Push To Recall Gov. Newsom On Track To Advance As Deadline Nears

SACRAMENTO (CBS13) — With one week to go, the push to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom is on track to trigger a special election.

Organizers say they've collected more than 2 million signatures, exceeding the approximately 1.5 million needed.

The most recent verification found that 83% of signatures collected by early February were valid. If that rate holds up, the recall will advance.

According to the RecallGavin2020 campaign, 1.8 million signatures have been pre-verified through a third-party vendor.

"The People of California are speaking loud and clear. We have cleared another milestone. Politics as usual in California are over as we know it to be," Orrin Heatlie, chairman of the committee, said in a statement.

Over the weekend, the Recall Newsom campaign held a rally at the California State Capitol and announced they had collected enough signatures to put the recall on a state ballot.

On Monday, Senator Bernie Sanders weighed in on the recall. 

"Right-wing Republicans in CA are trying to recall [Gavin Newsom] for the crime of telling people to wear masks and for listening to scientists during COVID," Sanders wrote in a tweet.

A comment from a Newsom spokesperson echoed Sander's tweet.

"The Republican recall scheme is a transparently partisan attempt to install a Trump supporter as governor of a state that elected Newsom and rejected Trump in historic landslides," the statement read, in part.

The recall campaign has a March 17 deadline to submit signatures.