The effort to recall Long Beach Second District Councilwoman Jeannine Pearce moved one step closer Wednesday afternoon after a group leading the effort to unseat her turned in over 9,400 signatures to the city clerk minutes before their deadline expired.

Ian Patton, one of the leaders of the recall group, was shown walking into city hall on a Facebook Live video stream just before 4:30PM holding a box labeled “recall”. The city clerk confirmed that the group turned in 9,462 signatures and that they need to have 6,363 verified Second District residents within that number to qualify for the November 6 ballot.

The city clerk’s office will now begin the process of reviewing and verifying the signatures over the next 30 days before signaling if the recall will go to a vote in November.

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“Accountability has been restored in the 2nd District,” Patton wrote on Facebook. “Now we just need to get her out.”

The group originally served Pearce with the recall papers during a December city council meeting triggering the 180-day signature gathering period that ended Wednesday afternoon. They had seized on Pearce’s affair with her former chief of staff becoming public and the ensuing investigations into alleged domestic violence and ethics violations by Pearce stemming from an incident with police last summer.

With a cushion of over 3,000 signatures it’s likely that the recall will end up on the November ballot but Pearce did not seem overly concerned.

Pearce and a handful of supporters gathered at a downtown bar Wednesday afternoon to toast to the 4:30PM deadline passing, with the news in hand that Patton and his group had indeed submitted their signatures the councilwoman addressed the room.

With a mix of optimism and defiance in her voice, she maintained that the recall effort was more about big money influencing politics than mistakes made in her personal life, pointing again to the roughly $180,000 raised by a special interest group comprised of several local hotels that were supporting the recall effort.

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“We know that these hotels have put money up and that’s what this is about,” Pearce said. “Because whenever people stand up and fight for things that they believe in their gut and they’re not swayed by political pressures, this is what happens. This is why it’s hard for electeds to speak up because they know this is going to happen.”

Pearce said she is confident that if the recall goes to the ballot that her message and values will resonate with the community. She said that a November election could actually benefit her as a number of ballot initiatives like Claudia’s Law—an effort to get panic buttons and workload caps instituted for hotel workers—and rent control could potentially be on the ballot.

There could also be an influx of voters as Californians decide their next governor, United States senator and a number of statewide initiatives. Pearce is hopeful that they will also support her, again.

“I’m pretty sure that the Second District was electing someone that they knew was an advocate for workers, truck drivers, housekeepers and that this is what this campaign is about,” Pearce said. “It’s not about my personal situation. I’m really confident that at the polls, should it come to a point where we’re on the ballot in November that the Second District will do the right thing and continue to support the values they supported when I was elected.”