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an Mateo County supervisors are attempting a historic feat in the state: removing an elected sheriff via charter amendment and a simultaneous recall vote.

It’s unclear whether both have been levied against a California sheriff before, but removing a county’s top law enforcement officer has rarely been successful.

County supervisors are asking voters in March to give them the temporary authority to remove Sheriff Christina Corpus two years into her first term after “unprecedented complaints.” An independent investigation found the hallmarks of her administration weren’t the transparency and accountability she promised voters, but rather “lies, secrecy, intimidation, retaliation, conflicts of interest, and abuses of authority.”

Corpus has remained steadfast that she would not step down, despite mounting calls for her to resign from state and federal lawmakers, so county officials are taking a two-pronged approach to remove her before she’s up for re-election in 2028.

Recall elections in the Bay Area have been surprisingly successful in the last two election cycles, including the recalls of three school board members and District Attorney Chesa Boudin in San Francisco in 2022 and this year’s recall of Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price.

“What is interesting about the sheriff is that, historically, recalls haven’t gone after law enforcement officials until now, until the DA recall,” said Joshua Spivak, a senior research fellow at Berkeley Law’s California Constitution Center and author of Recall Elections: From Alexander Hamilton to Gavin Newsom.

But sheriffs across the country have largely been spared the wrath of a recall, namely because those campaigns have failed before making it to the ballot or, in some cases, the sheriff resigns before a vote.

“Sheriff recalls are actually so rare that it’s pretty hard to come up with a very consistent typology or information about recalls,” said Jessica Pishko, a journalist, attorney and author of The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy.

Unlike a recall, San Mateo required only a vote by its supervisors to place the amendment on the ballot. If approved by a simple majority of voters, the measure would grant supervisors the authority to remove Corpus with an 80% vote.

Corpus was the first female and first Latina candidate for sheriff in county history. When she was elected in 2022, she became one of the first Latina sheriffs in California.

Corpus did not respond to requests for comment.

Ousting a sheriff by charter amendment

In 2001, then-Attorney General Bill Lockyer issued an opinion affirming that supervisors in California’s 14 charter counties — those with greater autonomy over their elections and elected officials — could adopt ordinances allowing for the removal of a sheriff, district attorney or other elected official for cause. The process requires a four-fifths vote by the county board after providing the impacted person written notice and a chance to respond.

The following year, San Bernardino County, a charter county, did just that, and although its board didn’t try to use its new powers against him, Sheriff Gary Penrod asked a judge for an injunction. He alleged the move was an “unconstitutional ‘removal’ of the constitutionally mandated, elected sheriff” that could also interfere with investigative and prosecutorial functions.

A legal battle ensued, ending up at the Fourth District Court of Appeals, where judges found in 2005 that the ordinance was constitutional. They didn’t, however, decide whether the majority board vote to remove the sheriff might violate the Peace Officers Bill of Rights.

More recently in 2022, Los Angeles County voters overwhelmingly approved an identical charter amendment to allow the board to remove a sheriff. Two years earlier, LA supervisors removed Sheriff Alex Villanueva as the head of the county’s emergency operations through a board vote due to several ongoing scandals, including a history of deputy gangs inside the department.

The board vote ultimately was unnecessary, as Villanueva overwhelmingly lost his re-election bid to an internal challenger.

San Francisco’s charter has similar authority, requiring at least nine of the 11 supervisors to vote in favor of removing a sheriff or other public official for misconduct. A vote was brought against then-Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi in 2012 after he pleaded guilty of one count of misdemeanor false imprisonment of his wife. The city’s ethics commission found that Mirkarimi committed official misconduct and Mayor Ed Lee suspended him. Mirkarimi was ultimately reinstated when only seven supervisors voted in favor of removing him permanently.

In San Mateo County, Corpus has alleged she believes the board is overstepping its authority by asking voters to approve a charter amendment. An argument filed against the measure calls it “an illegal maneuver that will not survive a court challenge.”

At the Dec. 2 meeting where the board approved putting the measure up for a special election, Thomas “Tip” Mazzucco, an attorney appearing on behalf of Corpus, asked the board for a delay.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty about the process. I ask that you continue this matter to protect the sheriff’s rights, because it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “This is premature for you to usurp the authority of the voters.”

San Mateo supervisors did not delay, adding the amendment measure to the March 2025 ballot, with signatures from U.S. Reps. Anna Eshoo and Kevin Mullin, Supervisor Noelia Corzo and the heads of the two unions representing deputies and sergeants in the San Mateo Sheriff’s Office in favor of her removal.

