The Government Accountability Board puts scanned recall petitions on line — even though the ACLU raised concerns about privacy.

The petitions show over a million names and addresses of (purported) Wisconsin citizens who (presumably) want a recall election to remove Governor Scott Walker.

I'm saying "purported" because I don't know the extent to which there are fake names or names of non-Wisconsinites in there. And I'm saying "presumably" because I don't know whether people signed their names as a result of what they truly want and whether they all understood what they were signing.

Anyway, the ACLU concern seems to be about stalkers. Some people have good reason not to want their name connected to an address in such a visible manner. In fact, I assume that there are some people who signed the petition who would not have signed if they had been warned that this would happen.

Right now, it's very hard to look up names, because the GAB website only has scanned petition PDFs up. You can't do a search for names.

Walker supporters have until Feb. 26 to challenge signatures. The Republican Party has more than 2,000 volunteers lined up to review signatures. It takes 540,208 to force a recall.

Obviously, these people could type all the names and addresses and post them on line. That would make it very easy to look up names, and I've said before that I want that so people (like me) can make sure our names were not appropriated by others and so we can look for duplicate names and suspiciously overused addresses. But since the total number of signatures submitted is so much larger than the number required, it's much less important to work at weeding out all the bad names. Not that there shouldn't be any checking. There should a process of sampling petitions to get a sense of the degree of accuracy, and if the incidence of bad signatures does not exceed, say, 5%, then we could feel confident that there are enough signatures (since nearly 50% of the signatures would need to be bad to avoid the recall election).

On the other hand, as a political matter, in fighting the recall, Walker supporters have an interest in portraying the recall effort as spurious, so if they can point to petition fraud, even if it is insufficient to avoid the election, it may help Walker win.