By of the 
 
 Madison - A Republican effort to stall recall elections by forcing Democratic primaries to be held will cost taxpayers at least tens of thousands of dollars, a check of local election clerks shows. 
 
 Meanwhile, the top Senate Republican said Tuesday that all GOP recall targets were familiar with the plan to delay the recall elections by fielding fake Democrats in primaries. Earlier, some of those recall targets claimed they didn't know about the plan. 
 
 Recall elections for six Republican senators are scheduled for July 12. If there are multiple candidates from the same party in any of those elections, the July 12 election becomes a primary election, and a general recall election will be scheduled for Aug. 9. 
 
 Republicans are being recruited to run as Democrats in all six races so the general elections would be pushed back a month. That will give Republicans a crucial extra month to campaign, said Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau). 
 
 Fitzgerald said all six Republicans facing recalls knew about the plan. That differs from statements by Republican Sens. Randy Hopper of Fond du Lac and Luther Olsen of Ripon that they were not informed of it. Jennifer Harrington, the campaign manager for Sen. Dan Kapanke (R-La Crosse), has said she did not know of the plan. 
 
 "All of them were aware that this was taking place," Fitzgerald said. "Some were questioning the angles on it." 
 
 He said it was discussed at the state Republican convention in Wisconsin Dells in May. 
 
 After Fitzgerald made his comments, Olsen continued to insist he had no knowledge of the plan. Asked if he was sure he didn't know about it, he said: "Unless I wasn't paying attention, but I'm sure I was paying attention." 
 
 Hopper couldn't be reached Tuesday, but on Sunday he said he knew nothing about it. "My campaign and myself don't know anything about this," he said then. 
 
 Expensive process 
 
 Holding the primaries will not be cheap. 
 
 La Crosse County Clerk Ginny Dankmeyer estimated costs to the county and various municipalities would total $50,000 for a primary in Kapanke's recall election. 
 
 Dankmeyer said a primary election would cost just as much as the general recall election. The costs of the recalls would include paying poll workers, printing ballots, using supplies and other paperwork. 
 
 A spot check of other communities in the recall districts found municipal costs ranging from $2,000 in Kaukauna to $15,000 in Fond du Lac. For counties, the check showed costs ranging from $2,200 in Dodge County to $18,500 in Outagamie County. 
 
 Fond du Lac County Clerk Lisa Freiberg said the county alone would have to pay $10,000 to cover primaries in the Olsen and Hopper recall elections, and that the city of Fond du Lac would have to pay $15,000 for the two potential primary elections. 
 
 "This is going to be costly," Freiberg said. "We just keep spending, spending, spending on elections this year." 
 
 Marquette County Clerk Donna Seddon said having an additional election would put a strain on county budgets. 
 
 "It's going to double our costs," said Seddon, whose county is in Olsen's district. 
 
 Sen. Alberta Darling (R-River Hills) said she learned of the primary plan last week and was told Monday it would be implemented in all six Senate districts. She declined to say what she thought of it. 
 
 "I'm staying out of that," she said. "I'm not getting involved in the diversions of the recalls." 
 
 None of the county clerks associated with Darling's recall election immediately returned phone calls Tuesday for their cost estimates. 
 
 Fitzgerald downplayed the significance of adding to costs by holding primaries. He said he is not worried running fake Democrats would engender cynicism among voters. 
 
 "I think the cynicism comes from the recalls," Fitzgerald said. "Recalling senators for taking a tough vote is just wrong." 
 
 Recalls were launched against the Republicans because of their vote to curb collective bargaining by public workers. Attempts were made to recall Senate Democrats for leaving the state for three weeks to block action on the collective bargaining measure. 
 
 The Government Accountability Board will consider Wednesday whether recall elections should be held for three Senate Democrats - Dave Hansen of Green Bay, Jim Holperin of Conover and Bob Wirch of Pleasant Prairie. Those recalls would be July 19; if primaries were required, the primaries would be held July 19 and the general elections would be Aug. 16. 
 