Eliot Storch, secretary of the San Mateo County Deputy Sheriff’s Association, said the union is supporting the amendment through its political action committee, Law Enforcement Against Corruption. He expects people to turn out to vote, even though they just went through a presidential election cycle.

“This isn’t something that’s a distant thing in Washington, D.C. This is something right here,” Storch said. “The people who live here and who interact with the sheriff’s office and our deputies and correctional officers, they’re the ones who are affected by this, and so we want them to understand what’s going on, why Sheriff Corpus’ behavior is so bad and why she needs to be removed, and hope that they will then vote accordingly.”

Storch said people are still “holding out hope” that Corpus “will see the light” and resign before the amendment or recall are put to voters.

Citing the previous legal challenge out of San Bernardino County, the California Constitution Center in 2021 examined the ways counties can remove sheriffs and found a charter amendment with a four-fifths board vote and simultaneous recall is legal.

“Multiple means of removing a sheriff are not conflicting, or mutually exclusive. So while general law counties must use the state’s existing recall procedure (and are probably limited to that remedy), charter counties… have far greater flexibility to use the recall or some other removal procedure. The bottom line is that California sheriffs are not exempt from removal before their term expires,” the center concluded.

But that rarely happens, as sheriffs can’t be recalled just for any reason.

“Usually it’s some kind of dereliction of duty, or it has to be a violation of the oath of office, and that’s where a lot of recalls run into trouble,” Pishko said. “Most recalls are either for some kind of failure to investigate crime or the sheriff has lied about corruption. You don’t ever get a recall because the sheriff has been too violent, too tough, or has killed too many people or their officers are committing misconduct.”

In her investigation, retired Judge LaDoris Cordell had several sustained findings against Corpus, including Corpus using racial and homophobic slurs in the workplace; she and her executive team engaging in retaliation and intimidation; and she and former Executive Director Victor Aenlle are in a romantic relationship that creates a conflict of interest.

Recalling a California sheriff is a rare feat

San Mateo supervisors have also announced that a recall campaign against Corpus is underway, which will require about 46,000 signatures to get on the ballot. County officials estimate it wouldn’t be until April 2026.

Recall campaigns against sheriffs died due to a lack of signatures in both Shasta and Santa Cruz counties in 2012. An analysis of a failed sheriff recall in Lake County in 2013 found the most common reason signatures were invalidated — 8.6% of all signatures — was because the signee was not registered to vote.

A recall effort against San Francisco’s Mirkarimi was hinted at in 2012 but never materialized, along with one in Monterey County in 2021, when Sheriff Steve Bernal chose to retire. Monterey County supervisors censured him over allegations he misused funds but, as a non-charter county, they couldn’t remove him.

The last time citizens tried to recall a California sheriff was in Sonoma County in 2017. Then-Sheriff Steve Freitas resigned, citing medical issues, before the deadline for the recall to collect 35,000 valid signatures.

“Sometimes sheriffs just resign rather than go through the process,” Pishko said. “If the situation is bad enough, the sheriff will simply resign and then no recall is necessary.”

A search of newspaper archives found just one successful recall campaign against a California sheriff. In December 1974, Plumas County Sheriff W.C. “Abby” Abernethy “retired” for six days before being sworn in for his sixth term, according to the Feather River Bulletin. The move allowed him to collect his pension while drawing a salary of $29,346 a year, $178,390 in today’s dollars.

Some taxpayers didn’t like the double-dipping, so they gathered the required 500 signatures to put the recall on a 1976 ballot. After 21 years in office, Abernethy was recalled, losing by just 2% of the vote.

Spivak said it’s not surprising that there aren’t many recalls against sheriffs, because of two main reasons. One, there’s only 58 serving in the state at a time, compared to the thousands of people serving on school boards or city councils across the state, so other offices are more likely to face a recall based on sheer numbers alone.

“The other problem is that, because there’s one sheriff, that means they’re elected by the whole county, so you need a lot more signatures,” he said. “You need just an enormous number of signatures.”

While San Mateo County officials have estimated they need 46,000 signatures to get Corpus’ recall onto a 2026 ballot, Spivak projects they should plan to gather around 54,000 if they want to be successful, as 20% of signatures submitted for recalls typically don’t meet the requirements and are tossed out.

Timing of the election also impacts a recall’s success. Spivak said of the more than 1,000 recall elections in the U.S. since he began tracking them in 2011, 67% succeeded on a general or primary election day.

Spivak said San Mateo is right to use its authority as a charter county.

“That makes a lot of sense to go with a charter amendment,” he said. “If you can, it’s much easier and a lot less costly.”