Recall organizers will turn in their petitions against Governor Walker on Tuesday. Democrats released a video Monday night. They say this is three thousand pounds of petitions. It took 60 days, 25,000 volunteers and $1.5 million dollars but Democrats say they’ve got the names to force the first ever statewide recall election in Wisconsin.
“Ninety-nine percent of people will need a photo ID to vote this year,” elections specialist David Buerger told Dodge County Democratic Party members Wednesday night. That likely was not news to the roughly 20 active Democrats assembled at the Dodge County Administration Building to hear Buerger, who works for the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board, discuss fine points of the state’s new, voter photo identification law. What may have been news, however, was Buerger’s briefing on the 1 percent of voters who will not need a picture ID to cast a ballot. For every rule, it seems, there is an exception or two.
Clerks in the state are scrambling to assign voters to the right districts after last summer’s redrawing of legislative maps, with changes to the process putting voters in incorrect locations across town or even across the Atlantic Ocean. The problems could add to the confusion for voters who may already be affected by the redistricting law approved by legislators last summer. Primaries for spring races are being held on Feb. 21, leaving little time to sort out the problems. The errors affect thousands of voters around the state and stem from different sources, including inaccuracies in U.S. Census Bureau data and problems with a new way of assigning voters to districts in a state database.
The review of signatures submitted seeking a recall election of Gov. Scott Walker will take longer than the 60 days originally planned. The director of the Government Accountability Board which is charged with handling the review said Thursday that it’s not clear how long it will take, but it will be more than 60 days. Board director Kevin Kennedy says more time is needed in order to do a more extensive review of the signatures to look for duplicates and obvious fakes as ordered by a judge last week. Kennedy says the board will proceed with the review next week even if the state decides to seek an appeal.
Advocates for seniors are holding education seminars for senior citizens to help educate them about Wisconsin’s new voter ID law, but some are concerned that effort may not be enough. “Every opportunity we get to get the word out, we’re doing that,” said Sue Edman of the Milwaukee Election Commission. Edman heads a panel for seniors trying to educate them about Wisconsin’s new voter ID law.
A judge in Wisconsin threw a curveball Thursday evening into the recall campaign targeting Republican Gov. Scott Walker, ruling that state election officials must make a greater effort to screen out fake or duplicate petition signatures — rather than abide by the pre-existing rules, which have placed more of the burden on the Walker campaign.
The state GOP’s lawsuit filed in mid-December against the state Government Accountability Board, which oversees elections in the state, claims that Walker’s 14th Amendment rights of Equal Protection are violated by putting a burden on his campaign to review and challenge petition signatures within a ten-day period. Instead, they say, the GAB must thoroughly search for and directly strike out duplicate signatures, and invalid names and addresses.
A judge ruled Thursday that the state Government Accountability Board needs to take more aggressive action to vet recall signatures that are expected to be submitted in two weeks against Gov. Scott Walker and other Republican officeholders.
The ruling by Waukesha County Circuit Judge J. Mac Davis came in a case filed Dec. 15 by Walker’s campaign committee and Stephan Thompson, executive director of the state Republican Party, asking Davis to order the accountability board to seek out and eliminate duplicate and bogus signatures and illegible addresses from recall petitions.
Davis, who refused to enter injunctions in the case, based his decision on his interpretation of state law, more than on constitu tional equal protection arguments brought up by the Republicans. He also said that the board must take “reasonable” actions to eliminate such signatures.
A state appeals court has refused to halt a legal attempt by Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign committee to force state election officials to more aggressively screen signatures in a recall attempt against him. But the court also cleared the way for recall campaigns to appeal an earlier court decision in the case.
The appeals court’s action allows a hearing to proceed Thursday afternoon in the lawsuit by the Friends of Scott Walker and Stephan Thompson, executive director of the state Republican Party, against the state Government Accountability Board. The hearing is scheduled for 1:30 p.m. in the courtroom of Waukesha County Circuit Judge J. Mac Davis.
The suit, citing constitutional rights to equal protection, asks Davis to order the accountability board to look for and eliminate duplicate signatures, clearly fake names and illegible addresses on recall petitions, which must be filed by Jan. 17. The accountability board reviews the signatures.
A recall election for Gov. Scott Walker would cost just more than $9 million without a primary and $17 million with a primary, according to numbers released Friday. The Government Accountability Board reached those estimates after receiving information from the state’s 72 counties. The work was done after Rep. Robin Vos (R-Rochester) made a request for the information.
“The costs are significant,” said Vos. “We asked for these figures, hoping that if people knew the cost, they would think twice.” After learning the recall elections in summer 2011 cost over $2 million, Vos wanted to know what a statewide recall would run. In a letter to the GAB back in October, Vos asked for an estimate, saying he wanted voters informed before petitions were circulated for Governor Scott Walker and other elected officials.
