quote:
But someone has to start to tell the story instead of just laughing at Disney names. I think it’s a real red flag that the registrar had that page as their big showcase. It was clearly meant to mock and discredit, not to tell a coherent story of what they received. It paints the registrar as opposition instead of neutral, if you step back. But too many people are eating it up still tonight. We will see where it goes. A court room is coming if Eileen’s being honest in her numbers.

Have they given us any reason to think they’re being honest, though?

I find this article from March 9 pretty interesting. I know it’s NOLA.com and all, but some excerpts:

quote:
An exhaustive review of thousands of petitions provided to The Times-Picayune by the organizers of the LaToya Cantrell recall campaign shows they contained 32,228 signatures, far short of the threshold needed to put the question on the ballot.

But it’s unclear how many signatures are on a batch of roughly 7,000 documents that the organizers did not provide, despite a court order requiring them to provide the newspaper with copies of all petitions.

quote:
According to the Orleans Parish Registrar of Voters, the recall’s organizers turned in approximately 17,400 sheets of paper to election officials, while providing just 10,000 sheets to the newspaper.

quote:
Under state law, all recall petition sheets are public records, but recall organizers ignored multiple requests for copies, leading the newspaper to file suit.

Those signatures were finally handed over after the newspaper sought to have the organizers held in contempt of court for ignoring a consent judgment signed by both parties.

quote:
For unknown reasons, the recall campaign submitted nearly as many sheets of paper on the second deadline as on the first. About 9,000 pages were turned in initially, followed by another 8,400 on the second deadline, according to Ryan Luminais, a lawyer at the firm Sher Garner who represents Wilson.

quote:
In addition to the signatures with flaws, reporters identified hundreds of pages that appear to have been scanned twice, totaling nearly 1,700 signatures. It’s unclear whether any of the sheets turned into the registrar were duplicates.

A similar overall count was obtained by analyzing the records using Pinpoint, a new Google tool that aids in sifting through large numbers of documents. That analysis also suggested the records could contain thousands of additional duplicates that were not caught in the manual count.

quote:
As they declared victory with a brass band on Ash Wednesday, recall leaders said they couldn’t reveal how many signatures they had because of pending litigation against Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin. But even though that litigation has been resolved in their favor, recall leaders have given no updates.

Recall leader Eileen Carter said that day that the campaign was opaque by design.

“You don’t tell your opposition where you are, you don’t pinpoint your location. This is strategy, ‘The Art of War’,” Carter said. “You have built your trust with us, and we ask you to hold on just a little bit more.”

quote:
After the Feb. 28 hand-off, a lawyer for the newspaper asked the recall campaign how many signatures they had collected in total versus the number disclosed.

“They produced everything that they had copies of. We do not have any document which shows the total number of signatures or the number produced,” said Blake Arcuri, a recall campaign attorney.

These just don’t strike me as people who have any idea what they’re doing, much less any confidence that they are actually getting hosed by the registrar. If Eileen is certain they had 100k signatures, why did they defy a court order and then fail to turn over 7,000 documents submitted to the registrar? Wouldn’t you want the media to know you have all those signatures?

Reading the statements from the registrar today, it sounds like the Donald Duck signatures actually came from the first batch. They are saying the second batch consisted almost entirely of duplicates from the first batch. I think the Donald Duck signatures are an easy thing to hold up in front of a camera and say “what the hell, man?” while thousands of duplicate pages are a bit more difficult to show the public.

That’s without even addressing the obvious question of why they wouldn’t have submitted valid signatures on time in the first place. Even if that second batch did have an additional 18k valid signatures there’s no way they were all collected during the 5-day grace period.

My guess is they knew they were fricked, turned in a shite ton of duplicates, and are now trying to save face publicly. I hope I’m wrong because I would love to see this move to a vote.. but I just don’t find these folks to be all that credible. If this goes to court we will find out, I suppose.