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Politics

‘Vote’ Early and Often for the Walker Recall Election

The stage is set for vote fraud on a massive scale in Wisconsin in connection with petitions calling for the 2012 recall election of Republican Gov. Scott Walker due to two truly shocking loopholes in Wisconsin election law.

Petitions are now being circulated to recall Walker. Groups circulating them have 60 days to gather 540,208 signatures from “qualified electors.”

But the so-called Wisconsin election “watchdog” agency, the Government Accountability Board (GAB), has no legal obligation to verify there are no duplicate signatures on the petitions nor is the GAB obliged to check whether all persons signing the petitions are “qualified electors.”

A “qualified elector” in the case of this recall election is a person over the age of 18 years who has resided in Wisconsin for 28 days prior to signing the recall petition. A recall petition signer need not be a registered voter.

It will be up to Walker and his volunteers or privately-paid staff to check more than half a million signatures for duplicates and verify that all signers are qualified. And, after the petitions are submitted (on varying dates in mid-January), Walker’s staff will have only 10 days to get all this done.

And making matters worse is that some organizations circulating petitions are actively encouraging voters to sign more than once. The MacIver Institute reports:

One Wisconsin Now, a liberal non-profit, posted on its website “You can circulate or sign a recall petition even if you have already signed another recall petition.”

The reason for this advice from One Wisconsin Now is not known. One Wisconsin Now notes that only one signature will count – but that’s true only if duplicate signatures are detected.

Recall backers claim they now have 300,000 signatures, though it’s not known how many of these are duplicates or invalid for other reasons. Organizers say they plan to gather 700,000 signatures to allow for disqualifications.  Obtaining the required 540,208 signatures is a high bar — 25% of the votes cast in the election in which Walker won the governor’s seat.

The GAB has asked for $625,699 in additional funding to hire temporary staff to review the petitions. It has 31 days to complete this review. But the review will be limited, MacIver reports:

The GAB staff will direct the temporary workers hired to process the recall petitions to only check to see if each signature includes the requisite information (address and date).

All signatures on the recall petitions are otherwise presumed to be valid and lawfully obtained.

Still, the GAB estimates it will cost more than $600,000 and take much longer than the 31 days allowed by law to review the more than 540,000 signatures to required to trigger a recall.

In 2008, the Milwaukee Police Department’s Special Investigation Unit released a report documenting  an “illegal organized attempt to influence the outcome of an election in the state of Wisconsin” in 2004, as John Fund reported:

 Among the problems cited were ineligible voters casting ballots, felons not only voting but working at the polls, transient college students casting improper votes, and homeless voters possibly voting more than once. The report said the problem was compounded by incompetence resulting from abysmal record-keeping and inadequately trained poll workers.

Nothing was done, except to propose disbanding the police investigative unit.

This year, however, a law was enacted and signed by Gov. Walker requiring all Wisconsin voters to show a photographic i.d. card before being given a ballot.

That means no one can vote to recall Walker without proof of “qualified elector” status.  The voter i.d. law should be amended to require the same proof for setting up the recall election in the first place.

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— Maureen Martin

Maureen Martin is The Heartland Institute's senior fellow for legal affairs. Formerly a newspaper reporter, she became an attorney and has practiced law for nearly 30 years, generally concentrating in litigation and environmental law. She was an adjunct professor of environmental law at Loyola University Chicago for more than 10 years. Her op-eds have been published in the Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, the Washington Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Chicago Tribune, among others. Her favorite lawyer joke: “What’s the difference between a carp and a lawyer?” Answer: “One’s a scum-sucking bottom feeder; the other’s just a fish.”

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_YVKXZHUDXLWHJ5LS5CCRU35TDY bed

    One wisconsin now issued its guidance  about signing petitions more than once after it was revealed that several GOP operatives were planning to collect signatures and then destroy the petitions.   Its perfectly legal to sign more than once and this tactic protects the recall organizers from the GOP plot to (illegally) suppress the recall.  Note that the recall organizers have established a database and are carefully checking (and well redact) all duplicate signatures before submission.