“I believe that Wisconsin taxpayers should know the estimated cost of running a statewide election before petitions are circulated. Taxpayers need this cost estimate so they can make a better informed decision as to how their tax dollars should be spent. This is essential information because the recall election costs will have a direct impact on all county and local government budgets,” he wrote.
New state rules that require photo identification to vote could make it harder for the homeless to cast ballots, and local advocates are trying to help. JOSHUA, an interfaith social justice organization, has made it a priority to help the homeless and others in need navigate the new voting laws before heading to the polls.
The legislation, in part, requires people to show photo ID when voting. That can be challenging for a person who doesn’t have a place to call home or transportation to visit a state Division of Motor Vehicles office to obtain the proper ID. Election specialists from the state Government Accountability Board told a group of advocates Tuesday at the Brown County Central Library the law doesn’t make exceptions for the homeless.
A state lawmaker unveiled a bill Wednesday that he says would target “legal bribery” in the effort to recall Gov. Scott Walker. Rep. Evan Wynn, R-Whitewater, has introduced a bill he said would eliminate a loophole in state law that allows recall petitioners to pay others in exchange for petition signatures.
The state’s bribery statutes outlaw paying someone to vote or to sign nomination papers, but there’s no state law on the books against paying someone to sign—or not to sign—a recall petition, Wynn said.
Wynn, who represents the 43rd Assembly District, said he learned of the issue recently after a constituent told him that someone collecting recall signatures door-to-door had paid the constituent’s friend $10 to sign a petition. Wynn has reached out to the state Government Accountability Board over the issue. He called the legal loophole “mind-boggling” and said it allows “legal bribery.”
A judge Thursday ruled against recall campaigns that sought to intervene in a lawsuit over how state election officials check recall signatures. Waukesha County Circuit Judge J. Mac Davis also set Jan. 5 for the next hearing in the case, in which the Friends of Scott Walker and Stephan Thompson, executive director of the state Republican Party, asked Davis to order the state Government Accountability Board to look for and eliminate duplicate signatures, clearly fake names and illegible addresses. All of the issues in the case are expected to be handled during that hearing.
Jeremy Levinson, attorney for recall groups targeting Walker, Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch and three Republican state senators, had sought to make the groups, and some individuals connected with them, parties in the case. Levinson also sought to have the Republicans submit to discovery, which could potentially have opened Walker campaign records to scrutiny by Democrats. With Davis denying the motion to intervene, discovery won’t occur, as an attorney for the accountability board said it didn’t see a need to conduct discovery.
Wisconsin citizens who may be turned away from their polling places in the next election are beginning to share their stories. Ruthelle Frank has voted in every election since 1948 but she’s no longer eligible. Wisconsin’s voter ID law requires a photo ID for voting and a birth certificate is needed to obtain the photo ID.
Born in 1927, Ruthelle has never had a birth certificate. Her name was misspelled at birth and, to obtain a correct birth certificate, she must petition a court at a cost over $200. On her limited income, she can’t afford this amount.
Ruthelle has served on the Brokaw Village Board since 1996. She has a baptism certificate, a Social Security card, a Medicare statement and a checkbook. Without a photo ID, however, Ruthelle can no longer vote and she finds the prospect of being turned away at the polls infuriating.
Wisconsin Democrats late Tuesday filed a motion to intervene in the lawsuit that state Republicans filed on Thursday against state election officials, with the Dems seeking to become legal parties to counter the GOP’s claims that the procedures in the recall targeting Gov. Scott Walker are a violation of Walker’s rights.
A copy of the filing, made in the names of the Committee to Recall Walker and other organizers, was sent to TPM by the state Democratic Party.
The state GOP’s lawsuit filed Thursday afternoon against the state Government Accountability Board, which oversees elections in the state, claims that Walker’s 14th Amendment rights of Equal Protection are violated by putting a burden on his campaign to review and challenge petition signatures within a ten-day period. Instead, they say, the GAB must make a greater effort to look for duplicate signatures, and for invalid names and addresses. (The petitions will be filed in mid-January, which will then kick off the review process. The same procedures were used in a series of state Senate recalls, on both sides of the aisle, earlier this year.)
On December 16, 2011 the Milwaukee chapter of the NAACP and Voces De La Frontera, a Wisconsin group that fights for immigrant rights, filed a suit against the state of Wisconsin’s new voter ID law. The new law is Wisconsin Act 23 and will require voters to show photo identification at the ballots beginning in 2012.
Voces De La Frontera and the NAACP are challenging the law, saying that it is unconstitutional and is intended to marginalize voters. The two organizations’ challenges follow the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) that was announced on December 13, 2011. The ACLU is challenging the law because they say that it violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment as well as the 24th Amendment which was enacted to protect against poll taxes.
Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus said last week she believes she has been exonerated even though her office is undertaking numerous changes in how it handles ballots following the nonreporting of 14,000 votes in the spring Supreme Court election. State investigators in September determined that Nickolaus likely broke the law by not reporting the votes in the hotly contested race between Justice David Prosser and challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg, but her conduct was unintentional and not criminal.
… The Government Accountability Board on Tuesday approved numerous changes designed to improve the procedures used by Nickolaus’s office on election night. Both before the meeting and during a break, Nickolaus told reporters that the investigative report vindicated her handling of the votes.
“I’ve been exonerated,” she said. Government Accountability Board director Kevin Kennedy disagreed. “I would not characterize it that way,” Kennedy said. The September report, led by former Dane County prosecutor Timothy Verhoff, found that Nickolaus likely broke state law requiring the posting of all returns on election night.
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.
Wisconsin’s voter ID law is again being challenged, this time in federal court. It’s the only active federal challenge of a photo ID law, say representatives of the national and state chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, who are bringing the lawsuit.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in the Eastern District of Wisconsin federal court, seeks an injunction against enforcement of the voter ID law, which takes full effect on Feb. 21, 2012 for Wisconsin’s spring primary elections.
“The photo ID law imposes a severe and undue burden on the fundamental right to vote under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution; violates the Twenty-Fourth and Fourteen Amendments to the United States Constitution as an unconstitutional poll tax; and violates the Equal Protection Clause o the Fourteenth Amendment in arbitrarily refusing to accept certain identification documents,” the December 13 complaint (PDF) states.
The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin Education Network filed suit in October against Wisconsin’s law in state court, and the Milwaukee branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is also expected to file a state challenge this week.
Civil rights activists protested stricter voting laws Saturday with a march from the New York offices of Koch Industries, whose owners have supported an organization that favors tighter safeguards against election fraud.
“You can’t accomplish anything if you’re not prepared to fight,” said U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel, wearing a hat with embroidered with “NAACP.” Rangel and other labor leaders and politicians said they wanted to roll back new voting rules passed in several states.
Some of the laws passed in more than a dozen states around the country include requiring photo IDs at the ballot box and restricting voting by ex-felons. Critics say the laws will have a negative effect on blacks, Latinos, students and the elderly.
The reports of how the Republican-inspired voter ID law is disenfranchising Wisconsin citizens, particularly the elderly, keep coming in. Last week the Wausau Daily Herald ran a heart-rendering story about 84-year-old Ruthelle Frank of nearby Brokaw, who has not only voted in every election since she turned 21 in 1948, but has served on the Brokaw Village Board for the past 15 years.
Because of a paralysis she suffered at birth, Frank has never had a driver’s license. That being the case, she, like tens of thousands of other Wisconsin residents without licenses, needs to get a so-called state picture ID card so she can go to the polls to exercise what should be her right as an American citizen.
Under the onerous provisions of this new law, which was gleefully signed by Gov. Scott Walker earlier this year, she has to produce a birth certificate to get the ID. Ordinarily it cost her $20 to obtain a birth certificate since she doesn’t have one — something she finds “crazy.” She has a baptism certificate, a Social Security card, a Medicare statement, a checkbook. “I’ve got all this proof. You mean to tell me that I’m not a U.S. citizen? That I don’t live at 123 First St. in Brokaw?” she said. “It’s just stupid.” But, wait, there’s more to the stupidity foisted on Wisconsin citizens by this Republican-led Legislature.
A second lawsuit challenging Wisconsin’s new voter I.D. law is expected to be filed next week. The Milwaukee branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People will be the lead plaintiff in the suit, which will also include Wisconsin immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera and several individuals, said Milwaukee attorney Richard Saks.
“We’re arguing that the photo I.D. requirement is an unreasonable and onerous burden on the state constitutional right to vote for Wisconsin citizens,” said Saks, who is representing the plaintiffs. Saks said the law is tantamount to a denial of the right to vote for “scores of thousands of voters, if not hundreds of thousands of voters, throughout the state of Wisconsin who don’t have the types of I.D.” now needed at the polls.
According to a survey completed for the website www.GetvoterID.org, those attempting to obtain a copy of their birth certificate to prove name and birth date to then obtain a voter photo ID may encounter a confusing application process. Many counties are directing applicants to a mail-in form which incorrectly informs applicants they need a copy of their photo ID prior to requesting the copy of the birth certificate. Applicants attempting to obtain voter photo IDs are instructed they need their birth certificate to get a voter photo ID, which results in a frustrating cycle with the potential to deter those trying to obtain IDs to vote in 2012.
