The article on SC's second ALEC bill on voting doesn't mention that another bill to limit voting is working its way through the State House. H 4549 would impose draconian requirements and fines on anyone who tried to register voters. Every form would have to be accounted for, and every signed form would have to be turned in within two days. Fines go up to $1,000 and more. (Similar legislation in Florida is now in the courts.) The League of Women Voters has announced they would probably have to withdraw from registration efforts.
Why is the southern GOP so afraid of voters?
Bwilhm, I am not sure where I am not "telling the truth" to readers. True the Vote has, in fact, been the subject of multiple allegations of voter intimidation.
Those allegations were serious enough to compel the U.S. Department of Justice to send personnel to Harris County, Texas to make sure that True the Vote's poll watchers did not continue their voter intimidation tactics.
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/10/doj_to_monitor_polls_in_harris_county_sheriff_joes.php
Just because a Republican County Clerk in Harris County Texas refused to pursue charges does not mean they were "cleared" -- especially when his investigation consisted of nothing more than calling up polling places and asking if there was anything wrong.
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/10/county_clerks_office_dismisses_voter_intimidation_allegations_in_tx.php
Besides, it certainly seems like "voter intimidation" is an appropriate term to describe sending white Tea Partiers to minority voting districts to confront African-American voters and hover behind them as they cast their ballots.
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/10/the_texas_democratic_party_expanded.php
As for "telling the truth," the group you are defending is the same one that doctored a photo of an African-American woman holding a sign, changing it to read “I only got to vote once.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/glenn-w-smith/right-wing-voter-suppress_b_706550.html
If you really want to get into "telling the truth," just look through a few pages of the signatures that True the Vote says are "ineligible" or that need "further review." As discussed in the article, the Texas group you are trolling for is making very, very dubious claims about what their data really shows. The only group doing a "substandard job of verifying / validating the signatures," to use your words, is True the Vote.
I have not seen anything from True the Vote "stating their belief that there were more than the 540,000 eligible petition signatures needed to initiate a recall election." The group's Executive Summary, which I link to above, says there are only 534,685 signatures "based on data available," which certainly seems to imply that recall proponents did not meet the requisite 540,000 signatures.
Mark Antill of True the Vote acknowledged to the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel that recall proponents probably had enough signatures, but said his group did not reach a conclusion about whether there were enough recall petitions signed to trigger an election.
http://www.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/walker-wont-challenge-recall-petitions-8r4bpcq-140601963.html
And as stated in the article, both the signatures deemed "ineligible" and requiring "further review" should not have been marked as such, so even the 534,685 number was very misleading.
You also say True the Vote "only received 138,000 of the 152,000 petitions supposedly submitted," which seems to imply that the GAB refused to turn over all the petitions. I have heard nothing about True the Vote not having access to all the petitions -- just that True the Vote failed to enter all of the documents into their database.
Finally, you are wrong when you say that the "GAB stated they could not review" the signatures. They stated their review would have a limited scope, and that it is up to the candidates facing recall to bring challenges. Governor Walker has raised $12 million to protect himself against recall, and was granted 3x as much time as is allowed under state law to review the signatures. He voluntarily chose not to direct his sizeable resources towards doing a thorough review. By the Texas-based True the Vote getting involved in Wisconsin's recall process and releasing misleading results based on a shabby analysis of the data, they have done nothing to "preserve the integrity of the election process." The real impact of their effort is to unnecessarily cast doubt on the work of the over 20,000 Wisconsinites who gathered signatures throughout the cold, snowy Wisconsin winter, and to tarnish the work of these people (who actually live in this state!) with baseless accusations of fraud.
So what am I getting backwards?
Prompted at another web site defending what True The Vote had done, I took a look at their 'Duplicate Names Report'.
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- At random, I looked at True The Vote page number 177.
The first eight entries on the page point to link ending sw042814.png, and also to sw042764.png (where I figure I was going to find the duplicate signature to the first link)
Sw042814.png points to Walker petition #42967, and sw042764.png points to …Walker petition #42967!
That is, page 177 of the TTV duplicates report is telling me that there are eight ‘duplicates’, when in fact all they’ve done is somehow manage to duplicate a Walker petition page.
(Amazing as that is, they also somehow manage to then NOT report signature #4 on that page as being a duplicate.)
I didn't happen to pick the 'needle in the haystack; There are maybe *hundreds* of such entries where the 'duplicates' actually point to the same page.
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Another page selected at random, TTV page 228, shows at the first entry that someone named Dawn Cotter signed twice – first on Walker petition #51563, and then again on page #51566.
The second entry on that VTR page then reports THE SAME duplicate signature, but in the reverse order!
That is, VTR counted her duplicate signature as two duplicates into their total.
The third entry on TTV page 228 shows Robert W Cobb; original petition at sw051374.png, duplicate at sw065846.png.
If you then scroll down to TTV page 281, you find a report for Robert W Cobb, original at sw65846.png, duplicate at sw051374.png.
Again, not that I chose the page 'luckily'; TTV reported many duplicates twice (but not all; that would be too consistent, and make estimating actual duplicates too easy).
Under state law, one is legit, and one gets thrown out.
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Hard to guess how many of the 5000 or so are actually duplicates; maybe half? maybe fewer than half? (But it is also worth noting that even 5000 would NOT be a particularly large number of duplicates. Many of he 2011 senate recalls and the current senate recalls show duplicates in the half-percent to one percent range.)
Brendan,
You are really having a problem with this and have gotten this backwards.
True the Vote issued their results on 2/28 stating their belief that there were more than the 540,000 eligible petition signatures needed to initiate a recall election. True the Vote became involved with verifying the recall signatures to preserve the integrity of the election process in Wisconsin when the GAB stated that they could not review the 1.3-1.5 Million recall signatures the gatherers claimed to have gathered. True the vote was not involved because of an interest in the outcome of the recall election itself.
The True the Vote review determined that the petition gatherers had grossly overstated the number of eligible signatures and did a substandard job of verifying / validating the signatures before submitting them to the GAB: 557,000 signature lines were blank, 55,000 were ineligible and another 229,000 required further review. Since True the Vote only received 138,000 of the 152,000 petitions supposedly submitted, they projected that there were likely enough eligible signatures in the remaining 14,000 petitions and/or among the 229,000 signatures requiring further review to meet the minimum level needed for a recall.
I also see that you tagged an old article to accuse True the Vote of wrong doing. You should have tagged the multiple articles stating that they were cleared of these false allegations over two years ago, but then again telling the truth to your readers does not appear to be your strength.
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