Wisconsin's Governor Walker and the possibility of a recall

Robear wrote:

When do we get to the part where some "Democrat" burns down the State House? Because soon, some distraction will be needed... Anyone heard from James O'Keefe lately? :-)

I know he was recently just next door in Minnesota, and wouldn't be surprised if Project Veritas Falsitas showed up in the Badger state before the recall elections.

OG_slinger wrote:

When's Wink's Playboy shoot?

Given Playboy's aesthetics and audience, I don't see that happening.
IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/WozbK.jpg)

First charges of willful fraud in the recall efforts.

A Racine man could face felony charges after his brother’s signature was found four times on a petition to recall Senate Republican Van Wanggaard. But the brother said he never signed the petition – and his mother didn’t either, even though her name popped up twice on the same documents.

The Racine Journal Times said a man was looking at the Wanggaard petitions on-line when he found his friend’s signature multiple times and called authorities. Technically, it’s not illegal to sign recall petitions more than once. But it is illegal for somebody to forge them, which is apparently the case here.

Too soon to know whether Mark Demet is a GOP plant, a Democrat who decided to "help", or something else entirely.

In any event, the crimes he is accused of are a felony, and I hope he's appropriately prosecuted.

Dimmerswitch wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

When's Wink's Playboy shoot?

Given Playboy's aesthetics and audience, I don't see that happening.
IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/WozbK.jpg)

Oh c'mon. I'm sure they could airbrush that!

LouZiffer wrote:
Dimmerswitch wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

When's Wink's Playboy shoot?

Given Playboy's aesthetics and audience, I don't see that happening.
IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/WozbK.jpg)

Oh c'mon. I'm sure they could airbrush that!

I think that would strain the limits of photoshop.

Oops. Looks like even with by the generous standards of cash-based accounting, Governor Walker's budget is coming up short.

Wisconsin’s state budget condition has worsened to the point that Gov. Scott Walker and possibly the Legislature will need to take emergency steps to avoid being out of balance.

The nonpartisan Legislative Fiscal Bureau on Thursday released the new projections that show the two-year budget will be $143 million short of balancing by July 2013.

That’s bad news for Walker, who faces a drive to recall him from office based largely around criticisms of choices he made in the two-year state budget passed last year. Four Republican state senators, along with Walker’s lieutenant governor, also face potential recall elections this summer.

The budget news also comes in the wake of six straight months of job losses in Wisconsin.

Walker has argued that he made the tough choices necessary to balance a $3.6 billion budget shortfall last year without widespread layoffs or tax increases.

Additionally, Walker's claims that his budget doesn't raise taxes, and doesn't rely on accounting gimmicks, are false. (Or, false and false, if you'd like sources and don't mind PDFs).

Oh c'mon. I'm sure they could airbrush Pat!

Fixed for accuracy!

Because this is probably the only place I can post it and be assured someone will get my joke.

IMAGE(http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7056/6858556513_d7e1cb04a9_z.jpg)

Hah, the intersection between the two audiences (meme-aware gamers and the politically active) is probably about, oh, twelve people, and eight of them are probably in this forum.

Malor wrote:

Hah, the intersection between the two audiences (meme-aware gamers and the politically active) is probably about, oh, twelve people, and eight of them are probably in this forum.

Move votes, for great justice!

Robear, I'm taking the liberty of answering you in this thread, since it's a derail in the redistricting one. Hope that's okay.

Robear, in the redistricting thread[/url]]I understand that Gov. Walker has decided to use funds from the recent $26B mortgage bank settlement, which were supposed to go to homeowners in trouble, to instead reduce the state's deficit. Is that correct?

Basically, yes. Wisconsin's share of the national settlement is a comparatively paltry $140 million. $31.6 million of those proceeds go directly to the state government, and Walker is appropriating the overwhelming majority of that to prop up his unbalanced budget, rather than supporting the homeowners the money is intended for.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel[/url]]Wisconsin will use a chunk of its $140 million share of a national settlement over foreclosure and mortgage-servicing abuses to help the state budget rather than assist troubled homeowners, Gov. Scott Walker and state Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen said Thursday.

Walker and Van Hollen said the majority of the settlement amount earmarked to Wisconsin under a $25 billion proposed nationwide agreement announced Thursday still would go to aid consumers in Milwaukee and other communities struggling with the specter of home foreclosure.

But of a $31.6 million payment coming directly to the state government, most of that money - $25.6 million - will go to help close a budget shortfall revealed in newly released state projections. Van Hollen, whose office said he has the legal authority over the money, made the decision in consultation with Walker.

Dimmerswitch wrote:

First charges of willful fraud in the recall efforts.

