MacIver Institute Predictions Proven Wrong

The MacIver Institute is a Wisconsin-based propaganda outfit, funded by rightwing money, staffed by rightwing Republicans, and emitting rightwing propaganda.

If you want credible, unbiased information from MacIver, you would have better luck getting a disquisition on string theory from Sarah Palin.

The MacIver Institute—like the GOP—spent the last several months asserting massive fraud of recall signatures, massive voter impersonation fraud, massive fraud of anything critical of the Republican Party.

Turn outs the MacIver Institute, like the GOP are wrong.

But don't look for a retraction from MacIver Institute President Brett Healy for his defamation of the Wisconsin people. Healy is a hack; and accurate, credible information is not his business.

By Will Dooling at the Center for Media and Democracy's PRWatch

Upon receiving the signatures, the GAB worked hard to scan them and post them online so that all parties could examine them. In a February 6 interview on the Mike Gousha Show, the most respected TV news show in Wisconsin, MacIver Institute President Brett Healy declared that he had personally reviewed the thousands of pages of petitions, and by his estimate almost one third of the signatures would be invalidated, and only 650,000 signatures would be found valid.

Yet in the end, the final count released by the GAB on March 29 found an error rate of only about 3.2 percent -- about a tenth of Healy's initial prediction of 33 1/3 percent. This is no surprise to the 30,000 volunteers of the grassroots group United Wisconsin, who collected and submitted signatures and established a multi-stage review process to make sure that every signature was clear and complete, and made their best effort to eliminate duplicates.

While only 931,000 signatures were submitted, slightly short of the one million claimed, the GAB disqualified only 30,000 from the Walker recall, and about 34,000 from the Kleefisch recall. The three percent error rate is significantly below the 15 percent rate predicted by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. It was also dramatically below the 30 percent rejection rate for the one million signatures collected for the referendum to reverse SB-5, the Ohio collective bargaining measure, in 2011.

The Wisconsin GAB has recently released a statement giving comparably low error rates on the petitions to recall state senators Fitzgerald, Wanggaard, Moulton, and Galloway. ...

Dire predictions of 'rampant signature fraud' and 'floods' of phony signatures have been proven false. We hope that MacIver, 'True the Vote,' and other groups that alleged fraud will promptly and professionally apologize to United Wisconsin, the grassroots group that gathered the signatures. But we will not hold our breath.