Christian Schneider

Author, Columnist

Month: July 2011

Panning for Signatures in Ohio

On Monday, I wrote about all the signatures the pro-public union group We Are Ohio collected in order to bring Governor John Kasich’s newly-minted collective bargaining bill up for a public vote.  Despite the extremely low threshold of 231,147 signatures to subject the law to a referendum, We Are Ohio turned in 1.3 million signatures.

Last week, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted announced the collective bargaining law would appear on the November ballot, and released the results of the state’s signature validation process. Husted announced that “more than 915,000 of the signatures were valid.”

As Mike Antonucci points out at the Intercepts blog, while 915,000 is an impressive number, it falls well short of the 1.3 million signatures turned in.  In fact, over 25% of all the signatures submitted by the unions (351,925 total) were found to be invalid.  As Antonucci points out, some of Ohio’s largest counties had some of the highest percentages of invalid signatures:

Of the 159,946 signatures submitted from Franklin County, 48,972 were invalid (30.6%). In Lucas County, 34.4% of the signatures were invalid. In Cuyahoga County, 36.2% were invalid, and in Hamilton County 49.9% were invalid.

Most of the signatures that were tossed were because the person who signed the petition lived in a different county than the one in which the papers were circulated.  Presumably, those 351,925 were easy to check.  But what about the 915,000 that remain?  If a petitioner has an error rate of 25% right off the bat (and about 50% in some counties), how much faith are we supposed to have in the signatures that haven’t been disqualified?  If you had a friend who lied to you 25% of the time, wouldn’t you look askance at the 75% of things he swore to you were true?

It’s as if the unions are panning for signatures – just throw some giant rocks onto the secretary of state’s plate, and hope that when all the sand and gravel is sorted out (at great cost to the taxpayer), there’s enough gold there to force a referendum.  There’s just no way any state department can sort though and validate 1.3 million signatures with any kind of accuracy in such a short time span.

In order to streamline the process, there should be a penalty for submitting hundreds of thousands of bad signatures.  Make the petitioner reimburse the taxpayers for the cost of counting all the bogus signatures.  Dock the unions one valid signature for every two invalid ones.  Punish each circulator who turns in bad signatures with making them watch 10 hours of whatever Keith Olbermann’s show is now called (which would quadruple his audience, come to think of it.)

In any event, the current signature process in Ohio is like aiming a fire hose at the secretary of state’s staffers and asking them to catch the water with Dixie cups.  If this process works for unions in Ohio, there’s no doubt it will be employed here in Wisconsin, where only around 500,000 signatures are required to force a recall of Governor Scott Walker in 2012.

Wisconsin Flexes Its Star Power

Tuesday night’s utterly predictable recall election win by Democratic State Senator Dave Hansen of Green Bay followed the usual protocol:  At about 9 p.m., Hansen strode to the podium at his victory party and predicted Democrats would take back the state senate when other recall elections are conducted in August.

But Hansen’s speech was followed with a bizarre appearance by – and this is not a joke –  Jon “Bowzer” Bauman of the ‘70s faux-greaser doo wop group Sha Na Na, who congratulated the Democrat on his win and predicted more big wins by Democrats in future recall elections.  Cashing in on Sha Na Na’s biggest hit, Bowzer eschewed any attempt at dip-dip-diplomacy, predicting Republican state senators would soon have to “get a job.”  (If there was any question that everyone in America was on drugs in 1972, that last clip will put that doubt to rest.)

Under normal circumstances, such an appearance by a D-minus list celebrity would have been scary and a bit confusing.  But since the Wisconsin collective bargaining fight broke out in February, Wisconsin has been flooded with once-notable celebrities whose name you thought would never pass your lips again.

On February 26th, a rally was held outside the state capitol featuring guest speaker Gabrielle Carteris, best known for her role in the early 1990s as high school virgin Andrea Zuckerman on Beverly Hills, 90210.  (And best known to everyone under the age of 35 as “who?”)  Carteris, who portrayed Zuckerman at the age of 30, has primarily been employed as a video game voice-over artist for the past decade.  Apparently Luke Perry’s sideburns were booked and couldn’t make it.  (Or, worse yet, they support Scott Walker.)

Following Carteris was Guiding Light actor Robert Newman, who is best known by people who mistakenly think he is Paul Newman.  The event was emceed by former Billy Madison foil (and West Wing alumnus) Bradley Whitford, who actually is kind of a star, but hails from Wisconsin, so he shows up for every lefty rally in Madison.  (Whitford would later disavow his role in Billy Madison, which is a considered a criminal offense by anyone who owns the first four Pearl Jam albums.)

A March rally featured Green Bay native and “Monk” star Tony Shalhoub, whose sister works as a public school teacher in Wisconsin.  Shalhoub was joined by Susan Sarandon and the ubiquitous Jesse Jackson, who became as much a part of the protest scene as “Scott Walker is Hitler” signs.  Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello showed up to rally the crowd, apparently undeterred by the crushing defeat I handed him in a Guitar Hero battle on Playstation two years ago.

In fact, Wisconsin is probably best known for its fictional celebrities.  Large chunks of this summer’s Bridesmaids and Transformers 3 were filmed in Milwaukee.  Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Titanic supposedly hailed from Chippewa Falls.  Fond du Lac was the fictional childhood home of There Will be Blood’s Daniel Plainview, who is best known for drinking other people’s milkshakes and clubbing them to death with bowling pins.  And let’s not even get started on the Fonz, who is memorialized in downtown Milwaukee with his own bronze statue.

As for the recall elections, it’s not as if Senator Hansen needed the much-sought-after “1970s fake greaser doo wop band” voting bloc to come through for him.  When Republican Assemblyman John Nygren failed to garner enough signatures to make it to the ballot, it left the GOP without a serious candidate to challenge him.  The only Republican left running owed $25,000 in back property taxes and had been arrested four times on domestic violence charges.  (His campaign slogan of “my wife is a crazy alcoholic” didn’t quite match “Yes We Can!” for inspirational value.)

Yet while spending weeks pointing out what a terrible candidate the GOP was running, now Democrats are crowing about Hansen’s re-election, as if it was some monumental triumph that signals momentum for the anti-Walker cause.  It does not.  It merely signals that voters prefer their state senators to dabble a little less in domestic violence.

The state now moves on to the remaining eight recall elections, in which six Republicans and two Democrats are in danger of losing their jobs.  And as for celebrity sightings, voters will certainly be moved when Weezie shows up at the capitol arguing that fish don’t fry in the kitchen, but concedes that beans may, in fact, burn on the grill.