A Racine man could face felony charges after his brother’s signature was found four times on a petition to recall Senate Republican Van Wanggaard. But the brother said he never signed the petition – and his mother didn’t either, even though her name popped up twice

on the same documents.

The Racine Journal Times said a man was looking at the Wanggaard petitions on-line when he found his friend’s signature multiple times and called authorities. Technically, it’s not illegal to sign recall petitions more than once. But it is illegal for somebody to forge them, which is apparently the case here.

Too soon to know whether Mark Demet is a GOP plant, a Democrat who decided to "help", or something else entirely.

In any event, the crimes he is accused of are a felony, and I hope he's appropriately prosecuted.

Great "friend". You'd think he would check with his "friend" before going straight to the cops!

karmajay wrote:

Great "friend". You'd think he would check with his "friend" before going straight to the cops! ;)

Maybe he did.

"Hey... I saw your signature on this petition four times. What gives?"
"I never signed any petition. Someone is using my name!"
"Great, so someone is forging your signature. Let's call the cops."

Dimmerswitch wrote:

Robear, I'm taking the liberty of answering you in this thread, since it's a derail in the redistricting one. Hope that's okay.

Robear, in the redistricting thread[/url]]I understand that Gov. Walker has decided to use funds from the recent $26B mortgage bank settlement, which were supposed to go to homeowners in trouble, to instead reduce the state's deficit. Is that correct?

Basically, yes. Wisconsin's share of the national settlement is a comparatively paltry $140 million. $31.6 million of those proceeds go directly to the state government, and Walker is appropriating the overwhelming majority of that to prop up his unbalanced budget, rather than supporting the homeowners the money is intended for.

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel[/url]]Wisconsin will use a chunk of its $140 million share of a national settlement over foreclosure and mortgage-servicing abuses to help the state budget rather than assist troubled homeowners, Gov. Scott Walker and state Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen said Thursday.

Walker and Van Hollen said the majority of the settlement amount earmarked to Wisconsin under a $25 billion proposed nationwide agreement announced Thursday still would go to aid consumers in Milwaukee and other communities struggling with the specter of home foreclosure.

But of a $31.6 million payment coming directly to the state government, most of that money - $25.6 million - will go to help close a budget shortfall revealed in newly released state projections. Van Hollen, whose office said he has the legal authority over the money, made the decision in consultation with Walker.

This is probably a derail in itself, but it's a prime example of one of my biggest problem with the libertarian philosophy.
People like talking about how wasteful and corrupt the government is, but the biggest perpetrators always seem to be the state government. Here, that transportation bill that passed a couple years ago, the home insulation credits, the money disappears at the state level, not the federal level. Giving the states more power and money seems likely to cause more problems.

Thanks for the answer, Dimmer. I just wondered if I was understanding it correctly.

Robear wrote:

Thanks for the answer, Dimmer. I just wondered if I was understanding it correctly.

You bet - I understand that it's hard to find good coverage of Wisconsin politics most places (hell, even in Wisconsin it's challenging at times), and am always happy to field questions to the best of my ability.

Governor Walker today filed a request to be granted an additional two weeks to come up with petition challenges. He's already been granted 30 days, which is 20 days more than the law requires.

I'm personally in favor of campaigns being given adequate time to review the recall petitions, but this feels like a stalling tactic. They'd need to successfully challenge almost 50% of the signatures in order to prevent the recall, and given the difficulty Scott Fitzgerald is having coming up with a much smaller number of viable challenges, it is pretty unlikely they genuinely feel they can prevail here.

Case is scheduled to be heard on Friday.

http://chicagoist.com/2012/02/15/wis...
Walkers tummy ache prevents him from visiting a union factory.

Judge Niess has just ruled against granting a two-week extension to the Walker campaign.

Given that the state Senators facing recall have only been able to challenge signatures in significant numbers by lobbying for the redistricting boundaries to be illegally applied, and Governor Walker has no similar recourse, I can't imagine that he'd be able to even issue preliminary challenges against enough signatures to preclude a recall.

His campaign couldn't have been optimistic that they'd get another extension, could they? Is this maybe political maneuvering for the election? Feeding into that "Dane County Judge" victimization complex the GOP played to so successfully over 2011 Wisconsin Act 10 could help rally the base, though I don't know how it'll go down with independents.

Breaking news: Walker's spokesperson has just announced the campaign won't be challenging any signatures.

Walker’s campaign faced a 5 p.m. Monday deadline to file challenges after a Dane County judge granted him a 20-day extension beyond the 10 days allowed under Wisconsin law. Walker’s attorneys had sought two more weeks, but that request was denied.

Matthews said the judge’s denial made it impossible to review the approximately 152,000 pages of petition signatures filed seeking his recall.

