The impossible task of verifying signatures on the Walker recall petitions.

WISN reports that the Government Accountability Board will only check the addresses and dates that accompany the signatures. It will "flag" names that seem suspicious — e.g. Mickey Mouse — but "will not strike them without challenge." To initiate a recall election, there will need to be 540,208 valid signatures, so significantly more than that will probably be submitted.

The GAB plans to hire about 50 temporary workers to conduct the review of what it expects could be up to 1.5 million signatures.

Judge Thomas Barland, a GAB board member, asked what was being done to prevent the temporary workers being hired to review the petitions from attempting to sabotage one side or the other. All people hired will be subject to the same background check that GAB staff are to ensure they don't have a partisan background, Buerger said.

There are a lot of partisan citizens around here. I assume they don't all have a "partisan background," whatever that means.

The goal is to have the petition review done in public, but because where that will be done hasn't been determined, it's not yet known how broad the access will be, Buerger said.  Electronic copies of all the petitions submitted will be available upon request, he said.

The board plans to ask a court for an extension of 60 days, instead of just 31 days, to finish its review. Challenges must be made within 10 days after copies of the petitions are given to the targeted office holders, but an extension to that is also expected to be sought.

So the burden is on the target of the recall to find the duplicate signatures and phony names, for maybe over a million signatures, on a tight deadline! By "electronic copies," I assume they mean scans of the handwritten signatures. I want typed-out names, so you can use a computer to do targeted searches. I mean, I'd like to know if anyone signed my name and address, but how would I check? Read the handwriting on all of the pages?

The Republican Party and Walker's campaign have started their own website asking for people to submit information about signatures that ought to be disqualified, including multiple signatures.

Walker and those targeted are at a disadvantage since they can't see the signatures collected until after they are submitted, while circulators can weed out problems before they are submitted.

What a mess! I hope they are planning to get the signatures quickly typed up and presented on a webpage so that everyone who wants to check names can do so. I am especially concerned about the appropriation of names of people (like me) who did not sign. I am genuinely afraid of fraud and don't think we have anything close to decent safeguard in place.

ADDED: Instapundit says:

You know, events in Wisconsin have made me wonder if — despite its longstanding reputation for “good government” civil society there is basically a sham, an overlay on a corrupt one-party machine. One expects this sort of thing in Illinois, but Wisconsin?