In March, the #Wisconsin Government Accountability Board certified 900,939 signatures on a petition to recall Governor Scott Walker. Apparently, they found 4,001 duplicate names, and struck 26,109 incomplete signatures. They discovered only 5 fake names.
Whether the latter number strains your credulity depends on whether your name is Eric Holder, I suppose. I find it unlikely that there weren’t more bogus names. After all, there were as many University of Wisconsin doctors violating professional ethics in order to write fake “illness” excuses for Madison protestors a very short time ago.
Yesterday, Wisconsin held a primary to select candidates for the recall election. In total, 670,278 people voted in the Democrat primary. This means nearly a quarter million (230,661) of those who signed the recall petition didn’t vote for a Democrat. There are many conclusions that might be drawn.
1. The names weren’t fake, they just weren’t living people.
2. The 230,000 voted for Scott Walker. Though he was effectively unopposed, he garnered 626,538 votes.
3. Social pressure to sign the petitions was high, and many people signed a petition they did not believe in.
4. The 230,000 didn’t vote. They were turned off by overreaching Union tactics.
Evidence supporting number 3 is that the recall petition was heavily, nearly exclusively, Big Union driven. They managed to get a large number of signatures, but 25% came from people who didn’t care about the result of the primary they helped initiate.
Evidence supporting number 4 is that the preferred Big Union candidate needed a huge turnout to win, which she didn’t get, even though unions spent heavily on negative ads against her opponent – now the Democrat candidate for governor. Among other things, the unions said he was just like Scott Walker. We can only hope.
If we accept numbers 3 and 4 above as explanatory, we get a good demonstration of why unions want to eliminate the secret ballot from union organizing activities. This is known popularly as “Card Check.” Card Check proposes to dramatically change union certification rules. Under existing law, workers are allowed to vote for or against unionization in a federally supervised secret ballot election. Under Card Check, proposed by Orwellian inclined Democrats as the “Employee Free Choice Act,” if more than 50% of workers at a facility sign a card, the government must certify the union. A secret ballot election would be prohibited, whether workers want one or not.
By forcing workers to sign a card in public — instead of vote in private — Card Check is a recipe for intimidation and coercion.
What people do in private is different from what they do when a union rep is breathing down their neck.