720,000 signatures have been collected to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. Only 540,000 signatures were needed. The rest is, I suppose, a tip. Raw Story reports:
With Tuesday’s deadline fast approaching, The New York Times reports that Wisconsin’s activists are prepared to submit about 720,000 petition signatures, far surpassing the 540,000 needed to trigger a recall election later this year.
Before the election can proceed, the state’s election board will have to build a $100,000 database of registered voters and check each petition signature against the list. Assuming that more than 540,000 entries are valid, Walker will face the possibility of being only the third governor in U.S. history to be removed by recall election.
It will be interesting to see, if possible, how many petitions were faked. Remember a while back the Tea Party promised to do that? And if they did, it will be interesting to see if charges are filed.
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Weren’t most of the recalled representatives reelected anyway? I wonder if Scott will just get reelected.
I wouldn’t put it that way … The Democrats and union people engineered recalls of several Republicans, and one or two were replaced with Democrats. That is remarkable and a success. A recall hardly ever means a replacement, that it did in a couple of cases is amazing. As a means of retaliation, the Republicans and teabaggers got a few Democrats recalled, and they were re-elected, not replaced. So the outcome of the recall was successful by any reasonable standard, though it would have been nice if one more turnover had occurred.
In the case of Walker, it is hard to say. The available polling data are not current enough. This is from last fall:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-poll-shows-most-favor-recall-of-wisconsin-governor-20111116,0,6633196.story
Oh yeah, that’s right. The fake petition or fake petitioner destroying signatures. I forgot about that.
OK, here I go getting my hopes up that something will change for the better.
Such petition drives always result in a considerable percentage of invalid votes, and a good number of them are honest mistakes: volunteers not recording the names and addresses right, volunteers not pointing out clearly enough that you have to be a registered voter, and a surprising number of people who believe they are registered to vote when they really aren’t.
If a drive uses paid volunteers, you have the additional problem of signature collectors faking signatures to earn more, and then there’s the occasional act of political sabotage.
And since the signatures are only compared to a databank of registered voters, fake signatures can only be told from honest mistakes if the fake is blatant, i.e. when names like Donald Duck or Batman are submitted (which happens). If the fake name is John Smith, there’s no telling if somebody faked the signature or if there is a John Smith who just forgot to register to vote after moving the last time. Even if a fake is blatant, it’s not possible to tell whether it originated with the signature collector or if they got pranked, so prosecution is very difficult in the absence of indications of a concerted effort.
If there was more than an unorganized effort by individual Teabaggers to sabotage this drive, it would become obvious by a significantly higher percentage of invalids than for comparable drives in Wisconsin, so that’ll be the figure to look at.
I’d think those 180,000 extra votes should provide a sufficient margin of safety, unless there was something really well-organized and large scale going on. Which I actually doubt – the grassroots Teabaggers never demonstrated much of a knack for organizing, and the moneyed interests behind Walker have a better shot at supporting his re-election than at sabotaging the recall drive, so why would they go the risk?
If the teabaggers did what they said they would do, I would expect there to be entire pages of all badly faked petitions. They’re not that smart.
180K is definitely a good margin of error!
Hey this ain’t no Sarah Palin Tea Party signature recall. This is Wisconsin making a historical statement. Wisconsin has said, “don’t f with us!”
I love it!
Kathy O, always keep hope alive! Always!
Your numbers are wrong. To recall Walker, they submitted over 1.1 million signatures.
Over 700,000 were submitted to recall the Lt Gov, and numbers in the tens of thousands to recall several other congressmen.
Almost 1.9 million all total, according to the news last night.
Why are so many news sites underreporting the numbers?
It was over a million signatures.