State elections officials received a 30-day extension on the amount of time they will have to verify and validate more than 1 million reported signatures for the recall of Gov. Scott Walker and separate petitions for four Republican senators.
In a Wednesday hearing before Dane County Judge Richard Niess, the Government Accountability Board received an extension of 30 days to validate recall signatures, Reid Magney, GAB spokesperson said. This gives the GAB 61 days to review and validate the signatures beginning Jan. 17.
The efforts against four of the Republican senators facing recall – Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, R-Juneau, Sen. Pam Galloway, R-Wausau, Sen. Terry Moulton, R-Chippewa Falls, and Sen. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine – also received a 10-day extension to review signatures for a possible court challenge.
The Republican senators now have 20 days to review the petitions from when they received them last Friday, Magney said.
The board granted Walker and Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch 30 days to review petitions from the date they received them, Magney said. The GAB plans to send scanned copies of the petitions to Walker by Friday and to Kleefisch sometime next week.
While the board can return to the court to ask for more time in reviewing the signatures, officials do not know at this time if they will be requesting additional time or not, Magney said.
While Walker’s campaign now has 30 days to review and challenge signatures, they have to do the review within the 61 days the GAB has, Ciara Matthews, a spokesperson for the Friends of Scott Walker Committee, said.
“Our extra 20 days is in conjunction with the GAB’s 60 days; it is not an additional 30 days,” Matthews said.
Marathon County Democratic Party Chairman Jeff Johnson, a candidate running in the Senate race against Galloway, said he thinks regardless of the amount of time Galloway asks for, the number of signatures will still be there.
He said the Democratic Party already has spent time checking and rechecking the signatures on the petitions to recall Galloway to make sure there are no duplicated or fraudulent signatures.
Graeme Zielinski, Democratic Party of Wisconsin spokesperson, accused Walker and the Republican Party of stalling the recall election. He said the Republican Party likely plans to spend millions of dollars challenging recall petitions.
Zielinski said Walker wants the election to happen, but also wants to control the timeline of when it happens.
“The governor himself wants the election,” Zielinski said. “He could, with a wave of a wand, make this happen.”
The Democratic Party also maintains the GAB should count to a valid 540,208 signatures and then hold a recall election, which Zielinski said is the process for all other signature collecting in the state.
However, Magney said the law requires the GAB to examine all the petitions and to come back with the total number of valid signatures. He said petitioners raised a similar issue in the court but the judge did not order the board to count to the valid number.
Magney said all the petitions are scanned in, but the GAB still must verify the scans and make sure the petitions did not receive marks during the scanning process.
