Wisconsin Recall Office Burglarized (and I’m Calling it a Hoax)

Jesus, this is going to be a mess:

Green Bay police are investigating an apparent break-in at the office of the “Recall Dave Hansen”effort at 1136 W. Mason St.

Petitions, a computer and T-shirts were among the items reported stolen, police said.

The Democratic state senator is among the lawmakers being targeted in recall efforts stemming from Wisconsin’s ongoing budget controversy.

The burglar or burglars broke a window to make entry, police said. The incident occurred between 5 p.m. Thursday and 8 a.m. Friday, police Lt. David Paral said.

Organizers of the effort, in an email to media, blamed the break-in on “the (opposition) of ‘Recall Dave Hansen.’” Police said they did not have descriptions of suspects.

Total value of the missing items is slightly more than $1,000, Paral said.

Before the Recall Hansen folks get too carried away pointing fingers, let’s get a few things straight here:

There is NO INCENTIVE for Hansen supporters to commit such a crime. Hansen won his district by 32% most recently, so even if enough signatures did get gathered by the recall effort, there’s little likelihood of Hansen losing a recall election.

The Recall Hansen team also has had some organizational issues, like finding enough volunteers. This was apparent such a problem that they offered to pay people to do it by posting an ad on Craigslist:

The recall Hansen group is even looking to pay people to collect signatures. In a Craigslist ad they posted, they offer 50 cents a signature saying there is an unlimited short term earning potential.

This, of course, the same kind of pay-for-names scheme that conservatives used to blast the artists formerly known as ACORN for doing, suggesting that it led to voter fraud.

Or just regular old felons. The Recall Hansen folks recently had to fire a paid, out-of-state canvasser after he was arrested for stealing and subsequently was shown to have an extensive criminal record.

Originally there were two Recall Dave Hansen efforts, but they merged, a process that can lead to leadership quarrels and disgruntled ex-members.

But the biggest reason of all to be skeptical of the Recall Hansen folks is how they’ve publicly marked their progress thus far. It’s been scatter-shot at best. On April 1st they said:

The recall Hansen group says they are halfway to the 13,852 required signatures, and hope to be all the way, by Tuesday, election day [April 4th].

So they thought they could bring in 7000 signatures in over 4 days. Which they apparently accomplished:

The recall campaign against Sen. Dave Hansen, D-Green Bay, said its haul of more than 3,000 signatures Tuesday likely propelled it past its goal of getting enough signatures to force a recall election.

Keep in mind this was before both recall campaigns merged, a process that should have added signatures to the grand total, but somehow, three days later on April 7th, they were still short of their goal:

That combined effort is now very close to having the required number of signatures after a surprising release of the total this afternoon.

After combining signatures and adding up the total, we are at 12,973. We need 13,851. Victory is a reality with 19 days to go.

And even though they were able to bring in 4000 signatures during the three days before the election, they still need another week to find gather the 900 signatures to put them over the hump (yet again) yesterday, when the campaign announced that it had finally gotten the signatures required to start a recall:

Organizers of the campaign to recall state Senator Dave Hansen of Green Bay say they have  enough signatures to deliver to the State.

The groups targeting the Democratic state senator are planning a victory party Saturday. Then they say they’ll double-check their petitions before handing them over to the State.

Wow, what awful timing.

Here’s what one can reasonably suspect happened:

The Recall Hansen organization is basically being run by amateurs who are having a trouble finding signatures. The problem is that they are probably accountable to someone, somewhere in Wisconsin (my guess is in Madison). This looks like they have inflated their progress to the press and, more importantly, their superiors and now find themselves in a bit of a bind with only ten days left before the recall period ends. So someone, who is probably pretty new to politics, but still thinks of themselves as the next Karl Rove cooks up a little plan wherein a mysterious robber steals away with the recall signatures in the middle of the night, before the gang has had the chance to turn them in to the GAB, which not only spares them the wrath of their overlords in Madison, but also has the added effect of making the opposition look crooked.

Bravo, Machiavelli.

Do I have any proof of this? No more than the Recall Hansen people do of Watergate-style burglaries led by the opposition. Throwing a brick through one’s one campaign office window in an attempt to win some sympathy is one of the oldest tricks in the book, but at the end of the day the Recall Hansen people have to answer one very simple question:

What the fuck were the signatures doing in a place where someone could steal them? Why didn’t someone bring them home at the end of every day and put them in a safe place? I don’t care how safe the neighborhood is, they should have at least put in place a system that would have made accident loss of misplacement of the signature damn near impossible.

This doesn’t look like a crime so much as an idiotic hoax.