Recall petition hijinx

I know what you’ve been thinking — what happened to the blog’s obsession with bizarro Wisconsin politics?  Don’t worry, things haven’t settled down here.  It now appears that nine senators, six Republicans and three Democrats, will face recall elections this summer.  There’s one hitch, though:  Democrats say that the petitions for recall of the Dem senators are filled with fake signatures copied from phone books, including one from the father of Democratic State Representative Marc Pocan.  Not to say that dad’s can’t disagree with their sons politically — but the senior Pocan died in 1991.  He’s still in the phone book, though — and he’s still in the books as a signature for recall.

The recall petitions are all scanned and online, in case you want to do your own detective work.  For instance, I might want someone to take a second look at page 2505 of the petitions to recall Jim Holperin from Senate District 12, which has just two signatures, both illegible, gathered on April 1; scrawled across the whole page is a message that appears to say “F**K SCOTT WALKER AND ABORTION.”