She declined comment when asked about future challenges that may be filed by the campaign. She said it would file documents at 2 p.m. today with the state Government Accountability Board but declined to elaborate.

Looks like I was right about the victimization complex thing. Guess we'll see what their next move is in a couple more hours.

Ooh - if true, this is interesting. Early reports that Walker intends to request that the challenges from the third-party group "Verify the Recall" be processed by the GAB in lieu of the incomplete set completed by the campaign. (Partisan story writeup on politiscoop).

Remember that the District 4 Court of Appeals already ruled this month, upholding §9.10(2)(g). At issue there was the Walker campaign's contention that the GAB bore the burden of ferreting out "fake" signatures, rather than flagging anything egregious for campaigns to challenge. That ruling is arguably applicable here, but the law doesn't explicitly state (at least, anywhere I can find) that the only party to have standing as a challenger is the official incumbent campaign.

Wisconsin State Law §9.10(2)(g)[/url]]The burden of proof for any challenge rests with the individual bringing the challenge.

Walker's paperwork has been filed with the GAB (warning, PDF link).

Some highlights:

5. As a result of this deadline, representatives of Governor Walker have been unable to complete a verification of the required minimum of 540,208 signatures. In fact, to this point, representatives of Governor Walker have been able to minimally review and verify only approximately 350,000 signatures.

6. Accordingly, as a challenge to the Petition, Governor Walker hereby demands that the GAB adhere to its prior public statements and the currently pending Order of Judge Mac Davis in Friends of Scott Walker, et al. v. Wisconsin GAB et al., Case No. 11-CV-4195 (Waukesha County) (the "Order"), requiring the GAB to take reasonable affirmative steps to (a) identify and strike duplicative names; (2) identify and strike fictitious names; and (3) identify and strike names where GAB cannot determine that the signatory is a qualified elector, including where addresses and municipality cannot be determined.

It seems deeply weird to me that they're referencing Judge Davis' order in today's filing, since that was overruled by the District 4 Court of Appeals back on February 3rd. District 4 is a state appellate court, so it doesn't seem like there's any leeway to argue jurisdiction here, as there might be if the judgement were coming from the federal level. Any lawyers in-thread, I'd love a more informed guess about what they might be trying to get at here.

10. During a February 7, 2012 meeting of the Government Accountability Board, the Board's Public Information Officer, Reid Magney, informed the Board that staff had been referring to Verify the Recall those individuals who contact the Board with information that their names were improperly affixed to the Recall Petition or with other concerns about the validity of the Recall Petition.

11. On information and belief, Verify the Recall believes existing campaign finance laws prohibit the respective organizations from directly providing to Governor Walker or his representatives the results of the Citizen Verification Process or otherwise coordinating the Citizen Verification Process with the Governor. Consequently, Board staff has been suggesting that individuals report issues with the Recall Petition to an organization that cannot share that information directly with Governor Walker.

12. On information and belief, Verify the Recall will be making the results of the Citizen Verification Process publicly available. Insufficient time exists under the current permissible time frame to evaluate this review process. Accordingly, as a separate written challenge to the Petition, Governor Walker hereby incorporates and submits these third-party challenges.

This portion seems, at least superficially, to have some potential merit. I believe the Grandsons of Liberty and We the People of the Republic (the groups whose combined efforts were branded as "Verify the Recall") both chose to incorporate as PACs. That's their fault, but the GAB should not have been directing citizens to groups who weren't allowed to share information with Walker's official efforts. Seems like the issue of standing and who qualifies as a "challenger" will be the deciding factor.

Semi-relatedly: the document claims the official Walker campaign had 3,000 volunteers. At the end of 30 days, the campaign claims to have only reviewed 350,000 signatures. That means that they averaged fewer than four signatures per volunteer/day. I know volunteers aren't able to work every day, and most aren't working full shifts, but that is shockingly low to me. They would have only had to average 11 signatures per volunteer/day to review the full million. Also, with as much out-of-state fundraising money the Walker campaign is sitting on, surely they could have paid some folks to help review signatures?

That seems commensurate with the effort involved in actually *contacting* every signer...

Robear wrote:

That seems commensurate with the effort involved in actually *contacting* every signer...

I dunno. I've done phone banking for the various recall efforts at different points. It's not that hard to contact people, and supplementing phone efforts with postcard mailings to find invalid address / no such person via return to sender should have sped things up.

Hell, their first response to the "Verify the Recall" groups forming up as PACs should have been to request that concerned citizens come to the campaign offices around the state to help review the petitions, rather than put efforts into something that would have to be partitioned off from the official, legally-mandated challenge process.

