And here we thought no one was allowed to complain about signatures at election time. After Californians collected 715,833 signatures to recall Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón, the county clerk tossed out 195,783 of them. That, observed commentator Michael Knowles, is “a number that brought the petition just slightly below the threshold requirement” to officially hold a recall election. He sarcastically asked, “What are the odds?”

Given that California is a one-party state and that Gascón is funded by billionaire leftist do-badder George Soros, we’d say the odds were pretty doggone high.

Naturally, a patina of legitimacy was all Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorded/County Clerk Dean Logan could offer. “Based on the examination and verification,” his office said, “520,050 signatures were found to be valid and 195,783 were found to be invalid.” Logan’s press release concluded, “Therefore, the petition has failed to meet the sufficiency requirements and no further action shall be taken on the petition.”

Recall organizers insisted that more than 500,000 signatures still represented “a wholesale rejection of Gascon’s dangerous polices,” and they vowed to continue their effort over the next few weeks.

Now, it could well be that Logan’s office conducted a serious and professional review and that nearly 200,000 signatures were not registered voters, were duplicate signatures, or were otherwise illegitimate. But this sure does stink to high heaven.

Why? Because California is one of a handful of states that proactively bulk-mails ballots come election time — 21 million of them in 2020. In theory, everyone who receives a ballot is alive, a citizen who’s registered to vote, and still lives at the address to which the ballot was sent. In theory, every signature is validated by competent officials. In practice … well, just don’t question it because shut up, the Leftmedia censors exclaim.

So a county clerk can invalidate hundreds of thousands of signatures to initiate a recall of a soft-on-crime DA in one county (the most populous county in the nation), but don’t you worry at all about all those signatures on millions of mail ballots for the president of the United States. Signatures that we don’t even begin to believe are all sufficiently validated. As the Associated Press reported last year, “Roughly a quarter of all voters used a mailed ballot during the 2016 and 2018 elections, but that jumped to more than 43% in 2020.” To put it mildly, millions of Americans simply don’t trust that the verification system for mailed ballots is adequate.

With the attempted recall of Gascón, roughly 27% of signatures were invalidated. In 2020, California rejected just 0.6% of mail-in ballots for any reason. In 2016, when the number of mail ballots was far fewer, the rejection rate was slightly higher — 0.7%. (Nationwide, the 2020 mail-ballot rejection rate was just 0.8%.) We’ll grant that a citizen-led recall petition and state-mailed ballots are different animals, but these numbers ought to raise a few eyebrows.

Meanwhile, it’s the people of Los Angeles who are suffering. Gascón won election in LA in 2020 after serving in the same role in San Francisco. He’s part of George Soros’s self-described effort to elect DAs nationwide who will rectify “injustices that make us all less safe.” He and his cadre of DAs are the ones making us all less safe by going soft on crime, releasing criminals quickly, and doing little to sufficiently punish the ones they do hold.

No sooner had Gascón won election than he promised to overlook a slew of crimes. The result has been exactly what we and others predicted: more crime.

As for the recall, Gascón says he’s “grateful to move forward from this attempted political power grab,” and that means continuing to strive for “a more equitable justice system for all.” Citizens of LA beware.