    • Anonymous

       Note that the recall organizers have established a database and are
      carefully checking (and well redact) all duplicate signatures before
      submission. 
      ___________
      Ordinarily, that would warrant inclusion in an ‘article’ like this, but in this case it would make the whole thing less *spoooky* and nefarious-sounding.

      It’s like mentioning that ‘felons’ voted. This is Wisconsin. It is not unusual for a felon to be a tax-paying, legally employed Wisconsin citizen. We allow them to vote.

      Boo!

      (I guess putting it that way doesn’t sound as scary as it did earlier.)

      • Mathew Schaefer

        Proof?

  • Anonymous

    This sleazy system is the same one that gave Wisconsin ‘Governor’ Walker, two Republican majorities in the State House, and a Republican justice Prosser (in a very suspicious eleventh hour ‘surprise’ from the most heavily Republican district in the state.

    You are correct.  There are serious problems. Unfortunately, Republicans are not concerned with actually fixing them, just exploiting them to their benefit. 

  • Anonymous

    The Milwaukee Police Department did NOT find an “illegal organized attempt” at voter fraud with respect to ineligible voters, felon voting, college students, and double-voting homeless people, as you imply here. The only section of the report that referred to the possibility of an “organized” effort was where employees of a 527 Political Action Committee who were campaigning in Wisconsin, but did not live there during the rest of the year, cast votes in Wisconsin. See the report at page 52: 

    http://www.minnesotamajority.org/Portals/0/documents/WisconsinElectionFraudFullReport.pdf

    There is no evidence the campaign staffers cast double-votes. Prosecutors chose not to pursue the cases because Wisconsin statutes only define “residency” as relating to the ten-day period before an election, and these staffers met the standard. Even if what the staffers did was kinda sketchy, prosecutors probably could not have secured convictions under the law as written. 

    Prosecutors did pursue other cases of voting improprieties, so it is completely inaccurate to say “nothing was done, except to propose disbanding the police investigative unit.” But the number of improprieties were very few, and most of the problems identified in the report were mostly attributable to clerical errors.

  • Anonymous

    Maureen, I don’t know what you did during the first 30 years of your career, but you are really discrediting yourself with such a poorly researched and amateur piece.  The title of “senior fellow” must be some honorary award.  Unless, maybe, the Heartland Institute is some right wing anti-intellectual fake organization and your writing is just  satire.

  • Anonymous

    “Interested voter” is a public employee
    labor union thug whose only intent is to run cover for the illegal nature of the
    signature gathering process.  Any sentient Wisconsin resident should know
    that Wisconsin labor union thugs will do anything necessary to recall Governor
    Walker and stop him from implementing controls on the thuggocracy called the
    modern American labor movement and protecting the taxpayers of Wisconsin.
     They are desperate to protect the jobs and percs they enjoy at the sufferance
    of the beleaguered Wisconsin taxpayer.  Labor union thugs like to portray
    themselves as victims.  This is totally fallacious.  They are thugs,
    forcing union membership on those who do not wish to be associated with their
    activities, their agenda, and their reprehensible conduct.  Forced union
    membership is anathema to the American way of life.  No one should be
    forced to belong and pay dues to an organization with which they disagree.

     

    If someone wants to join a labor union
    voluntarily, fine.  But no one should be forced to join any organization
    against their will and then pay dues to support an agenda which they oppose.
     President Franklin Roosevelt warned against the organization of public
    employees because he feared that they would use their power in opposition to
    the public interest and that of taxpayers.  Everything he warned against
    has come true.  Public employee unions have abused their power, coerced
    union membership, and corruptly insinuated themselves into the political
    process to further enhance their already generous salaries and benefits.
     They have used their dues to buy off corrupt and unprincipled Democrat
    politicians who do their bidding, or run off to Illinois when the democratic
    process does not go their way. 

     

    If you want to know what private sector workers
    think of forced unionization, look at the dwindling percentage who now belong
    to labor unions–6.9%.  The only growth they have experienced in recent
    years is in the public sector (36.2%), which is not subject to the free market,
    and naturally, uses coercion to force whole classes of employees into unions
    against their will. That is why they are fighting tooth and nail to hold on to
    the only area where they have achieved some gains. 

