Read my debrief here: our latest Long Beach Reform Coalition newsletter.
* And see the update below, including the disclosure of over $700k spent on this petition drive!
UPDATE (8/6/26):
First, the money!
Mayor Rex Richardson's allies running this campaign spent over $700,000 on this paid signature gathering effort!!
That includes $182,000 directly from the mayor’s own political action committee. Some of the city’s most well-healed unions ponied up this dough in checks of up to $50k a piece.
All for NOTHING! Thank goodness!
The Breakdown
I recently received a response to a Cal. Public Records Act request I made to the County Registrar’s office for the signature validations breakdown.
And here it is:
What this tells you is that the proposed parcel tax initiative failed due to its (paid, and very expensive) signature gathering campaign’s incompetence, rather than fraud.
In other words, the signature gathering campaign was its own victim, rather than the victim of paid signature gatherers rampantly defrauding it (or doing so in collusion with the campaign, which would have been quite stupid).
If the campaign or its paid gatherers had been fabricating signatures, the MISMATCH SIGNATURE total would have been far higher.
Instead, it failed—as one can see from the breakdown above—due primarily to duplicates, unregistered signers, and folks who put addresses not matching their registration address.
If the campaign had been processing the signatures each day, properly running them through voter data software to check as they were going along, they would’ve known that they were short of good unique signatures and needed to keep going before submitting.
But instead they just went until it looked like they had a big enough margin and decided they were done.
Big mistake in favor of the Long Beach taxpayer!