http://thevotingnews.com/state/wisconsin/walker-wisconsin-gop-sue-state-elections-and-ethics-agency-over-recall-effort-jsonline/
Walker, GOP sue state elections and ethics agency over recall effort
By Jason Stein
<http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/mailto:[email protected]> of
the Journal Sentinel
Dec. 15, 2011 |(1550) Comments
<http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/assembly-leader-wants-to-replace-state-elections-agency-5u3f2or-135669843.html?page=1>
*Madison *- Gov. Scott Walker's campaign and the state Republican Party
director sued the state's elections and ethics agency in Waukesha on
Thursday over its handling of duplicate and bogus signatures in the
ongoing recall effort against the governor.
The top GOP lawmaker in the Assembly also took a shot at the Government
Accountability Board - which he voted to create - saying it had strayed
from its nonpartisan mission and might need to be replaced.
The lawsuit filed Thursday in Waukesha County Circuit Court asks a judge
to order the accountability board to look for and eliminate duplicate
signatures, clearly fake names and illegible addresses. The lawsuit can
be brought in one of the most conservative counties in the state because
of a change in state law earlier this year by Republican lawmakers and
Walker that allowed lawsuits to be brought against the state outside
liberal Dane County, the seat of state government.
The lawsuit <http://media.jsonline.com/documents/walkersuit.pdf> says
allowing multiple signatures is a violation of the equal protection
clauses of the state and U.S. constitutions.
"The decision of one individual who chooses to sign a recall petition
should not carry more weight than the decision of another who chooses
not to sign," said Stephan Thompson, executive director of the state
Republican Party and a plaintiff in the case. "This lawsuit seeks to
protect the Wisconsin electors whose voices have been trumped by those
purposefully signing multiple petitions."
The accountability board has said it's up to challengers to point out
problems like those and the board itself cannot automatically toss the
signatures for those reasons.
"The plaintiffs are challenging the rules that have been established by
statutes and administrative code, and which have been in place since the
late 1980s. Since then, these rules have been used in every state and
local recall petition effort against incumbents of both parties,"
accountability board director Kevin Kennedy said.
Graeme Zielinski, a spokesman for the state Democratic Party, said the
lawsuit wouldn't end the effort to gather recall signatures against the
governor.
"We have a system in place to review signatures before we submit them to
the GAB. This doesn't change our system and neither will it stop the
recall of Scott Walker," Zielinski said.
The state Government Accountability Board was created in 2007 to replace
the state ethics and elections boards after the elections agency was
criticized by Republicans for favoring Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle in his
2006 re-election campaign.
At the time, Republicans controlled the state Assembly and Democrats
controlled the state Senate. The creation of the board passed the Senate
unanimously and passed the Assembly by a near unanimous 97-2 vote.
The accountability board is made up of six former judges.
The elections board, by contrast, was an overtly partisan body. One
member each was selected by the governor, the speaker of the Assembly,
the Senate majority leader, the Assembly minority leader, the Senate
minority leader, the chief justice of the Supreme Court and the top
official of both the Democratic and Republican parties and sometimes a
third political party in the state. That meant a majority of the board
often had strong political affiliations.
The ethics board was made up of nonpartisan members appointed by the
governor. It was often criticized as toothless.
Now, the Government Accountability Board has been criticized by
Republicans during this year's nasty recall campaigns. Assembly Speaker
Jeff Fitzgerald (R-Horicon) said he saw advantages to going back to the
old elections and ethics boards if some changes were made.
"I like that system, and I think that system worked fairly well," said
Fitzgerald.
Notably, Fitzgerald was among those who voted to create the
accountability board.
Kennedy said the board was recognized nationally for being uniquely
nonpartisan.
"In every other state, elections are run by a partisan elected or
appointed official, or a bipartisan citizen board," Kennedy said. "The
current board members have more than 130 years of experience on the
bench as trained decision makers, something the state did not have with
the previous elections board, which was comprised of partisan political
appointees."
Spokesmen for Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) and
Walker had no reaction to Jeff Fitzgerald's comment, but Scott
Fitzgerald has been critical of the accountability board in the past.
The Fitzgeralds are brothers.
