While attempting to collect signatures for my friend John Pokrandt‘s State Assembly campaign on the sidewalk outside of Jefferson Elementary School in Wauwatosa this past Election Day, I was confronted by both a poll worker and the polling place’s chief inspector. They both erroneously informed me that my attempt to gather signatures ran afoul of Wisconsin electioneering laws, despite my citing of an opinion issued by the then-State Elections Board in January of 2007 that read:
The Elections Board finds that the solicitation of signatures, on a petition that is not related to the election at hand, without any attempt to influence that day’s vote of the voter solicited, is not, per se, “electioneering” within the meaning of §12.03, Stats., and, therefore, not a violation of that statute.
My signature-gathering efforts, which entailed me standing in one fixed spot on the sidewalk outside of the school – well out of the way of anyone’s path to or from the polls – with a homemade sign the size of printer paper reading “POKRANDT FOR ASSEMBLY – Sign Here!” and a clipboard, first attracted the attention of a poll worker who had a name tag identifying herself as “Dixie”. She came up to me, inspected my sign and clipboard for a moment, and intoned in a reasonably polite manner that “I don’t think you’re allowed to do that here“. After I replied back to her in a similarly polite manner that I was indeed allowed to do what I was doing per the Elections Board’s opinion (phrased as “Actually, ma’am, the GAB permits signature-gathering where I’m standing for races that aren’t on today’s ballot“), she gave what seemed to be a hesitant reply in the affirmative, and walked back into the building.
No sooner than five minutes later, a man identified by his name tag as “Joe Musto” – a man that, while not disclosing this to me during our brief confrontation, was later identified for me as that precinct’s chief inspector by Wauwatosa’s deputy city clerk – made his appearance by taking wide strides out of the polling place, arriving at “sixteen” before stopping next to me and remarking, “Still ten feet off.”
“Ten feet off from what?” I replied.
He launched into a short and curt description of how I needed to be “ten feet farther” from the polling place to gather signatures, a description that was met with my attempt to cite the same GAB opinion I’d cited a few minutes earlier to “Dixie”. Once I got to the “GAB” in my sentence, he cut me off and grew quite angry, informing me that he “didn’t care what party [I] was from” and that he would call the police if I didn’t cease my activities. I challenged him to, and left after he dashed back into the building, quickly fearing that the local authorities would be as ill-informed of local electioneering laws as Musto seemed to be.
After getting home, I called up Jefferson with the intent of reaching Musto and speaking to him over the phone, and was told that this would not be possible. I followed that up by calling the GAB, reaching a bureaucrat who confirmed with me that I was indeed correct on the intent of their ruling; “you were fine“, he simply assured me. I called the city clerk’s office immediately after that, and had a very polite conversation with the deputy city clerk, who apologized to me for having to go through what had transpired (although I said that I appreciated her apology, I remarked that I’d much rather it came from Musto) and told me that she’d call up the city police and inform them that no laws were being broken in case I wanted to go back there and resume my previously-interrupted activities.
Of course, at that point, I really didn’t have a will to. Jefferson is over ten minutes away from my house, and while I was still in decent enough spirits to go stand outside in the mild weather once more and attempt to gather signatures, I did not feel like I had the patience nor the sanity remaining to deal with possible further incompetence from non-Musto poll workers or voters.
Furthermore, it depresses me to a degree that Musto was the chief inspector of the polling place in question. If the chief inspector has a grasp on electioneering laws that would be described as tenuous at best, what does that possibly say for the rest of his group, or for groups of poll workers elsewhere in our state?
