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Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) was just dealt a defeat in court, with Dane County Judge Richard Niess denying a request by Walker for more time — on top of a previous extension — to review and challenge the more than one-million signatures that Democrats filed last month to recall him.
The request was filed with the court on Tuesday, and argued Friday, with a ruling coming very quickly afterward. Had the request been granted, the potential existed for the official certification and triggering of the recall to be delayed. As the Associated Press reports, Niess said that Walker did not show good cause for a further extension.
This result may have come about due to an admission that Walker’s legal team made in their filing: Of the amount of processing that they had completed, they claimed a discovered an error rate of only between 10 and 20 percent, consistent with the 15% figure in a random sampling by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Such a rejection rate is not unusual when an opposing campaign actively looks for alleged deficiencies and challenges against signatures.
However, the Democrats’ submission of over a million signatures was nearly twice the required threshold of just over 540,000, or 25 percent of the total number of voters in the 2010 gubernatorial election. As a result, the Walker campaign would need to disqualify nearly half of the signatures in play here — a rate that is very far above their current tally.
