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By Ryan Ekvall | Wisconsin Reporter
MADISON — There’s a reason state Sen. Scott Fitzgerald’s campaign couldn’t find Timothy P. Sucker, an alleged fictitious name signed on a petition to recall the Juneau Republican.
The last name is Suckow, said Lori Compas, who spearheaded the campaign to recall Fitzgerald.
“He challenged Sucker,” Compas told Wisconsin Reporter on Monday. “Obviously, if you look at it, it’s Suckow. It’s O-W not E-R. It’s took us, like, two minutes to find that.”
The jury may be out on that one — handwriting being in the eye of the beholder.
Wisconsin Reporter attempted to reach Timothy P. Suckow, but he has an unlisted phone number.
But despite a flood of challenges by the incumbent and apparent validation of many of Fitzgerald’s claims by a third-party recall verification movement, Compas reiterated that she is “confident this (recall) is going forward.”
And so goes the recall petition challenging process.
Four GOP state senators targeted for recall may be stretching their grievances, according to a Wisconsin Reporter review of their challenges.
The great majority of the contested signatures involve redistricting lines drawn by the Senate Republicans last year.
State Sen. Van Wanggaard of Racine, for instance, challenged 20,427 signatures. Nearly two-thirds of those challenges were based on the newly drawn maps meant to take effect for the November 2012 elections.
“The Government Accountability Board (or GAB) will have to look at that (redistricting maps) in light of the challenges (brought forth by incumbents), but that was certainly the opinion the board adopted last November,” said Kevin Kennedy, director and legal counsel for the GAB, the state elections watchdog.
“For recall, you use the old districts. My sense is that will continue,” Kennedy said.
Should that be the case, two state senators, Pam Galloway, of Wausau, and Wanggaard would face recall elections, barring unforeseen issues.
Sen. Terry Moulton, of Chippewa Falls, and Fitzgerald appear to have more substantive challenges, though both face uphill battles based on figures from TruetheVote.org, a tea party-based elections integrity organization, and the senators’ own challenges filed with the GAB.
TruetheVote, using the existing district maps, or the ones that have been in play for the past decade, found that 1,273 signatures on petitions to recall Moulton came from outside his 23rd Senate District. That number is double the 588 signatures Moulton challenged, though the senator did challenge another 6,260 signatures based on the new boundaries.
However, the incumbent has made his share of potentially suspect challenges. For instance, Moulton challenges at least five records, because the signer used ditto marks instead of writing a complete address — something the GAB has said is acceptable.
Other challenges include petitions where the circulator failed to sign the bottom of the petition completely, marking only the month and year, or marked the date 1/1/2011 instead of 2012.
According to the GAB, an error in the footer of a petition invalidates the entire page of signatures. Out of 12,347 challenges made by Moulton, 4,388 were based on an issue with a date being illegible, omitted or outside the petition circulation period.
Then there are areas with more shades of gray. For example, some petition signers wrote Chippewa or C.F. instead of Chippewa Falls. Since the GAB procedure doesn’t address that situation, the GAB takes the incumbent’s challenge and the petitioner’s rebuttal into account and then makes its final ruling.
Calls to the four state senators facing potential recall elections were redirected to Dan Romportl, executive director of the committee to elect a Republican senate. Calls to Romportl were not returned.
Fitzgerald made similar challenges, leading his opposition to optimism.
“I can’t give you exact numbers, but as I’ve been saying for a month now, I’m sure we have more than enough signatures to trigger a recall election,” said Compas.
The Fort Atkinson resident cited challenges made by Fitzgerald based on the date of signatures and invalid addresses. Fitzgerald challenged numerous petitions dated Nov. 15, 2011, the first eligible date for circulating petitions. He said 994 signatures were dated outside the petition circulation period.
“There’s a ton of other challenges that the volunteers are able to debunk as they go through line by line,” Compas said.
TruetheVote executive director Mark Antill sees it differently.
“I think Moulton definitely (has enough valid challenges to stop the recall effort). Fitzgerald, he should be able to challenge adequately,” Antill said.
He noted his organization has been conservative when it comes to vetting signatures for validity.
“We start with the assumption (a signature) is eligible. If we weren’t 100 percent certain … we didn’t mark those as ineligible, we just said you might want to look at it.”
But TruetheVote only looked at 14,061 of the 20,600 or so signatures initially reported by the Committee to Recall Fitzgerald. Those signatures now appear on the Fitzgerald website.
Some of the names may have been lost in the process of transferring data from the GAB website to TruetheVote’s software.
On Friday, Antill said either the database of petition signatures released to the public was corrupted or missing hundreds of pages.
A Wisconsin Reporter computer-assisted review earlier this month found 200 pages of petitions missing from the public file of the Gov. Scott Walker recall campaign, something GAB acknowledged and said it would correct.
GAB spokesman Reid Magney on Friday told Wisconsin Reporter he could not explain the disparity in the two sets of numbers.
“What we got from the (recall) committees was their estimate. That’s the number we included on our website,” he said. “We’ve gone through the petitions ourselves, but we are not releasing how many signatures we have found.”
Kennedy effectively said the same Monday.
“I don’t know what’s going on with that, we’re checking on that to see what the inconsistencies are,” he said.
The recall committees have until 5 p.m. Tuesday to submit their rebuttals to the incumbents’ challenges. The incumbents then have two days to respond to the rebuttals.
Notwithstanding any changes, the GAB has until March 19 to determine the validity of all recall signatures.
