Tea Party Led Verify the Recall Tosses Democracy out with supposed "ineligible" signatures.

If you ever wondered how accurate the teabilly group "Verify the Vote" was in their efforts to help Scott Walker beat the recall, check out this analysis by the Center for Media and Democracy:  

Claims by an out-of-state Tea Party group that the campaign to recall Governor Scott Walker is fraught with error do not stand up to even limited scrutiny. Findings released this week from the Tea Party-led “Verify the Recall” effort allege that recall proponents fell short of the 540,000 signatures necessary to recall Governor Scott Walker. However, a cursory review of the pages they allege are erroneous actually include the information they claim is missing. Signatures the groups deem “ineligible” are very clearly legitimate. Some of the problems appear to arise from data entry errors on the part of True the Vote volunteers.

The “data” put forward by the groups involved in Verify the Recall has served as fodder for right-wing media outlets to claim the recall petition collection efforts were riddled with problems, if not outright fraud.


True the Vote discounts the signature of Mary Babiash (page 980) because she added the state abbreviation “WI” to her zip code. Her address is otherwise correct.

The group calls Clifford Winkleman’s signature (see page 3) ineligible because it has a “bad sign date … it looks like he pushed hard when he wrote the “10” in “01/10/2012.” Linda Winkleman, who lives at the same address, signed below him, and also on 01/10/2012.

The signature from Tyrell Luebkes (see page 983) would not be counted because he entered his city in the “street address” section, and vice versa.

They would not count Cheryl L Koch’s signature (see page 497), saying she had a “bad sign date” of 1/91/12 because of a stray pen stroke behind the “9” on the correct sign date: 1/9/12

The Government Accountability Board told CMD that administrative rules require that all signatures be approached with a “presumption of validity,” and state law requires a review of each petition “on its face.”

True the Vote considers Heath Beacher’s signature (see page 497) ineligible because “1/6/ 2012” (note space) was entered into the database, causing the software to mark it with a “bad sign date.” Kelly Ullrick signed a recall petition with her full name, but the True the Vote volunteer entering her into the database (see page 984) failed to include her last name. Meghan Walsh’s signature (see page 168) is deemed invalid for a “bad sign date,” because the True the Vote volunteer entered “!!/!^/!!” instead of 11/11/2011.

This is not a case of a few isolated examples being used to refute a much larger set of data. These examples were all identified after a very quick review of the results on the True the Vote website. Signatures marked "ineligible" for a "bad sign date" appear perfectly admissible. Some recall signatures appear to be deemed "questionable" for imperfect handwriting.

True the Vote says their “involvement in the petition review is simply to help uphold the integrity of the process.” But their misleading assertions, inaccurate data, and dishonest framing do little more than undermine and cast doubt on the process they claim to uphold.