I recently reported what I thought were two ways to keep the Demonrats honest:
This site supposedly will notify you if your name shows up on a recall petition.
This site allows you to supposedly scan actual recall petitions and report possible fraud or invalid signatures.
The problem is that neither of these sites is operated by an organization that has a legal right to challenge recall petitions. By Wisconsin law, only the Wisconsin Republican Party and the "Friends of Walker" have that right, and those groups are prohibited by law from accepting any data from outside groups, no matter how valid that data might be. You can't even protest if someone signs your name on a petition - the best you can do is tell the legitimate challengers, and hope they can find the bogus entry.
Is it possible that both of these sites have been engineered to sucker pro-Walker volunteers into wasting their efforts while thinking they were helping fight corruption?
Here's the link to find out about volunteering for the real recall screening process:
I went to a Wisconsin GOP Victory Center training session last night, and learned quite a bit about Wisconsin's recall law.
A recall petition can be started by any person eligible to vote who has resided in the district for at least ten days. So, a community organizer from Chicago can move to a motel in Wisconsin for a couple of weeks and kick off a recall of our governor.
The law says that 25% of Wisconsin residents eligible to vote in the affected district must sign the petition. Not 25% of registered voters, just 25% of those over 18. Non-residents are prohibited, but anyone residing here for at least 10 days is considered a resident.
Petition circulators must sign the bottom of each petition form attesting to the fact that all the signatures are valid and that the person signing is indeed an eligible voter in that district, but are not required to check ID or know the person signing. Circulators may be non-residents. There are penalties for circulators lying or abetting fraud. Of course, if the circulator is from out of state, they must be found and extradited - not likely. The worst that could happen is all petitions from that person would be invalidated - if they were found.
Recall petitioners have 60 days to gather signatures. Once the signatures are delivered to the Government Accountability Board, the challengers have ten whole days to examine all the petitions and challenge any they find that are questionable. The petitioners then have 5 days to answer the challenges. The challengers have the right to ask for an extension, and we will likely get 48 hours more from the time the petitions are delivered, as it will take the GAB at least that long to prepare them for us. We might get more time if we can show any signs of massive fraud.
We have on our side sophisticated computer software that can cross-reference the Wisconsin voter rolls and consumer information to determine if addresses and names are valid.
The Demonrats are doing a last-minute scan through the petitions to remove the most obvious cases of fraud, to lessen the possibility of us finding more "Mickey Mouse" and "Adolph Hitler" signatures like happened in the last recall.
The GAB would have allowed "Mickey Mouse" if we had not complained, as the address was valid - but "Adolph" listed his address as "Berlin" - if he had used "New Berlin", he might have gotten counted.
The whole process seems to be inordinately biased toward allowing recalls. It amazes me that no Republican tried to get Doyle recalled back when he was busy destroying our economy and vetoing common-sense self protection laws.
If we prevail in this and in the upcoming four Senate recall elections, I think we should push for an overhaul of the recall process. Requiring the same residency time for petition originators, and prohibiting out-of-state signature collectors would be a good start - as would allowing the same time for verification and challenges as the collectors had to get the signatures. Fair is fair, and recall elections cost the taxpayer millions. Perhaps a clause that a recall can only be started if the official in question has done something that is actionable, or actually criminal, such as murder or robbery - or maybe drunk driving? At lest one of each party would be eligible for recall here under those rules.
The unions are pissed. They'll stop at nothing to quash this movement.
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