OAKLAND — About 15 months after taking office, Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price appears set to face a recall election this year after her opponents on Monday cleared the last significant hurdle to putting the question before voters.
Tim Dupuis, the county’s registrar of voters, on Monday said the recall campaign Save Alameda For Everyone submitted 74,757 valid signatures, just over the 73,195 required to get the question on a ballot.
In all, 48,617 signatures were found to be invalid, meaning they couldn’t count toward the group’s bid to unseat Price. A manual count became necessary after the registrar office’s initial sampling of signatures in March could not establish if there were enough valid signatures to trigger an election.
The Alameda County Board of Supervisors now must decide on a date for the election, which will likely be sometime between July and September.
On Monday, recall organizers hailed the announcement as a stinging repudiation of the district attorney’s bid to reshape the East Bay’s justice system. For more than a year, they have railed against decisions by Price not to pursue lengthy prison terms against criminal defendants — framing such moves as being too lenient on crime.
With a recall election all but set to become a reality, they vowed to make good on their bid to oust Price from office.
“The successful collection of signatures demonstrates the overwhelming support from residents across Alameda County for a change in leadership and a renewed commitment to principles of integrity and public service,” the group’s announcement said.
Jim Sutton, an attorney for Price’s Protect the Win campaign, criticized recall organizers for having only “barely” cleared the county’s threshold for holding a recall election, despite having spent heavily to do so. He also raised concerns about Dupuis’ handling of the recall process so far — suggesting that more signatures should have been invalidated, and that his office took too long to finalize the count.
Legal action to contest the recall effort “certainly is going to be considered,” Sutton said. Price, he added, intends to survive the recall effort and serve out the remainder of her term, which ends in 2028.
“The district attorney, as long as I’ve known her, is a fighter,” Sutton said. “I think she’s going to fight very hard to not let out-of-county special interests take her out of office.”
The move marks the second time in just the last few years that a recall effort has been aimed at a Bay Area district attorney. In June 2022, voters in San Francisco booted their own progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin, from office in a nationally watched campaign.
In that same election, however, Alameda County voters placed Price first among four candidates for Alameda District Attorney, before she went on to defeat a longtime prosecutor in the November runoff.
But within months of being sworn-in, Price faced vocal opposition, with opponents first holding a rally in April 2023 calling for her removal from office. They filed formal paperwork to create a recall committee over the summer and worked from September through early March to collect enough signatures to force an election.
Recall leaders say Price has been too lenient on crime since taking office, and they have criticized her efforts at curtailing prison sentences and reducing the number of sentencing enhancements filed against criminal defendants. They have pointed to her handling of multiple high-profile murder prosecutions — including a plea deal for a man once accused in three killings as a teenager — as signs of Price not being tough enough on crime.
Price, however, has framed lengthy prison sentences as a vestige of the country’s racist overreaction to crime — one that has devastated communities of color and led to unnecessary mass incarceration of criminals. A vocal critic of law enforcement, she also has taken steps to re-open misconduct cases against police and sheriff’s deputies.
Check back for updates to this developing story.