The Republican leader of the state Assembly wants to make it against the law to sign a recall petition more than once. Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald says the state’s election agency has not been clear enough on the issue. “There was a situation in West Bend where a gentleman was scratching out recall signatures and was charged with a felony, and then we saw a gentleman on the news last week who was blatantly saying that had signed the recall petitions against Governor Walker eighty different times,” says Fitzgerald. “I thought the GAB would clarify that that was also fraud.”
In fact, Government Accountability Board director Kevin Kennedy says that man has been identified and referred to authorities, but Fitzgerald says what he did, ought to be a felony. “We saw a few liberal groups saying to do this on their website, and the GAB not coming out with a clear stance against it . . . so we are going to make this a class I felony,” says Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald is also calling for dismantling the current Government Accountability Board, which is just four years old, and replacing it with the previous system of separate ethics and elections agencies.