Last Thursday, Governor Scott Walker filed a lawsuit seeking to force the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board (GAB) to "look for and eliminate duplicate signatures, clearly fake names and illegible addresses" from the recall petitions that will be submitted against him next month.
Normally, a campaign must identify these potentially invalid signatures on its own and then submit a formal challenge against those signatures to the GAB. However, Walker must figure that finding signatures like that would be, like, really time consuming. As such, he is filing a lawsuit in the hopes of forcing the public employees at GAB to do it for him.
Today, Walker defended the lawsuit in a press conference:
At a news conference Monday, Walker mentioned a news report of a person saying he signed a recall petition at least 80 times is a sign that the GAB should take additional steps to review the petitions.
“If people want to sign it — and they have every right to in this state — it should be enforced that they can sign it once and they actually have to sign it with a real name related to a real voting location in this state.”
First, it's a relief to know that Scott Walker thinks people have the right to sign a recall petition. Second, the type of enforcement Walker is calling for already exists, the only caveat being that the legal teams of the elected official facing recall must identify the problematic signatures on their own.
Even though this is a process all of the nine state senators—three Democrats and six Republicans—facing recall had to go through over the summer, it is apparently too much for Scott Walker. As such, he has decided to add to the grand tradition of rugged individualism by filing a lawsuit arguing that you should never have to do anything yourself if the government can do it for you instead.