7/20/03 Almost 9,000 registered voters in Santa Barbara County have signed a petition to recall Gov. Gray Davis, county officials confirmed Friday.

According to Clerk-Recorder-Assessor Joe Holland, 87 percent of the 10,263 signatures turned into the county/s Elections Division are believed to be valid.

County officials completed a verification of a random sample of 500 of the signatures Friday, Holland said, and have already notified the secretary of state 77 well ahead of Wednesday/s deadline for the monthly reporting period.

Also Friday, California courts turned away efforts by allies of Democratic Gov. Gray Davis to block certification of the recall drive 77 which could qualify for the ballot as early as next week.

If counties on Wednesday report enough valid signatures on petitions being circulated by GOP-led organizations, Davis would become the first California governor ever to appear on a recall ballot.

It was an outcome that looked increasingly imminent after Friday/s court decisions.

In Los Angeles County, a Superior Court judge denied a request from Taxpayers Against the Governor/s Recall for a temporary restraining order to prevent the secretary of state from certifying the recall until the group/s allegations of illegal signature-gathering were investigated.

Meanwhile in Sacramento, an appeals court sided with a recall group that sued the secretary of state to speed up signature verification. The court ordered the secretary of state to direct counties to verify petition signatures as they count them.

The 3rd District Court of Appeal in Sacramento said Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, a Democrat, gave "erroneous" instructions to county elections officials when he gave them an extra 30-day period to verify signatures on recall petitions rather than verify them immediately.

In the statewide recall, county elections officials are required to give 30-day updates to the state, Holland said. Under Shelley/s instructions, the July 23 deadline applied only to raw totals and counties would have until Aug. 22 to report totals of valid signatures.

After the court/s rulings, Wednesday/s numbers must be validated.

Santa Barbara County was initially included in the lawsuit as a county not properly following the law, but was quickly dropped.

"We/ve always been updating under the law, and the filing of the lawsuit was apparently an error on the part of the proponents. When we explained to them what we were doing, they dismissed us immediately," Holland said.

Recall proponents claim to have given counties more than 1.6 million signatures; they need 897,158 valid signatures to get the recall on the ballot.

The Associated Press also contributed to this report.

Staff writer Erin Carlyle can be reached by e-mail at ecarlyle@pulitzer.net