Alberta Darling Randy Hopper
It appears there is, at least currently, a strong groundswell for using the Wisconsin recall procedure to push back against the Republican attack on collective bargaining in the Budget Repair Bill; and the attacks on public education, the University System, BadgerCare and other public assistance to the poor contained in Governor Walker’s proposed 2012-2013 budget. But it may be very difficult for a groundswell today to translate into effective recall action in the future. And it is almost certain, barring the continued absence of the Democratic 14, that the recall effort will not serve to prevent the BRB or the Budget bill from being enacted in form similar to what the Governor is seeking, because of the time lag in getting to a recall election.
Mounting an effective recall effort is a daunting task under Wisconsin law. The officeholder that is the target of a recall has lots of advantages in fending off the effort:
1. The number of signatures needed on the recall petitions is quite high, 25 percent of the total votes cast in the Senator’s District for all gubernatorial candidates in the last Governor’s race.
2. The legal window for collecting sufficient signatures on recall petitions is very short, 60 days. That window begins with the registration of a petitioner seeking the recall with the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board ("GAB"), and ends on the 60th day from the date of registration, no extensions permitted.
3. This means that it is counterproductive to commence the recall effort by a formal registration until substantial organizational efforts (and fund-raising efforts) have been made to print off recall petitions (each petition holds ten signatures, so securing the signatures needed for a particular Senator will require two thousand or more petitions, see point 6 below), identify potential persons to circulate the petitions, coordinate the distribution of the petitions for circulation, assign areas in electoral wards to each circulator, double-check the accuracy of the information on petitions that have been returned to the recall committee, photocopy the petitions that are filed, and follow-up with additional petitions in the latter stages of the recall circulating period to account for problems found in earlier signatures. Without careful coordination, the effort will be a fool's errand.
4. The petitions that are circulated must be in the proper form. The GAB has a sample on its web site.
5. There will be a natural reluctance of many voters to sign a recall petition because it will serve to put the government through extra expense and will be viewed as unfairly overturning the prior will of the electorate. Many voters will think: “I don’t care for what this Senator has done, but the right time to cure it is in the next regular election cycle.”
6. The GAB web site lists the number of valid signatures needed for each of the Republican Eight here. However, the number of petition signatures obtained in a recall effort as to each of the Senators probably needs to exceed the stated amount by thirty percent or more, as a safety factor, for a number of reasons:
a. There will be people signing the petitions who will deliberately try to create valid challenges to their signatures, perhaps by putting inaccurate information on the petitions, or by not dating their signatures, or by failing to fill in their entire correct street address.
b. There may be individuals who sign up to circulate the petitions with the express purpose of interfering with the effort. For example, persons who will not make a honest effort to canvass their assigned wards, or will purposefully leave necessary information off the petitions as to signatures in an effort to invalidate the signatures.
c. There will be signatures on petitions of non-registered voters. The signatures will have to be checked against the registered voter rolls.
d. There will be many honest mistakes made on the petitions that will invalidate signature.
d. It can be very difficult for a petition canvasser walking around a neighborhood to keep straight whether the street they are working on is in the Senate Assembly District or not. Below, for example, is a small portion of the Senate District 8 Map of Senator Alberta Darling’s district, with her district shaded in green. It will be easy for an canvasser to cross over on Parkland Street from Brown Deer Ward 9, into the southwest quadrant of this picture, which is in another Senator's District.
Eight of Nineteen Republican Senators are currently subject to recall: Robert Cowles, District 2; Alberta Darling, District 8; Sheila Harsdorf, District 10; Luther Olsen, District 14; Randy Hopper, District 18; Glenn Grothman, District 20; Mary Lazich, District 28; and, Dan Kapanke, District 32. (None of the Assemblymen, Republican or Democratic, are subject to a recall effort being commenced by circulation of petitions until after November 4, 2011, as each is in his or her first year of office of a new two-year term.)
Alberta Darling won the 2008 election in her district by only 1,008 votes, or about one percentage point. Randy Hopper won his election by only 184 votes. Dan Kapanke won his election by 2507 votes. While several of these senators look more vulnerable to recall than others, a case can be made that it makes sense to attempt to recall all eight, with the possible exception of Mary Lazich, from a Republican Senate District around the GOP stronghold of Waukesha.
For example, Republican Senator Robert Cowles ran unopposed in Senate District 2, winning relection in 2008 with over 99% of the vote. Nevertheless, the Assembly seats encompassed by his Senate District, State Assembly Districts 4, 5 and 6 were all hotly contested, and although only one of those three seats went to a Democrat in the 2008 election, that winning Democrat, Tom Nelson, did so well that the total votes in the three assembly races broke in favor of Democrats by a margin of 44,535 to 40,027, or 53% to 47%. In the 2010 election, Tom Nelson did not run for re-election and State Assembly Districts 4, 5 and 6 all polled in favor of Republicans with the two democratic Candidates (GOP Assemblyman Tauchen ran unopposed in District 6) garnering only 17,539 votes. The number of registered voters that need to sign a recall petition to force a recall election of Senator Cowles is 15,960, a high percentage of the Democratic assembly votes in 2010, but only about 36% of the Democratic Assembly votes in 2008. Moreover, the most hotly contested State-wide race in 2010 in Senator Cowles' district was the Walker - Barrett race. In that race over 60,000 voters in Senator Cowles' district voted for Tom Barrett. Moreover, it is possible that some of the voters in Senate District 2 who voted for Senator Cowles in 2008 are not happy they did so now.
Similarly, Senator Luther Olsen ran unopposed in 2008, and won over 99% of the vote. But the number of necessary recall signatures for Senator Olsen is only 14,733, and the three Assembly races (Assembly Districts 40, 41 and 42) in his Senate District in 2008 garnered some 36,326 votes in favor of the Democratic candidates in those races. In 2010, the Democratic votes in those three Assembly races dropped significantly, down to about 20,500 votes.
The Wisconsin General Accountability Board (the new overseer of elections) has web pages to access to analyse the raw voting data in Senate and Assembly districts to determine whether a recall effort seems feasible or quixotic. This page will take you to Excel spreadsheets with ward-by-ward vote totals for each of the eight Republican Senators and the ward-by-ward vote totals for each assemblyman in their Senate district in the Fall 2008 general election. This page will take you to the same Excel spreadsheet data for the 2010 Assembly races. The vote totals in these spreadsheets can help a recall committee identify by voting wards where they might find voters most responsive to signing a recall effort, and where they may be getting doors slammed in their face. The Legislative Reference Bureau also has an almanac of all the Legislature's Senate and Assembly districts that has very useful information on the demographic and educational make-up of the districts.
Successful recall efforts will require a highly coordinated and cooperative effort from teachers, policemen, firemen, local and state workers, organized labor from the private sector, parents upset by school aid cuts, citizens angry over cuts to aid programs for poor children, and voters who traditionally vote for Democrats. Without significant coordination and cooperation, the efforts will simply be an exercise in tilting at windmills.
Miscellany:
The GAB's County by County total of Wisconsin's 3,493,927 registered voters is located here.
2,983,417 Wisconsin voters voted in the presidential election of 2008, or about 71% of Wisconsin residents of voting age. However, the percentage of registered voters that voted in the 2008 presidential election was over 85%. The difference in the two percentages is accounted for by the number of persons eligible to vote who have not bothered to register.
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