 The other Republicans facing recalls are Sens. Rob Cowles of Allouez and Sheila Harsdorf of River Falls. 
 
 Daniel Bice of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report. ||||| And so Wisconsin — which garnered national attention earlier this year because of its Republican leaders’ aggressive efforts to cut collective bargaining — is again being watched closely as a testing ground, this time for potential backlash from the Republican sweep to power in statehouses last fall, when they won control over more legislative seats than they have had since 1928. Republicans also gained complete control of more than half a dozen other state Capitols. 
 
 Other states that recently came under Republican control — including Maine , Michigan , Ohio and Pennsylvania — have not created nearly the stir as Wisconsin. Protesters here have started a new wave of demonstrations this month in the form of a “Walkerville” tent city near the Capitol in Madison , meant to mimic Hoovervilles, the Great Depression shantytowns of homeless people named after President Herbert Hoover . 
 
 Republicans in the Legislature here deny that any rush is on to ram through legislation, and say many of their pro-jobs, fiscally conservative measures are simply elements of the state’s next budget, which must be approved by next month. 
 
 Yet Republican leaders are clearly worried about what the recall elections may bring. Stephan Thompson, executive director of the Wisconsin Republican Party , acknowledged on Monday that Republicans were encouraging “protest candidates” (who he describes as conservative activists) to run as Democrats in the recall contests. The intent is to force Democratic Party challengers to the threatened Republican senators to compete in invented primary elections, and to buy the Republicans more time to make their cases to voters before a general contest. 
 
 Whatever the Republicans’ motivation, there is no doubt they are moving quickly. 
 
 In only his first weeks in office, Mr. Walker pushed to remake the state’s Department of Commerce into a public-private hybrid, to limit lawsuits against businesses, to give two-year corporate tax breaks to companies that move to Wisconsin and to give tax credits to companies for each job they create. 
 
 By February, he announced a “budget repair bill,” which, he said, would help solve a budget shortfall, in part by limiting collective bargaining rights for most public employees in Wisconsin. 
 
 The proposal set off a wave of protest, drawing union supporters to the Capitol by the thousands and spurring the Senate’s 14 Democrats to flee to Illinois to try to prevent a vote. 
 
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 In the end, the bill passed without the Democrats, who then came home, but soon recall efforts were under way against six Republicans who had supported the bill and three Democrats who had left town. It was a noteworthy feat, requiring more than 140,000 signatures on petitions. 
 
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 Since Wisconsin began allowing recalls of state-level politicians in 1926, only four such recall elections — which allow a new challenger to oppose an incumbent — have been held. In half, the incumbent won. 
 
 On Wednesday, state officials are expected to decide whether all nine elections will indeed take place. (The three Democrats are objecting to the way signatures were obtained on many petitions against them.) Recall elections have already been set for July 12 for the six Republicans. 
 
 There is no consensus on the likely outcome of these races in a state known for being split nearly evenly along party lines and also being home to a large group of independent voters. 
 
 One reminder of the divide came in April, when a nonpartisan State Supreme Court race became a virtual referendum on the standoff between Republicans and Democrats. David Prosser, an incumbent justice who some view as part of the court’s conservative bloc, won — but by only 7,004 votes of almost 1.5 million cast. 
 
 Democratic Party leaders say they could easily win the three Senate seats they would need to gain control of the chamber, now a 19-to-14 partisan split. But Republicans say they expect no such outcome, and believe they may even gain a seat. 
 
 Much is at stake. A judge last month blocked Wisconsin’s cuts to collective bargaining from taking effect because she said the Republicans had violated open-meeting laws in their rush to approve them. The State Supreme Court heard arguments on the issue on Monday, but it was uncertain how or how swiftly the court might act. 
 
 Control of the Senate also affects the 10-year redrawing of legislative boundaries — a task over which Republicans, under the current alignment, hold significant authority. 
 
 Among political experts, a debate has emerged here over whether Republicans should slow their feverish pace and get through the recall elections or push as fast as possible with their agenda while they can. 
 
