It was over a 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.

I love it!

180K is definitely a good margin of error!

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?

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