More than 164,000 signatures on Change.org demanding the immediate resignation of Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass is an impressive number, but it seems clear that the mayor has no intention to resign. Last year, she announced she intends to run for a second term.
If city residents want to remove Bass from office before her term expires December 13, 2026, they will need to hold a recall election. The procedure is a bit complicated, but the sense of outrage among city residents from the wildfires – still burning, by the way – gives Bass’ opponents good odds of forcing a recall election.
According to the Los Angeles City Election Division, recalling a local official begins with “filing and publication or posting of a notice of intention to circulate a recall petition.” This requires just five registered voters. Proponents would also need to notify Bass of the intention to recall her, either in person, or by certified mail.
Bass would be entitled to offer an answer and to have that answer published “in English and other required languages, in a newspaper of general circulation in the city of Los Angeles within 21 days of the service of the notice of intention.”
Once a notice of intention for the recall petition is filed with the city clerk, that office will review it, and verify that “the form and wording of draft petition meets applicable requirements, including any language translation requirements, within 10 days.” If the requirements not met, the clerk is required to send “a dated letter to proponents outlining corrections that need to be made before petition can be approved for circulation.”
“Each petition section shall be printed in both English and a minority language if more than five percent of the city’s or applicable jurisdiction’s voting age population is of that minority language group and the language is one of the languages identified by the federal government as a Voting Rights Act language for Los Angeles County.” The language requirements for Los Angeles County (not city) include Cambodian, Chinese Cantonese and Mandarin, Spanish, Tagalog, Armenian, Farsi, and Japanese. Under the city regulations, “the city clerk will inform proponents of the language translation requirements as early as possible in the petition process.”
The number of signatures required for recall petitions is 15 percent of the registered voters eligible to vote for the office in which the incumbent is sought to be removed. As of February 2024, Los Angeles city had 2,130,581 registered voters, so recall proponents would need roughly 319,588 signatures. The Election Division’s guidebook “suggests that petitions be submitted with a substantially greater number of signatures than required.”
For perspective, 420,030 people voted for Bass’s top rival, Rick Caruso, in the last mayoral election in 2022.
Once the recall petitions are approved by the city clerk, the recall proponents would have 120 days to collect enough valid signatures.
Once the petitions are submitted, the city clerk will examine the signatures on the petitions and compare them to voter registration records in the county. The city clerk has thirty days to complete this, and can use random sampling instead of checking every signature.
Once the city clerk has verified that as sufficient number of verified signatures of registered voters have signed the petition, the clerk must “present the dated certification of sufficiency to the City Council and the proponents without delay.” Then the city council has 20 days to call for the holding of a special election, and if necessary a special runoff election, which in this case would be a mayoral election contingent on a majority vote supporting the recall.
It’s not a simple task, but an achievable one. Public outrage over Bass’ absence from the city while the wildfire crisis started and general overall incompetence is unlikely to dissipate quickly.