 For now, there is no sign of a slowing — and there is even talk that if the State Supreme Court does not move rapidly on the collective bargaining question, a new vote might be needed on the issue. 
 
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 “You want to make sure there aren’t things undone,” said Senator Scott L. Fitzgerald, the Republican leader, who called the recall elections a battle of the two bases — firm Republican voters against firm Democrats. “If some major issue hasn’t been taken care of, voters wouldn’t be as motivated.” ||||| The Wisconsin Government Accountability Board, which oversees elections in the state, has now green-lit three recalls targeting Democratic state Sens. Dave Hansen, Jim Holperin and Robert Wirch — but it was a close call, as the board grappled all through the day with a topic that isn’t discussed too much in the media: Alleged election fraud that is perpetrated by Republicans. 
 
 The state Democratic Party and the three incumbents had filed extensive challenges to the petitions that were filed by the Republicans, triggering an extensive debate among the board members (retired judges who are selected through a mostly non-partisan process), the GAB staff lawyers, and Democratic and Republican Party attorneys over what the threshold was to disqualify petitions based on claims of fraud. 
 
 Adding to the political dimension the GAB had already certified six other recalls, all of them spearheaded by the Democrats to target Republicans who voted for Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-public employee union bill, but had to receive an extension of the review time from a judge for these three recalls, because the Dems had filed much more extensive challenges. As a result of the extension, these new recalls (or any necessary primaries) will take place on July 19, a week after the July 12 date for the recalls targeting GOP legislators. 
 
 The board faced a conundrum, in that the Dems’ challenges outlined a significant number of signatures that were the products of apparent fraud. But even without all the signatures that the Dems were able to question within their ten-day review period, there would still be enough signatures left to trigger recalls. 
 
 However, as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports, the GAB’s staff laid out several options for the board. The first option would be to green-light the recalls, on the grounds that enough signatures remain that have not been challenged. The other options, for which the staffers cited various precedents in other states, would be to disqualify all petition pages collected by certain signature-gatherers who had exhibited a pattern of fraud, beyond just a few disqualified signatures that normally occur — which would shut down the three recalls in question — or even to throw out all the petitions entirely as the ultimate sanction. 
 
 Democrats had used their ten-day response period, after Republican activists had submitted the completed petitions, to conduct extensive phone surveys of the people whose names were on the forms. Along the way, they produced affidavits from people alleging various dirty tricks, ranging from claims that they were misled into signing — being told that it was to support the legislator in question, or to recall Walker, etc — to claims from some individuals that they did not sign their names at all, but were forged as having done so (possibly by getting their names from the phonebook). 
 
 Most notoriously, the Dems found the purported signature of a man who had been dead for 20 years, but whose name was still in the phonebook (by peculiar circumstance, he was the father of a very liberal current Democratic state representative). In addition, they found a married couple for whom the signatures were clearly written in the same hand — but both people have signed affidavits that neither of them actually did sign. 
 
 As one might expect, the Republican attorney Eric McLeod argued before the board that only specific, identified signatures should be tossed, preserving the state’s constitutional right for voters to sign recall petitions. On the other side, both Democratic attorney Jeremy Levinson and GAB staff attorney Shane Falk have each been arguing in their own ways that petition efforts involving crooked circulators have to be held accountable in some way, in the name of protecting the process. 
 
 To be clear, this was a very serious decision, with major implications either way that were thoroughly discussed throughout the GAB’s meeting. To throw out all of a crooked circulator’s pages would very likely disenfranchise the signatures of many other people who had legitimately signed the papers in good faith, and might have helped constitute a sufficient number of people to hold a recall election against a legislator. But to leave the petitions in could potentially make it virtually impossible to disqualify future recalls that might entail extensive fraud, involving too many signatures for the opposition to effectively screen out. 
 
 As one judge on the board said: “I think I’m discovering what a Hobson’s Choice is.” 
 
