Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price is caught in the eye of a political storm, with her office hit by accusations of wrongful termination while simultaneously facing a recall effort that's now turning into a meticulous manual count of signatures. According to SFist, two former employees of Price's allege they were fired for their political beliefs; Maria Ramirez, an organizer for Price’s 2022 opponent, and Douglas Butler, who was dismissed allegedly due to age discrimination and his support of Price's predecessor. Both sought damages over $25,000, but none has been compensated, nor have the claims escalated to lawsuits.
In the midst of this internal controversy, the Alameda County election officials are gearing up to manually count 123,374 signatures calling for Price's recall after a random sampling failed to confirm whether the required threshold for a recall election was reached, the recall needing 73,195 signatures, this comes even as the recall campaign against Price stumbled on a procedural snag with officials having declared they’re conducting a manual recount after finding the sampling "not sufficient to determine whether the signature threshold to call for a recall election has been met," as reported by NBC Bay Area. The recall's committee, Save Alameda For Everyone (SAFE), has been silent on the matter since the announcement.
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the campaign against the recall has taken a jab at the efforts to have Price removed. William Fitzgerald of Protect the Win derided the opposition's efforts, stating "After all that noise, they've failed their first test. We’ll wait to crack up the Guinness until the votes are manually counted but things are looking good," he told NBC Bay Area, "Their whole campaign is nothing but a hack job trying to oust a democratically elected DA." The manual signature count is mandated by state law due to the statistical uncertainty presented by the random sampling, and the process is expected to present a clear outcome for both sides involved in the recall effort.
This is not the first time a scenario of employee firing has developed in the Bay Area, reminiscent of similar workforce turnovers following the appointments of former SF DA Chesa Boudin and his successor Brooke Jenkins; in Boudin's case it did lead to a wrongful termination settlement, something that has not yet occurred in Price’s situation SFist points out.
