UPDATE: A federal judge in Wisconsin today struck part of the state's union-stripping bill (pdf of the ruling).
EARLIER: As expected, the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board ordered recall elections for Governor Scott Walker, Lieutenant Governor Rebecca Kleefisch and three Republican state Senators. The board also ordered a recall election for a fourth Republican state senator, Pam Galloway, but she resigned earlier this month. Depending on potential primaries, the elections will happen May 8 and June 5.
Organizers had turned in an overwhelming number of signatures for recalling Walker and Kleefisch especially, and those signatures proved to be valid at a rate of more than 95 percent. From the Wisconsin State Journal:
The board's staff had said in a memo Thursday that there were five fake names on Walker recall petitions, but it turned out one of those they suggested striking — Fungky Van Den Elzen — was a real person. That means they found just four fake names out of the 931,053 submitted on the Walker petitions: Adolf Hitler, Mick E. Mous, Donald L. Duck, and I Love Scott Walker Thanks.
That last name, I Love Scott Walker Thanks, sounds more like a protest of the recall than an attempt to fake a name for the sake of having him kicked out of office.
It's worth noting that Wisconsin Republicans have lost what used to be a solid majority in the state Senate. As of this month, they're down to a 16-16 tie, with an empty seat and one Republican who sides with Democrat on union issues. If they tried to pass Walker's union-stripping bill today, they would lose. And if they fail to defend the seats they hold that are under recall, they face the loss of their majority entirely.
(H/t for news and pdf of ruling: Jessica Arp of WISC-TV)
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An outrageous example of Voter Fraud!
Throw out all the petitions, and make the signers push a peanut with their nose to the closest photo ID center. . .
Bwah-HA-HA-HA!!!!
You have to wonder if there is any correlation between Obama's numbers in Wisconsin these days and the recall elections.
Have Wisconsin's turn to the right finally subsided?
Hallelujah!
Once again, the far right fringe is slapped upside the head because there were no examples of "fraud" among the nearly 1-million signatures. After all, who is going to show up at an election place claiming to be Adolph Hitler or Mick E. Mous unless that actually was their name? Now, if the rcall movement can get 80% of the people who signed petitions to vote when the time comes, we might actually see what democracy looks like.
That's the trick. I hope Wisconsin Dems got e-mail addresses at the time they had people signing petitions. They need to use those to reinforce the bases for the recall and to remind people to vote.
The recall petitions should be the recall organizers' best tool. They already have names and contact information for almost a million supporters. It shouldn't be hard to make follow up phone calls to these people, and to get those signers to remind their friends and fellow workers to vote.
We did collect e-mail addresses, but promised to use them only as a means of contacting them for verification should their signature be challenged. However, as we did in the first round of recalls, we will use the PHYSICAL ADDRESSES collected to send targeted mailings and for volunteer door-to-door efforts to get out the vote. I imagine efforts are already underway to get signers registered to vote if they are not registered already.
The recall drive was grassroots and volunteer driven, and the push for the election will be as well. I only wish there were more time after the primary, before the general, to really rally behind our candidate.
I don't understand why Wisconsin Republicans didn't make it a felony to turn in improperly filled-out recall petitions. Oh well, live and learn!
The court case is interesting because Wisconsin cannot discriminate between classes of union employees regarding the deduction of dues. What the Republicans wanted to do was to cut the funding to the public employee unions through deductions but not safety employees as defined by the statute. That part of the law was struck and the state must allow the deduction of dues for all unions. The alternative is that the state will have to bar all union dues deductions for all unions.
Throughout the country, massive voter disenfranchisement campaigns are under way. Republican governors who have absolutely NO evidence of any voter fraud have said, "It is our duty to anticipate this problem, and deal with it before it happens." But of course it is their real purpose to disenfranchise cohorts that tend to vote Democratic--the old, the young, the ill and disabled, minorities, workers.
The "voter fraud" drive in Wisconsin at the start relied on ten (yes TEN) incorrect votes. Most of those ten were not aware that they were ineligible. When Democrats collected nearly a million petition signatures (not counting the ones torn out of their hands and thrown away by Walker people), as this article points out, there were four specious signatures, none of which were certainly placed there by Dems.
As an aside--Republican petitions in the previous Senatorial recall were so riddled with false signatures to get their people on the ballot that checking them contributed to the postponement of the election. We don't think they came from the above groups--no kidding.
As for fraudulent voting, that's not an issue in the Republican party in Wisconsin. They just send Koch lawyers out to Waukesha the next morning, and when they leave, the election is repaired and Prosser et al. are elected.