Two efforts to force a recall election against Oregon Gov. Kate Brown are over, but another attempt is already in the offing.
With a 5 p.m. Monday deadline approaching for turning in more than 280,000 valid signatures, Oregon Republican Party chair Bill Currier announced his three-month campaign had failed. Currier told conservative talk radio host Lars Larson that the statewide effort had fallen less than 10% short of collecting the minimum number of signatures needed to force a vote.
“We did come up short,” Currier said on the program. “Not by a lot, but we did come up short.”
Another sometimes-competing campaign to recall Brown also failed, according to the Oregon Secretary of State.
Michael Cross, the chief petitioner behind that campaign, estimated Monday he’d collected 290,000 signatures — more than the 280,050 required to trigger the signature verification process. But within hours, elections officials determined Cross turned in no more than 239,260 signatures, and possibly far fewer.