With another recall petition scheduled to be handed in Thursday, the agency responsible for clearing signatures is expected to request an extension from the Dane County Circuit Court to allow more time to finish their validation process.
The non-partisan Government Accountability Board has 31 days to examine signatures on petitions to recall lawmakers. But with the unusually large amount of recall committees announcing they have gathered the required signatures, the GAB said it did not know if finishing in 31 days is a feasible or a good idea.
“We’re asking for an extension simply because we’ve never seen this amount of petitions before and we wouldn’t be able to process them in 31 days,” GAB spokesperson Reid Magney said. “We also want to try to synchronize the election dates of any petitions that are found to be sufficient.”
If special elections are called in different districts around the state, GAB officials would like the voting to take place on the same day so certain citizens in Wisconsin do not confuse the time of their election with the scheduled voting day of another election, Reid said.
The GAB would also require more staff members so staff are not stretched thin. Reid said the GAB has asked the state’s Joint Finance Committee for $40,800 in order to hire additional temporary staff. The committee will hold a meeting to discuss the request sometime in the future, Reid said.
Historically, requesting an extension on the deadline to validate recall petition signatures is not unique. Two senate seats in 1996 and 2003 were being contested through a recall drive and the GAB received an extension for both, Reid said.
Recall campaigns have already filed four petitions containing an estimated 99,500 signatures with the GAB office and a petition for Sen. Jim Holperin, D-Conover, is scheduled to be filed Thursday morning.
Jim Holperin Recall Committee spokesperson Kim Simac said she will be handing in more than 21,000 signatures – 5,000 more than required by the GAB. Simac said the distance between each community and “old man winter” were obstacles she felt glad to have overcome.
“It’s a great feeling, and the best thing was meeting all the wonderful people across the district who felt just as passionate as I did,” Simac said. “There is an overwhelming majority of people who do not condone Holperin’s decision to go to Illinois.”
Holperin is one of the 14 Democratic Senators who left for Illinois during the budget repair bill’s path through the Legislature. The move by the Democrats forced a halt on the bill’s progress and was scoffed at by Republicans.
Simac said Holperin made a decision to align himself with the small percentage of public workers in his district instead of the many thousands who supported Gov. Scott Walker’s bill.
The senator said he does not regret his decision, however.
“I think if we hadn’t done that, some other pretext for a recall would have been advanced and we’d have a recall election anyway,” Holperin said. “The step we took to delay a vote on the original bill in my view was well advised.”
Holperin added he was elected by a clear majority in 2008 and he would wait until the results of a special election to see if his actions were supported or not.
