Granted, the Government Accountability Office has not yet made the formal announcement making the Recall Election of Scott Walker official, but Walker's recent decision not to challenge the signatures just about puts an end to his base's speculation and rumors about the quality and quantity of petition signatures.
Cognitive Dissidence Excerpt:
First of all, he had three times the amount of time allowed by the law to do what he needed to do. Secondly, Walker has raised more than $12 million for his recall campaign thanks to the law that waives any limits on donations. The reason for that waiver is so that he could use it to defend himself by checking and challenging the signatures. He could have hired 15,000 people - one for every ten sheets turned in - and paid them $100 for the day to check the signatures and still had enough to overdose everyone in the state with his insipid, fact-free commercials.
Easily. He could have bought two more weeks of time two weeks ago by spending a few million dollars if he thought he had a chance to discredit the recall petitions. No way that was going to happen.
Not when there are preliminary numbers like this:
Wisconsin State Journal Excerpt:
Verify the Recall and True the Vote, another petition review group, on Monday released their own analysis of more than 800,000 of the signatures. The groups said their more than 14,000 volunteers from around the country had found some 55,608 ineligible signatures, 228,940 signatures in need of further investigation and 534,685 eligible signatures.
Remember again, these numbers were compiled and posted by outfits out to discredit the petition drive. They had a "no sign" form page for Wisconsin residents to sign in and verify they did not sign the petition, but does anyone really believe they would post a data base and form page for Wisconsin voters to verify those that they claim need further investigation? Not a chance.
As far as I'm concerned, those numbers verify the recall. Thank you tea party patriots! We can conservatively figure that 70 percent of the 228,940 signatures needing further investigation will pass muster. That brings the total eligible to 700,466 signatures and that's with more than 10% of the petitions still not counted. These percentages run true to the historical averages of past recalls. We'll likely see the official number closer to 770,000+ eligible when it's all said and done. Far more than the necessary 540,208 necessary to trigger the recall.
Fact is, Scott Walker did not run out of time. He ran out of hope. But we are dealing with a ruthless cabal of dirty rotten scoundrels in control of state government, so anything can happen.
Additional:
Tea Party "Crazy Brother" charged with nine felonies of forging signatures in possible attempt to discredit recall effort.