http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x1257226Yesterday I monitored the video link to the proceedings at the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (see link above).
The Board met to review and resolve challenges against recall signatures/petitions collected by Republican operatives against State Senators Wirth, Hanson and Holperin.
I tuned in late, sad had to miss a few other pieces, but would like to share my impressions of what went down, and how it will impact future recall attempts.
The Board is made up of about a half-dozen members (I'm not sure if everyone seated with the Board were actual Board members) all of whom are former judges (per testimony). I'm sure the details can be divined if one is interested.
The Republicans had collected and submitted ample recall signatures to force each of the three Democrats to face recall elections. The Democrats were challenging the validity of the signatures.
The essence of the Democratic argument was that the Republican collection process was rife with misrepesentation constituting fraud, and there should be sufficient penalty to deter future attempts at such behavior. Two sub-points immedately became hot issues.
The first was that there was insufficient time or money to do a thorough investigation of the signatures submitted by the Republican operatives. Only 300 phone calls were made to petition signers (out of some 40,000). Affidavids provided by signers who indicated the petition circulators had either misrepesented the purpose of the peition or outright forged their signatures numbered in the hundreds.
The attorney for the Democrats argued that the evidence of fraud that was presented (more later) was
"the greatest act of election fraud the State has ever seen" and could be used by the Board to extrapolate the pervasiveness of the fraud.
The second was that there is very little case law to cite as precedence. Two cases were cited, neither particularly analogous to the case at hand. In one case, an entire election had been thrown out since there had not been adequate ballots for a majority of the voters who turned out. The other was somewhat obscure (at least to me) and not given much attention by attorneys. Neither was in Wisconsin.
The allegations of wrongdoing were extensive. Republicans hired paid-by-the-signature mercenary circulators (apparently all from either Florida or Colorado) to collect signatures. Several of these people gave addresses of motels, mail drops and other locations that were insufficient for them to be located now, which is the point of making them put an address on the petition. That is fraud.
Petitions circulators were accused of misleading citizens about the purpose of the petition. Numerous People signed affidavits stating they were led to believe it was for a school building project, to recall Republicans and other lies. This misrepresentation is fraud.
The Board agreed that the actions of the circulators was fraudulent, and indicated they would refer the matter for prosecution (not in a motion, but in discussion, which didn't strike me until just now).
Then the Board had to decide how many signatures/petitions to throw out. This is where they set the precedence. Their task was to balance the rights of People who signed the petitions legitimately against those who were being subjected to recall. In the end, they sided, greatly, with the rights of the People who signed legitimately. Or rather, may have signed legitimately.
They failed to consider ANY misrepresentations or other fraudulent behavior that wasn't documented. The idea of extrapolating other fraud was not accepted.
They then chose the second-most lenient penalty. This despite their apparent consensus that "rampant fraud" had been committed.
The most lenient penalty would have been to strike only those signatures that were DQ'd. The second was to strike the individual petitions containing signatures that were DQ'd. That means, at most, ten signatures DQ'd for every fraudulent signature documented within the time and financial constraints imposed by the process. In practice, it was less than that since multiple DQ'd signatures appeared on individual petitions, and some petitions did not have the full ten signatures. In the final analysis,
only a few hundred signatures were DQ'd, despite the fact that the most fraudulent of the paid-by-the-signature circulators submitted 2,300 signatures. Ms. Sherry Ferrill can't be found, so we can't ask her anything.
So, to the precedence. The attorney for the Democrats argued that if one party can just submit a huge number of fraudulent signatures, knowing the other party will not have ample time and money to challenge enough of them to make a difference, there is no way to protect the People against such actions. Powerful argument.
The attorney for the Republicans argued the Board could create rules in the future to prevent such activities. This was exactly contradictory to his argument during the challenges. At that time he said the Board did not have the authority to DQ more than individual signatures, not petitions or a whole submission, and
that the Board could only follow the laws passed by the legislature and signed by the Governor(you could smell both the appeal, if necessary, and the Walker cronies re-writing the Board rules).
I think the whole thing sucks. "Rampant fraud" committed, no real penalty, bad precedence set.
As always, I welcome your thoughts.
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