Walker Recall Underway

The clock has started on the signature-gathering campaign to oust Scott Walker, beginning at midnight last night. The campaign has 60 days to gather 540,208 valid signatures statewide, and they didn't waste a second getting started, hosting approximately 70 kickoff signature drives across the state beginning at midnight. More such events are planned throughout the drive, and especially early on, so as to mop up all the easy signatures and save the recall effort as much time and energy as possible for later on. A calendar of planned events can be found here.

All day today, one such staging area is set up on the State Street corner of Capitol Square in Madison, probably the most target-rich spot in the entire state, given that State Street is pedestrian-only and leads directly to the UW-Madison campus.

However, someone else knew today was Day 1 as well, as the website where volunteers could download petitions was taken down by a particularly strong DDoS attack that knocked it out for most of the day (it's since gone back up). There is no word yet on who launched the attack, though organizers have their suspicions.

Strap in; this is going to be an ugly one.