contained 10 candidates, though the ballots allowed for only five choices — an apparent possible violation of the city charter. Thao’s opponents have pilloried her and other local progressives for the perception that she is soft on crime and bad at managing public money. Oakland saw a devastating spike in crime during the pandemic that has slowly begun to recede: Total citywide crime was down 33% as of Sunday from year-to-date statistics in 2023. The city, entrenched in a staggering budget crisis, is planning to direct revenue from a private sale of its share of the Oakland Coliseum property toward its budget shortfall over the next two years — a move criticized by financial experts as a shortsighted use of long-term funds. Next week, the City Council is expected to review Thao’s budget proposal for final approval. Thao has also pointed to her revival of the Ceasefire strategy, an anti-violence program in Oakland that slowed during the pandemic, as the cause behind the recent decline in crime. She has also cited as a success her support of outside investments in Oakland, including by the Ballers, a minor-league baseball team that formed this year ahead of the A’s departure to Las Vegas via the Sacramento region. Requests for comment on the petitions’ validation were directed by the mayor’s spokesperson to her campaign’s email address — a sign that Thao was now gearing up for another election fight. The recall campaign, meanwhile, is currently under investigation by the city over an ethics complaint alleging it tried allowing potential donors to “remain private,” a violation of state campaign-finance reporting law. In the same complaint, the campaign has been accused of having workers overlap with a nonprofit political action committee, Foundational Oakland Unites, that is backing the recall. Public records released by the city in the ethics complaint indicate that Scott, a recall campaign representative who received under 3% of the vote in his 2022 election bid against Thao, had devised a plan late last year to form the PAC to “support candidates in 2024.” It’s unclear how the investigation’s outcome could affect the campaign. Other recent city ethics complaints have remained in investigative limbo for weeks, months and even years. Recalls, once rare political maneuvers, have gained prominence in California. Voters in Alameda County are also pursuing a recall against District Attorney Pamela Price in November. Perhaps the largest source of criticism against Thao has come from supporters of the city’s ex-police chief LeRonne Armstrong, who sued the mayor after she fired him last January for his response to an internal cover-up scandal involving a city cop’s hit-and-run. Armstrong, who is now running for City Council, will be another player in the upcoming November election. Staff writer Nollyanne Delacruz contributed reporting to this story. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2024/06/18/recall-effort-against-oakland-mayor-sheng-thao-has-enough-signatures-for-election/ Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/