Evers Recall Effort Comes Up Short After Organizer Lies to Reporters

Wisconsin will not put two consecutive governors through recall elections.

The recall campaign against Gov. Tony Evers did not collect the roughly 670,000 signatures required to trigger a recall election, the petition’s organizer announced Monday morning in a post in the Recall Evers Petition Facebook group.

“It is with a heavy heart we announce that after proofing and what came in over the weekend we have fallen short,” organizer Misty Polewczynski, a Burlington-area resident, wrote. “We do not have enough signatures to turn in.”

She did not say how many signatures were collected. She said the papers will be destroyed to prevent them from becoming publicly available under open-records laws and “to keep them from falling in the wrong hands.”

Last week, Polewczynski lied to the media and told reporters she had enough signatures. However, she admitted in a Facebook post written before the interviews that she would “probably make up some crap to tell them. I like when they look dumb.” Polewczynski began collecting signatures in late August due to violence and unrest in Kenosha following the police shooting of Jacob Blake. 

“80k people with different beliefs, put aside their differences and came together to save our state,” Polewczynski wrote Monday to the Recall Evers Petition group’s 80,000 members. “Thats [sic] something! When I started this I had no idea so many people would be standing with me.”

Polewczynski ended her Facebook post with the hashtags #Trump2020 and #VoteRed.

Evers used the recall signature collection period to do some campaign fundraising. On Oct. 16, his campaign released a television ad targeting Republican leaders including Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester), Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau), and President Donald Trump. “Republicans are playing politics with our pandemic response,” the ad’s narrator says as images of Vos, Fitzgerald, and Trump flash across the screen.

Had the petition gathered enough signatures, Evers would have been the second consecutive Wisconsin governor to face a recall election. Petitioners, angered by ex-Gov. Scott Walker’s signature union-busting Act 10, gathered enough signatures to force a recall election in 2012. Walker won, becoming the first governor in the nation’s history to win a recall.