Jeff Fitzgerald also said Thursday he was introducing a bill to make it
a felony to sign a recall petition more than once, though the bill would
not affect the current recall effort against Walker. The crime would
carry a fine of up to $10,000 and up to 31/2 years in prison.
There have been scattered reports that some people have signed recall
petitions against Walker more than once, either to inflate the number of
signatures or because they were concerned that their original signature
might not be properly counted.
Fitzgerald said state law needed to be changed to guard against that,
but also criticized the accountability board for not coming out more
strongly against that possibility. He also criticized the board for
saying its staff would not automatically strike names in the recall
petition such as "Mickey Mouse" and instead in some cases would just
flag those names for Walker's campaign to challenge.
But accountability board spokesman Reid Magney said the board was simply
following the law and carrying out a process that would ultimately weed
out bad signatures after Walker's campaign called for striking them.
"There's an adversarial process designed to weed out fake names as well
as people who aren't qualified to sign and duplicate signatures," Magney
said.
/Patrick Marley of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report./
http://www.biztimes.com/blogs/milwaukee-biz-blog/2011/12/15/recall-process-has-multiple-checks-and-balances
Milwaukee Biz Blog
Recall process has multiple checks and balances
Posted on /December 15, 2011 12:53 PM/
*
By Kevin Kennedy
<http://www.biztimes.com/blogs/milwaukee-biz-blog/authors/kevin-kennedy>
Kevin Kennedy
View full bio
<http://www.biztimes.com/blogs/milwaukee-biz-blog/authors/kevin-kennedy>
Comments made at our board meeting Tuesday by elections specialists have
been taken out of context. They were answering questions about one
aspect of the petition verification process.
Wisconsin’s recall petition process is designed with multiple checks and
balances provided by the non-partisan G.A.B., as well as the competing
partisan interests of the recall committee and the incumbent officeholder.
These competing interests ensure that ineligible signers, duplicate
signatures and fake names get weeded out. Focusing on any one aspect of
the process in isolation misses the forest for a few trees.
The recall process starts at the grassroots level with petition
circulators. They personally obtain each signature on the page and are
responsible for striking any signature that does not match the name
given to them by the person signing the petition. These circulators sign
each petition page stating that they understand that falsifying the
certification is a punishable offense under state law, which is a felony.
The board understands that the recall committees are doing their own
quality control prior to filing petitions in January, involving
hand-entering names from each petition page into a database that will
allow them to identify duplicate signatures and fake names.
It is in the recall committees’ interests to do this to build their own
mailing lists, as well as to help ensure that the petitions they file
with the G.A.B. will stand up to the scrutiny of challenges.
Wisconsin law requires the G.A.B. to presume that petition signatures
are valid, which means that the staff cannot automatically strike names
that might appear to be fake. That level of review would require a
change in law as well as much greater resources than are available or
practical.
However, the G.A.B. staff and temporary workers reviewing the petitions
will be flagging apparently fictitious names for review by higher-level
staff.
At the same time G.A.B. is conducting its review, the incumbent
officeholders’ committees will be reviewing copies of the petitions as
part of the challenge process. If and when the incumbents’ committees
submit challenges to individual signatures, the G.A.B. staff must
evaluate each signature and the documentation provided by the
challenger, and may use outside sources such as voter registration lists
and telephone directories to determine the validity of signatures.
The Government Accountability Board members will then vote on all the
challenges at a public meeting to determine whether the petition has a
sufficient number of signatures to trigger a recall election.
Additionally, both the petitioner and the incumbent officeholder have
the ability to appeal the board’s decision to the circuit court.
The right of Wisconsin residents to recall elected officials is
guaranteed in the Wisconsin Constitution, and the laws of this state
spell out the process by which that can happen. These laws can seem
complicated. The process for any recall petition review will be
consistent with the rules that were in place for both parties in the
2011 recall elections. In reviewing approximately 215,000 signatures as
part of the 2011 recalls, only a handful of signatures were successfully
challenged on the basis that the name was fictitious or of a deceased
individual.
*/Kevin Kennedy is the director and general counsel of the Wisconsin
Government Accountability Board. He spoke about the agency’s roles in
the recalls, redistricting and enforcement of the changes in the voter
ID law at the Milwaukee Press Club’s Newsmaker Luncheon Wednesday./*
--
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