     

    Forced unionization is a 75-year old anachronism
    that has outlived any justification it might have had during the Great
    Depression.  Governor Walker has courageously taken a stand on behalf of
    the Wisconsin taxpayers who have said “enough” to the public sector
    union rip-off.

    The protests at the Wisconsin Capitol provided
    all of America with a vivid reminder of how irrational and childlike the public
    sector union members and their leaders are.  I speak as a former public sector worker who was fully
    cognizant that my salary and benefits were higher than those of the average
    taxpayer paying my salary.  I found
    it anathema to use the political process, via public sector union dues, to jigger
    the system to my further advantage. 
    Every taxpayer should be enraged by the tactics of these thugs.  Would that all public employees were
    honest enough to do likewise.   I also refused to join the union.

  • Anonymous

    This is silly stuff. For starters, the “Milwaukee Police Department report” by an “investigative unit” was really just the unauthorized work of two cops with a personal agenda. It’s indeed been discredited, by the city’s police chief among others.

    Second: Poor baby! Walker will have to — sob! — spend money checking the work of petition gatherers! Then again, under the state’s recall law, he gets to obtain unlimited funds for this purpose, and he’s been raking in millions from all over the country. We can be sure his team will scrutinize every scribble, even the ones already known to have been crossed out illegally by some of his own supporters.
     
    In general, what the column clearly sets out to accomplish is to take the overblown ”issue” of “voter fraud” (of which there are but a handful of examples out of millions of votes cast in Wisconsin, all of which were discovered and handled by the justice system without benefit of the overly suppressive new Voter ID law) and extend it to a new meme: petition signature fraud! 

    Kill recalls, as some Wisconsin GOP legislators propose, add in gerrymandering of legislative districts and Voter ID, both already enacted, and what we get is a conservative-driven, wide-spectrum, vote-suppression machine.
     
    As usual, conservatives and Republicans insist that the recall process be 100 percent perfect or else it is antidemocratic. But, obviously, no human-driven process can be perfect. Even if it’s 99.999 percent legitimate, as in the historically demonstrable case of recent Wisconsin elections, these people complain that the entire system is broken. They insist that constitutionally protected recall elections in Wisconsin should be made hugely more expensive and difficult for citizens, if not banned altogether. Which is completely inconsistent with voter rights under current law.

    Meanwhile, these conservatives are only against recall attempts against Republicans, and remain quite willing to mount recalls against Democrats, using the very same methodology they otherwise decry. Oh, and: Republicans keep cutting election commission budgets, ensuring more errors that they can then point to as reasons for their further adventures in partisanship and authoritarianism.
     
    The column mentions yet ignores the fact that Wisconsin’s constitutionally mandated recall process sets a very high bar on the number of required signatures precisely to overcome defects in petitions that would be enormously expensive and time-consuming to check with complete accuracy in a reasonable amount of time. This is as when Florida election officials in 2000 were forced to examine”chads” on individual punch ballots with exhausting deliberation until the time-limited recount was aborted by the Supreme Court and raucous GOP protesters. Thus, Republicans now regularly seek to stall the will of the electorate by demanding perfection. 
     
    The Walker recall petition gatherers plan to collect about 50 percent more signatures than needed — i.e., several hundred thousand–  on the assumption that some signatures will not be valid. This is normal operating procedure for both Democrats and Republicans who mount recall drives in Wisconsin. The Walker anti-recall forces cannot imagine that the vast majority of half a million of more signatures will be valid, but that arbitrarily high number assures that the vast majority of them will be.
     
    Finally, there is this hypocrisy: Wisconsin conservatives claim it’s too easy for people to fake a name or signature on a recall  petition. Yet, they also complain that being forced to list your name, address and phone number on such a petition is a threat to personal privacy. Well, which is it? Should the petitions contain sufficient information to gauge the legitimacy of a signer, or shouldn’t they? The anti-constitutionalists can’t have it both ways.