Confused yet? State law does NOT require applicants to present identification when the copies of birth certificates are mailed to the applicant. However, since the form wasn’t properly updated, the Election Division of the Government Accountability Board, the Department of Health Services, the Wisconsin Register of Deeds Association and 48 Wisconsin counties all post a link to this outdated and confusing form.
No charges will be brought against two groups that were accused of election law violations in the run-up to the August recall election of Sen. Alberta Darling, according to a statement released this morning.
“It is unclear, at best, whether an offer to pay persons to gathers absentee ballot applications on a quota basis comes within the scope of the Election Bribery statute,” wrote Asst. Dist. Atty. Bruce Landgraf, the lead prosecutor on the case for Milwaukee County. “The statute as currently written does not give much guidance to those who wish to follow the dictates of the law, especially in the area of absentee voting.”
Wisconsin Right to Life gave campaign workers $25 gift cards for every 15 voters sympathetic to the anti-abortion cause that were enlisted for absentee voting. Wisconsin Jobs Now, a community and labor group, held five block parties on the northwest side of Milwaukee. They provided food, prizes and a lift to Milwaukee City Hall where voters could cast absentee ballots.
Ruthelle Frank was born on Aug. 21, 1927, in her home in Brokaw. It was a hard birth; there were complications. A doctor had to come up from Wausau to see that she and her mother made it through. Frank ended up paralyzed on the left side of her body. To this day, she walks with a shuffle and doesn’t have much use of one arm.
Her mother recorded her birth in the family Bible. Frank still has it. A few months later, when Ruthelle was baptized, her mother got a notarized certificate of baptism. She still has that document, too. What she never had — and in 84 years, never needed — was a birth certificate.
But without a birth certificate, Frank cannot get a state ID card. And without a state ID card, according to Wisconsin’s new voter ID law, she won’t be able to vote next year.
Ruthelle Frank was born on Aug. 21, 1927, in her home in Brokaw. It was a hard birth; there were complications. A doctor had to come up from Wausau to see that she and her mother made it through. Frank ended up paralyzed on the left side of her body. To this day, she walks with a shuffle and doesn’t have much use of one arm.
Her mother recorded her birth in the family Bible. Frank still has it. A few months later, when Ruthelle was baptized, her mother got a notarized certificate of baptism. She still has that document, too. What she never had — and in 84 years, never needed — was a birth certificate.
But without a birth certificate, Frank cannot get a state ID card. And without a state ID card, according to Wisconsin’s new voter ID law, she won’t be able to vote next year.
Last week, UW-Madison announced plans to issue students a special identification card for voting. UW-Milwaukee is following suit. The university said Tuesday it will create a secondary card to comply with Wisconsin’s new photo ID law.
As WUWM’s Ann-Elise Henzl reports, schools are deciding whether to accommodate students. It comes with a cost. Under Wisconsin’s new voting law, a variety of identification cards are acceptable at the polls, including university IDs. However, UW System spokesman David Giroux says no UW ID cards contain all the information the law demands.
Wisconsin’s election board on Tuesday authorized a state university to issue identification cards that students can use to comply with the new law requiring voters to present photo ID at polling places. University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point joined six other schools authorized by the Government Accountability Board to issue secondary ID cards that comply with the law in Wisconsin, one of several states to pass such legislation this year.
In addition to Stevens Point, the system’s flagship university in Madison along with schools in Milwaukee, Whitewater, La Crosse, Eau Claire and Green Bay will issue the secondary ID cards. The eighth school — the University of Wisconsin-Superior — has received approval to re-issue primary identification cards to all students that meet the voter ID requirements.
A planned mass deputation organized by members of Student Council on Monday night coincided with the announcement that the University of Wisconsin will be issuing voter IDs to students requiring them.
The deputation was organized by Associated Students of Madison first year representative Colin Higgins and involved 13 students. These now-official special registration deputies will be able to register other students and community members to vote.
At least $650,000 will be needed by state election officials to cover the costs of handling petitions for Wisconsin’s upcoming wave of recalls, according to a memo from the state Government Accountability Board. But that estimate doesn’t include costs for local governments, which are expected to be in the millions statewide.
The election watchdog agency said it will need an additional $652,699 to cover recall expenses, including personnel costs, mainly from hiring and supervising about 50 temporary workers to review as many as 1.5 million signatures, renting additional office space, buying supplies and equipment and doing public outreach about the state’s new voter ID law.
Opponents of Gov. Scott Walker said they have faced threats and thefts in the days since the recall effort began. Two volunteers in the petition drive reported violent threats made against them to the police. Neighbors in Monona also complained to authorities of politically motivated thefts from their yards.
The threats involved phone calls from an area code in Minnesota. The calls came overnight after Walker’s opponents began the recall, said Madison resident Tom Peer, who said he received a call at 2 a.m. on Thursday. “They said, ‘If you don’t stop circulating recall petitions, we will kill you,'” said Peer.