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Madison - Gov. Scott Walker's campaign and the state Republican Party director sued the state's elections and ethics agency in Waukesha on Thursday over its handling of duplicate and bogus signatures in the ongoing recall effort against the governor.

The top GOP lawmaker in the Assembly also took a shot at the Government Accountability Board - which he voted to create - saying it had strayed from its nonpartisan mission and might need to be replaced.

The lawsuit filed Thursday in Waukesha County Circuit Court asks a judge to order the accountability board to look for and eliminate duplicate signatures, clearly fake names and illegible addresses. The lawsuit can be brought in one of the most conservative counties in the state because of a change in state law earlier this year by Republican lawmakers and Walker that allowed lawsuits to be brought against the state outside liberal Dane County, the seat of state government.

The lawsuit says allowing multiple signatures is a violation of the equal protection clauses of the state and U.S. constitutions.

"The decision of one individual who chooses to sign a recall petition should not carry more weight than the decision of another who chooses not to sign," said Stephan Thompson, executive director of the state Republican Party and a plaintiff in the case. "This lawsuit seeks to protect the Wisconsin electors whose voices have been trumped by those purposefully signing multiple petitions."

The accountability board has said it's up to challengers to point out problems like those and the board itself cannot automatically toss the signatures for those reasons.

"The plaintiffs are challenging the rules that have been established by statutes and administrative code, and which have been in place since the late 1980s. Since then, these rules have been used in every state and local recall petition effort against incumbents of both parties," accountability board director Kevin Kennedy said.

Graeme Zielinski, a spokesman for the state Democratic Party, said the lawsuit wouldn't end the effort to gather recall signatures against the governor.

"We have a system in place to review signatures before we submit them to the GAB. This doesn't change our system and neither will it stop the recall of Scott Walker," Zielinski said.

The state Government Accountability Board was created in 2007 to replace the state ethics and elections boards after the elections agency was criticized by Republicans for favoring Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle in his 2006 re-election campaign.

At the time, Republicans controlled the state Assembly and Democrats controlled the state Senate. The creation of the board passed the Senate unanimously and passed the Assembly by a near unanimous 97-2 vote.

The accountability board is made up of six former judges.

The elections board, by contrast, was an overtly partisan body. One member each was selected by the governor, the speaker of the Assembly, the Senate majority leader, the Assembly minority leader, the Senate minority leader, the chief justice of the Supreme Court and the top official of both the Democratic and Republican parties and sometimes a third political party in the state. That meant a majority of the board often had strong political affiliations.

The ethics board was made up of nonpartisan members appointed by the governor. It was often criticized as toothless.

Now, the Government Accountability Board has been criticized by Republicans during this year's nasty recall campaigns. Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald (R-Horicon) said he saw advantages to going back to the old elections and ethics boards if some changes were made.

"I like that system, and I think that system worked fairly well," said Fitzgerald.

Notably, Fitzgerald was among those who voted to create the accountability board.

Kennedy said the board was recognized nationally for being uniquely nonpartisan.

"In every other state, elections are run by a partisan elected or appointed official, or a bipartisan citizen board," Kennedy said. "The current board members have more than 130 years of experience on the bench as trained decision makers, something the state did not have with the previous elections board, which was comprised of partisan political appointees."

Spokesmen for Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) and Walker had no reaction to Jeff Fitzgerald's comment, but Scott Fitzgerald has been critical of the accountability board in the past. The Fitzgeralds are brothers.

Jeff Fitzgerald also said Thursday he was introducing a bill to make it a felony to sign a recall petition more than once, though the bill would not affect the current recall effort against Walker. The crime would carry a fine of up to $10,000 and up to 31/2 years in prison.

There have been scattered reports that some people have signed recall petitions against Walker more than once, either to inflate the number of signatures or because they were concerned that their original signature might not be properly counted.

Fitzgerald said state law needed to be changed to guard against that, but also criticized the accountability board for not coming out more strongly against that possibility. He also criticized the board for saying its staff would not automatically strike names in the recall petition such as "Mickey Mouse" and instead in some cases would just flag those names for Walker's campaign to challenge.

But accountability board spokesman Reid Magney said the board was simply following the law and carrying out a process that would ultimately weed out bad signatures after Walker's campaign called for striking them.

"There's an adversarial process designed to weed out fake names as well as people who aren't qualified to sign and duplicate signatures," Magney said.

Patrick Marley of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.