MORE MONEY THAN CENTS

Right-Wing Activist Changes His Mind About Forking Over $82K for Recount in Landslide Local Election

Randy Economy, who led the failed effort to recall Gavin Newsom, thought something didn’t “smell right” about the result in a county nine hours away from his own.

In her rural California county, Natalie Adona won big. Adona, who maintained that Joe Biden’s 2020 win was legitimate, won the race to become Nevada County’s clerk-recorder and registrar of voters with 68 percent of the vote, besting her runner-up by almost 15,000 votes. But Randy Economy, a conservative who led the doomed effort to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom last year, was apparently so passionate about the election in a county nine hours away from his own that he decided to fund a hand recount that would have taken 38 days and cost him upwards of $82,000. (Under California law, any voter can request a recount so long as they cover the cost.) But now, Economy, who had insisted that “something doesn’t smell right” about what most saw as an entirely normal race, has had a change of heart and discontinued the recount on Monday, the Los Angeles Times reported. Local officials, many of whom already saw the recount as a divisive waste of time, are incensed over the cancellation, as they have already devoted resources to the project. Economy claims that he changed his mind about the recount partly because he feared the ballots were “compromised.”