Verifying the signatures on the Scott Walker recall petitions.

According to email from the Verify the Recall effort, "over 13,000 volunteers" — typing in the data from scanned petitions — are "78% of the way through the 152,000 pages."

Scott Walker has signed his own petition 4 TIMES so far!
His wife Karen only signed it twice!

Yes, there will be some fake names on the petitions. (Walker's wife's name is Tonette, and "Karen Walker" sounds like a common name, so I'm presuming the name had Walker's actual address, or that exclamation point is very annoying.)

From the website:

We've built a system that will check the submitted signatures and give a full account of the findings - but first over one million petition signatures must be entered into the database so that the information can be analyzed for duplicate entries, false names or addresses, and other errant data.

I'm surprised they concede there are "over one million petition signatures." That's the claim the signature-gatherers made, but I doubt that anyone has counted the signatures... or even the pages. 152,000 is too round of a number. I'll bet they measured the stacks of pages and multiplied by some number of pages they believed were in any given inch. Moreover, if you divide a million by 152,000 you get 6.58. The individual pages have 10 lines, but not all lines are necessarily filled out. They must have estimated 7 signatures per page and multiplied to get to "over 1 million." I'd like to know how many signatures there really are, first, and then it's a matter of challenging bad signatures. Since only about 540,000 signatures are needed, there's an effort to make us think the exact numbers don't matter, because there are twice as many as needed. But that's propaganda for the recall, and it's important for the people to know that the procedure is fair and accurate. Give us the truth.

Meanwhile:

[Dane County Judge Richard Niess] denied Gov. Scott Walker's second request for more time to review signatures on his recall petitions, leaving a Feb. 27 deadline in place.

That means Walker is getting 30 days to review the material, including keying in the data (with thousands of volunteers).

Walker's attorneys claimed, "the potential margin of error found by the campaign committee to date (excluding the search for duplicates) was between 10 and 20 percent."

That was a statement made after 25% of that data was keyed in.

Judge Niess decided that with that margin of error there is "little likelihood" that enough signatures will be flagged to stop the recall.

Won't the rate of finding duplicates increase as the data entry approaches 100%? And, again, do we  know how many signatures there actually are? I don't believe they've ever been counted. As Democrats used to say during the old Bush v. Gore controversy, "count all the [signatures]."

The state Democratic Party said in a statement that it hoped Niess's ruling would end Walker's "heinous attempt to avoid accountability," and stop the governor's defenders from "smear(ing) what was a miracle of democracy."

Heinous. Smear. Miracle. Here's my advice to the Democratic Party: Don't declare yourself to be a "miracle" and don't call your opposition "heinous." There is a process here, and you want people to respect the steps you've taken in the process. Be circumspect, and do everything you can to convince the people of Wisconsin that the process is sound.

Rushing along the thousands of people who are working at typing in the handwritten names and addresses makes you seem as though you're trying to prevent people from finding errors. You should calmly and virtuously invite the other side to check your work carefully. Portray the petitions as the result of diligent work that realistically demonstrates what the people of Wisconsin want. Not a "miracle."

As you seek to wrest power away from the man the people gave it to in the last election, try to look like competent managers who can be trusted to handle the state's serious business. Not like childish enthusiasts who infuse politics with a misplaced religious fervor.

ADDED: If you live in Dane County, you might want to vote in the primary elections today, which include one circuit judge position. Here's the League of Women Voters website with candidate's answers to various questions.