Even if the review process was going to be that time-consuming, wth the war chest Walker has, knowing that this review would be needed, I have a hard time understanding why they wouldn't pay folks even a nominal fee to help out. The only way that makes sense to me is if they didn't expect to be able to find a 50% challenge rate, and only want this as a political issue to rally their base.

If they verified people in a random order then verifying 350k out of 540k people essentially means that no significant amount of fraud occurred.

Now that is complicated by the fact that they are essentially trying to prove a negative, so it would take a lot longer to prove someone doesn't exist or didn't sign rather than verifying everything was correct, so it makes since that people more difficult to verify (and hence more likely to not be legit) would take longer to clear, which may skew results, but even accounting for that I can't imagine that there is much of a chance for undetected malpractice on any appreciable level.

Yonder wrote:

If they verified people in a random order then verifying 350k out of 540k people essentially means that no significant amount of fraud occurred.

Now that is complicated by the fact that they are essentially trying to prove a negative, so it would take a lot longer to prove someone doesn't exist or didn't sign rather than verifying everything was correct, so it makes since that people more difficult to verify (and hence more likely to not be legit) would take longer to clear, which may skew results, but even accounting for that I can't imagine that there is much of a chance for undetected malpractice on any appreciable level.

Well, there were a million signatures to recall Governor Walker. 540k is the required minimum to force the recall. That is in part why I think Judge Niess declined to give Walker's campaign another extension - they'd made slow progress, but had gotten through a sizable portion of the petitions (several hundred thousand at that point) - the challenge rate they'd found so far was in the neighborhood of 10-20%. They'd need a successful challenge rate of almost 50% to prevent the recall election.

I was thinking that if they had to verify names, numbers, addresses, and contact the person - if that was the procedure - it could take quite a while. Especially if there was a benefit to working the issue slooooowly...

Poll Shows Scott Walker In Trouble Against Dems In Recall

Against the two declared Democratic candidates, former Dane County Executive Kathleen Falk edges Walker by 48%-47%, while the lesser-known state Sen. Kathleen Vinehout trails Walker by 46%-44%.

Given that the polling numbers show a slight advantage for a couple of the Democratic candidates, a slight advantage for Walker in others, and are in all cases (except for Feingold) within the margin of error, I'm not sure I'd be super comforted by those results. Walker has taken great advantage of the unlimited-fundraising loophole to put together a massive war chest, and I expect there will also be well-funded PACs running negative ads against whoever the Democratic nominee is.

There's a dedicated core of 40% or so whose faith in Walker seems completely unshakeable. From the shenanigans with "Verify the Recall", it seems likely that his campaign will be trying to position the race as being Dane County vs. the rest of Wisconsin. I don't have a good read on how that might play with independents, but he's going to have a lot of money to get that message out there.

I also expect Governor Walker to find some meaningless stuff to pretend to be bipartisan about in the next few months, to try to blunt the (well-founded) perception of him as a divisive figure.

Dimmerswitch wrote:

I also expect Governor Walker to find some meaningless stuff to pretend to be bipartisan about in the next few months, to try to blunt the (well-founded) perception of him as a divisive figure.

Call me Ms. Cleo.

Background: there was a contentious mining bill before the Legislature this session (covered in the Wisconsin State Senate recalls thread). It passed the Assembly, but when the Senate committee started to put some compromises in their version, Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald disbanded the committee and moved the bill to the Joint Finance Committee to get the unedited Assembly version up for a vote. That plan was stymied when Republican Dale Schultz (remember him?) announced he would not support the bill. Schultz has since been working with moderate Democrat Robert Jauch on a compromise version, which removes the most egregious abuses from the original Assembly bill.

Walker's bold response? Announce that the Assembly bill will have to be modified in order to get a mining bill passed before this Legislative session ends.

Gov. Scott Walker said Tuesday that his administration is not wedded to a single mining bill, and he emphasized that any legislation passed in the waning days of the legislative session will need to be changed from current proposals.

Walker spoke to employees of Joy Global Inc., and he used the setting of a mining equipment manufacturer to stress that lawmakers need to pass a mining bill that streamlines the regulatory process while not harming the environment.

The Assembly has passed mining reform legislation, but progress in the Senate has stalled. Sens. Dale Schultz (R-Richland Center) and Robert Jauch (D-Highland) introduced legislation last week that strips many of the changes from the Assembly bill.

Walker said the Schultz-Jauch bill doesn't have enough support and he said that the Assembly version needs to be changed for it to advance.

"There is room to make tweaks along the way," Walker said in a cavernous manufacturing building that assembles P&H Mining drills.

The governor said his administration was talking with Schultz and other senators, including Sen. Tim Cullen (D-Janesville), in the hope of finding a compromise in the Senate.

New Yorker profile piece on the recall.

Still reading through it but so far, it's pretty compelling.