Gov. Walker will not challenge recall signatures
By Jason Stein of the Journal Sentinel
Feb. 27, 2012 9:54 a.m. |(263) Comments
Madison -- Gov. Scott Walker will not challenge any signatures in an attempt to stop a recall election from being held against him later this year.
The election if held would represent only the third recall election for a governor is U.S. history. Walker faced a deadline of 5 p.m. Monday to challenge the signatures.
"We are not filing any specific challenges to any specific signatures today," Walker campaign spokeswoman Ciara Matthews said. "We simply ran out of time."
Matthews said Walker would make a filing Monday with state elections officials but declined to say what it was.
Organizers gathered more than 1 million signatures in 60 days seeking to force the recall – well over the 540,000 valid signatures needed. Over the last month, Walker and Republicans have been examining the signatures seeking to find ones to challenge as invalid.
Government Accountability Board spokesman Reid Magney said the election agency has to continue its review of the petitions including the search for duplicate signatures. Currently, the agency has until March 19 to complete that review but Magney said he wasn’t sure how much time it would take.
“That’s something we’re obviously still working on,” Magney said.
If the board concludes that the signatures are valid, the election would be ordered for essentially six weeks later. If there is a primary election, it would be held on that date with the general election four weeks after that.
Walker had 10 days under state law to challenge signatures and a Dane County judge granted him an additional 20 days. But Walker was turned down when he sought two more weeks to examine the roughly 150,000 pages of signatures.
"That put us in an impossible timeline," Matthews said.
Mike Tate, chairman of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, said Monday that Walker had been given three times as much time as normally allowed under state law. He said the governor's decision not to challenge the signatures discredits previous claims by Republicans that there was widespread fraud in the petition process.
“After months of hearing about supposed fraud, they can’t give us one example,” Tate said.
Matthews said that volunteers have reviewed about 400,000 of the signatures and found problems with 10% to 20% of them that need further checking. That's consistent with the Journal Sentinel's own analysis of a sample of the petitions.
The newspaper’s analysis used a random sample of 500 signatures and found problems with about 15% of those. The newspaper's review was more rigorous than the verification process being conducted by the accountability board.
In its motion earlier this month, Walker's campaign indicated it could challenge as many as 100,000 signatures - well below what would be needed to prevent a recall election.
"We've said all along that we anticipated there would be enough signatures to force a recall election," Matthews said.
Mark Graul, a GOP strategist who ran Mark Green's unsuccessful race for governor in 2006, said that Republicans know a recall will happen and are preparing for it.
Graul said he didn't believe that Walker or his opponents would benefit greatly by seeking to hold a recall election quickly or by seeking to draw out the process.
"I'm not sure there's a strong strategic advantage either way," Graul said.
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