By M.D. Kittle | Wisconsin Reporter

MADISON — At an average rate of 2.7 signatures entered every second, Wisconsin’s recall petition vetting effort appears to be humming inside the Verify the Recall network.

And a top official with the tea party-backed initiative said the review of hundreds of thousands of petitions to date has found numerous invalid signatures — validity issues that could spell problems for the campaign to recall Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, the group contends.

Verify the Recall, a joint venture of the Wisconsin GrandSons of Liberty and We the People of the Republic, tea party organizations aligned with fiscal conservative movements, bills itself as a grassroots effort of more than 12,000 volunteers, working together to check the validity of Wisconsin’s recall petitions.

Ross Brown of Madison, one of the founders of Verify the Recall, said the group hoped to disclose the first round of its data review — on the four Republican state senators targeted for recall — by late Wednesday or Thursday.

The initiative has turned its attention to the reported 1 million-plus signatures in the petition drive to recall Gov. Scott Walker, next moving on to a review of signatures from the campaign to recall Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch.

Brown said volunteers have found numerous abnormalities in the petitions, although he could not provide numbers.

“We’re finding duplicate signatures, which is something everyone expected to find,” he said.

“We’ve found fake names in this process … we’ve found things that are questionable. We’ve found a series of signatures deemed invalid because they are missing date, or other things,” Brown said.

Not enough?

The initiative is working with TruetheVote, a Houston-based nonprofit focused on election integrity issues.

Mark Antill, the organization’s executive director, described TruetheVote  as “tea party 2.0,” graduating from holding signs to reforming election law.

The organization’s proprietary software, with the help of an army of petition checkers, uses a system of multiple-platform cross references to sort through the signatures, multiple times.

Antill said the review found the Committee to Recall Scott Fitzgerald is conservatively short in its drive to recall the Juneau Republican by about 2,000 signatures — not counting perhaps dozens more signatures that could be contested.

“Right now the recall wouldn’t pass,” Antill said. “If you look at just the number of non-empty lines, they don’t have enough.”

After pulling out invalid signatures, Antill said, the review found the committee collected about 14,500 signatures, some of which could be contested. That would be far short of the 16,742 signatures from the 13th Senate District electorate required to force a recall.

Last month, the recall committee on turning in its petitions announced it collected 20,600 signatures — 123 percent of what was needed.

Lori Compas, a Fort Atkinson woman who has led the campaign against Fitzgerald, said she is confident the committee will have many more signatures than required.

“He (Fitzgerald) can complain about the process all he wants, but the facts are the facts,” she told Wisconsin Reporter. “Anyone can go online and see the petitions, see our effort was honest and legitimate.”

Fitzgerald has said he plans to contest thousands of signatures, and said the recall campaign should have followed newly drawn legislative boundaries in gathering signatures — put together by Republicans — and not the maps that have been in place for the past decade.

The new political boundaries, originally set to be implemented for this November’s general election, remain tied up in court. Fitzgerald and fellow Republicans have argued the new maps should be in place for any recall election.

Compas said she received direction from the GAB and state Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen.

“I trust the attorney general. I don’t trust Scott Fitzgerald,” Compas said.

Safe campaigns, dubious numbers

Antill said TruetheVote’s review of the other Senate recall petitions found invalid signatures but not enough to preclude the recall of Republican state Sens. Van Wanggaard of Racine or Pam Galloway of Wausau.

State Sen. Terry Moulton, R-Chippewa Falls, might have a solid challenge to the recall drive against him, Antill said.

“They could make a pretty decent challenge,” he said, noting there are a number of questionable signatures in the mix. The campaign needs 14,958 valid signatures to force a recall.

Senate candidates have until Thursday to challenge the petitions.

Walker can contest through Feb. 27, and Kleefisch has until March 5, due to the staggering nature of the GAB’s release of petitions.

The accountability board is expected to finish its review by March 19.

Verify the Recall now turns its attention to reviewing the Walker recall signatures.

Brown said thousands of volunteers, from every state, are entering an average of 2.7 signatures per second.

At that rate, Antill said, the verification drive could take another 10 to 12 days.

A random-sample analysis by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found 15 percent of the signatures invalid, not enough to stop a Walker recall movement that needs 540,208 valid signatures.

While critics have complained Verify the Recall is a partisan effort from people with a vested interest in protecting a conservative governor, Brown said the organization’s mission is the integrity of the election process. That includes transparency.

To that end, Brown said, Verify the Recall intends to challenge in court the accountability’s board decision not to accept third-party verification.

The GAB’s director and legal counsel Kevin Kennedy said the agency’s rules do not provide for third-party involvement.

But the rules leave some individuals unsure of how to proceed when they find inconsistencies on petitions, although a GAB official said the agency will make accommodations to resolve the issue.

“What we will do, is to put something on the (GAB) website saying that if people have these concerns, or if they actually find something on the petitions that is suspect, that they should contact the incumbents,” GAB spokesman Reid Magney told Wisconsin Reporter Tuesday.

Brown, of Verify The Recall, paints the pursuit in patriotic terms.

“If we lose integrity in the process, we lose America as we know it, and that’s not acceptable,” Brown said.