Let us now join the Bored At Work Network and check out people scanning 1.9 million signatures on 305,700 submitted pages in order to create a database that can be checked and cross-checked for legitimacy. Viewing this is all the rage now in Wisconsin, and whole twitter narratives are being constructed in which the staff members get to be the actors in various fictional projections, get assigned nicknames like Bald Stockton and Sideburns. You can join thousands of Wisconsinites and catch the action from an undisclosed location in Madison!
Check it out here. It is even more boring than an eagle cam! But on the other hand, I just watched a guy in a black shirt pick up a whole stack of petitions and carry them off. Where did they go? Did they get restacked somewhere? Is one of the signatures that I gathered among the stack? Will the penmanship of a million citizens be taken to task? NBC15.com mentions the booming popularity of this site:
Seated in his West Washington Street office in Madison, Tony Kapela watches as hundreds of users log on and off of the Government Accountability Board's Recall Cam.
If he steps away from his desk he can keep track of his favorite new office mates with his cell phone.
Kapela works for 5Nines: the tech company that set up the Recall Cam. As of Friday afternoon, more than 60,000 people have viewed the cam.
"I'm kind of flattered that people are taking notice of it because it really is a way to let people know in fact that we do this kind of stuff, " says Kapela.
It's gotten so popular that someone has even started a Twitter feed for the cam. The jokester went as far as to name most of the workers seen in the stationary shot. There's Magnets and Bald Stockton, named for his basketball abilities after someone saw him tossing crumpled paper into the trash. Then there's Flirty and Sideburns -- also named after some on-camera observations. Lionel Richie even danced his way into one picture. Courtesy of Photoshop he was featured on the ceiling of course.
Here's a link to the twitter feed if you hunger for some snark.
I'm told that all of the Senate recalls have been processed, and can be viewed as pdfs right here. I opened a few pdfs and found that they were for the Scott Fitzgerald recall. That is fascinating to me, after meeting activist Lori Compas, who, without help from the DPW, organized the collection of over 20,000 signatures. It is cool to know the person responsible for the signatures on these pdfs!
After submitting almost 2 million signatures to recall Walker, Kleefisch, Moulton, Galloway, Wanggaard and Fitzgerald, we now look to the tedium of how things get done. In the past, it was up to the incumbents to verify the veracity of signatures, after the Government Accountability Board did a "face value" perusal of legitimacy. However, in the ever litigious environment that is Wisconsin politics, Walker and his crew submitted a lawsuit against the G.A.B based on the fact that the rightwing supported MacGyver Institute - a fake news organization funded by the Bircherite Bradley Foundation - had aggressively asserted that fraud was running rampant among the petitioners. Not only did they find one old dude who said he "signed 80 times" (which has become a rightwing meme around here) but that people could sign as "Mickey Mouse" and "Adolf Hitler" and not be thwarted by the GAB. The GAB's point was that, yes, this could happen even after "face-value vetting", but it has historically been the incumbent's responsibility to contest. This is why the incumbent is allowed limitless fund-raising in such a circumstance, so that he/she has the resources to do their own investigation, relieving the taxpayer of that burden.
This just wasn't good enough for our law and order Republicans. Based upon a new law they passed early last year, the State can seek redress on any issue in any court throughout the State. Walker and his cronies went to (where else?) Waukesha, where they found a judge who supported them and ruled that the GAB had to verify all signatures. This is done on public money, which allows Walker to elevate the expense of the recalls as he hits the airwaves.
Here is more information about Walker's frivolous lawsuit. Here is evidence that the "Mickey Mouse" meme was a false flag operation, planted by Walker supporters. Here is an article about the GAB's response to the lawsuit, which in my opinion has been very professional, level-headed and responsible. After being ruled against, they invested $100,000 in scanning and OCR technology to create a database of the signatures so that verification can responsibly happen with as little delay as possible.
It is worth mentioning that the whole lawsuit that forces the GAB to do this meticulous work is based on unsubstantiated allegations of fraud, even while it was the Republicans who began to assert that they had operatives who were gathering signatures and then destroying them. While gathering signatures, I encountered many people who said things like, "Now, are you one of the real recall people? How do I even know?" My lame little "official" card wasn't too convincing to people who had been victim of these insidious seeds of doubt. Therefore, many people signed more than once. This, then, gave the Republican's radio mouthpieces the "evidence" of fraud, so stories like MacGyver's "80 signatures" stuck in the vacuum between gullibility and journalistic anemia.
But it won't matter. No matter how many zip codes were written where the state should have been, or how many signatures appear spidery or broken due to pens freezing in the cold, our 1.9 million signatures on 305,700 pages will not be discounted. It will merely take a long time to count.
Meanwhile, enjoy the show! Somewhere, baby birds are being fed, kitties are being nursed, suns are rising or setting, and in some undisclosed location in the midwest, pages bearing the signatures of a hopeful democracy are being one-by-one fed through scanners, stacked, labelled, and carried off camera, waiting in the wings for the spurious contestation that will result in the delay of the inevitable election which will oust the most extremist and divisive Wisconsin politician since Joseph McCarthy.