 Ultimately, the board voted to send a message for future recalls, by voting to strike individual pages that were circulated by some of the more offensive petition-gatherers, on the pages that showed a pattern of fraudulent conduct. This still left enough signatures to certify those recalls to move forward. 
 
 (Special thanks to Wisconsin Eye, the state equivalent of C-Span, for live-streaming the meeting.) ||||| Wisconsin Recall Elections Hit Snags 
 
 Last week, the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board certified six recall elections against Republican state senators — yet they claim they need more time to certify the three recall elections against Democratic senators. This despite the fact that some of the signatures required to force the Democrats’ recalls were submitted before the signatures submitted to recall Republicans. 
 
 This brought howls of protest from the GOP, as it may set up a scenario where the six recall elections against Republicans are held on a different day than the three recall elections against Democrats. That will mean that on one election day, Democratic volunteers won’t have to protect any of their incumbents. As one GOP operative told me, it will allow Democrats to “rush eleven,” in football parlance. Democrats need to pick up three seats to regain control of the Senate. 
 
 Two Republican incumbent senators face long odds. One of them is Randy Hopper from Fond du Lac, who represents a strong GOP district but has some personal issues to work out with his constituents. During the initial round of protests, demonstrators showed up at Hopper’s Fond du Lac home to picket, but were told by Hopper’s wife to buzz off because he lived down in Madison with his 25-year-old mistress. 
 
 Republican Dan Kapanke faces the opposite problem — he is well liked (he owns a minor league baseball team in La Crosse), but his district leans Democrat. He is facing a challenge from incumbent assemblywoman Jennifer Shilling, who is running an ad asking “Are you going to tell seniors they can’t retire, and if they do, they can’t go to the doctor?” (Ah, yes, who can forget Governor Walker’s famous “Seniors Can’t Retire or Go to the Doctor” Act?) 
 
 If both Hopper and Kapanke lose, that leaves only one more seat Democrats have to pick up to retake the Senate. In order to delay recall elections, the GOP has planned to run fake Democratic primary candidates against the GOP challengers, which would push the elections back another month. That would give Republicans an extra month’s worth of distance from the collective-bargaining imbroglio that got them in this situation, and would allow more time to campaign. 
 
 Yet this will almost certainly be seen as a “dirty trick” by media and some voters. It certainly appears like an admission that Republicans are struggling. And while it can be argued that the recall elections in themselves are merely dirty tricks, enough of a double standard exists that this ploy could backfire. (Last year, Democrats themselves used a similar trick, running a fake Republican against a very conservative Independent candidate, hoping it would split the vote and give victory to a Democrat.) 
 
 While all this unfolds, unions and their allies have set up a small city of tents outside the capitol, dubbing it “Walkerville.” (Others have derisively begun calling it “Entitledtown.”) Last week, boisterous singing protesters forced an American Red Cross blood drive from the statehouse. Marches continue around the capitol square, complete with chants of “Tax, tax, tax the rich!” No one seems to recognize the irony of teachers being able to spend all summer protesting their unfair treatment because they don’t have to go to work for three months. 
 
 At least that’s three months where they won’t be able to force elementary school kids to draw pictures of Scott Walker as the devil as part of an art class assignment. 
 
 — Christian Schneider is a senior fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute.
– Wisconsin politics continue to dazzle: Republicans there are worried about losing their majority in the state Senate in a spate of recall elections set for July 12. They'd like more time to campaign, and they've hit on a bizarre way to get it, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The state GOP is recruiting Republicans to run as fake Democrats on July 12, a move that would force a primary and push the general election back to August 9. The newspaper estimates the extra elections will cost the state "tens of thousands" of dollars. So far, the state has certified recall elections against six GOP senators and three Democrats, all the result of the collective bargaining fight in the spring, reports Talking Points Memo. (The Democrats' elections will be on July 19.) Two of the Republican incumbents facing recall are in serious trouble, notes the National Review. "That leaves only one more seat Democrats have to pick up to retake the Senate." Is the GOP worried? They say no, but the New York Times notes that lawmakers and Gov. Scott Walker are pushing though a lot of legislation just in case.