Category: State news

Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said it’s not uncommon for political party leaders to change their views on recall elections.

In 2012, Burden said, conservatives in Wisconsin fought the recall drive by arguing that Walker and Kleefisch had not been in office long enough to be removed and that recall elections were “merely a policy debate about labor unions and not over malfeasance in office.”

Now, he said, conservatives and Republicans can claim they are being consistent by arguing that school board members are violating state law with their public health mandates, such as masks, vaccines and online learning.

“So it is about wrongdoing in office and not just a dispute about local education policy,” Burden said.

Quoted: Mike Wagner, professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the conflict between Vos, Gableman and Brandtjen is typical of recent dynamics within the Republican Party and shows a “crash to be as close to President Trump as possible.”

Former President Donald Trump has continued to push false claims of election fraud across the country in the year following the election.

“It’s really striking to see elected officials and appointed officials engaged in a back-and-forth about who can be more skeptical about an election that was clearly shown repeatedly to be extraordinarily fair and very well conducted,” Wagner said.

Quoted: Every decade, states have to draw new maps after the census to rebalance the population in each district. For more than 50 years, the courts had the final say in Wisconsin because Democrats and Republicans split control of state government.

Not in 2011, when the GOP controlled both the legislative and executive branches.

“That’s when we got these really gerrymandered districts,” said University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor David Canon.

Canon believes federal courts may revisit the issue after the science becomes more established.

“If the state courts can get some consensus on a measure or a couple of measures that show a partisan gerrymander, then maybe 10 years from now, this comes up again, and federal courts will say, ‘The states did this pretty well, and we do have accepted measures,’” Canon said.

Quoted: Power plant and industry emissions didn’t see a steep drop or any decline during stay-at-home orders. The findings are consistent with what one would expect to see from people traveling less during the pandemic, said Tracey Holloway, professor with the Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“They did not see that much of a change in pollution from power plants and some industries, and that also is consistent because we’re still using electricity,” said Holloway. “We’re still running our air conditioners and the kind of things that drive a lot of demand for electricity were still happening.”

Quoted: UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden is the director of a non-partisan elections research center. He’s been following the election investigations closely.

“It’s really unclear what’s happening in each investigation because these things are mostly not being done in a public way,” Burden said.

Burden believes it’s unlikely that the probes will uncover anything problematic or new due to a lack of evidence to support claims of fraud.

“The motivation for what they’re doing is sort of hard to figure out,” he said. “It may be that they’re looking for reasons or justification to make some changes to state law. It might also be a way just to keep this issue on the front burner going into the next election cycle just to keep their voters energized.”

Noted: For instance, lawmakers needed to make virtually no changes to the 60th Assembly District in Ozaukee County because it was underpopulated by just 10 people. Republican legislators instead decided to move about 17,600 people out of the district and about 18,000 people into the district. The shift moved 719 times as many people as what was needed, University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Ken Mayer noted in court testimony at the time.

Mayer described similar changes to districts on Milwaukee’s south side. One district was underpopulated by about 2,800 people, but Republican lawmakers moved about 23,000 people out of the district and about 25,600 into it.

Quoted: “Teachers do not deliberately set out to make students feel bad about themselves. The problem this bill seems to identify, that Wisconsin’s teachers intentionally or otherwise want to make students feel bad, is simply not real,” said Jeremy Stoddard, a University of Wisconsin-Madison curriculum and instruction professor, at an August hearing in the state Capitol.

“What I fear is that if it becomes law, it will have a chilling effect inhibiting teachers from teaching a full account of history,” he said then.

Video: Barry Burden, director of the UW-Madison Elections Research Center, responds to former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s statement about investigating the 2020 vote in the state.

Quoted: Jordan Ellenberg is a math professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. When it comes to what constitutes a fair map, Ellenberg said many Wisconsinites might be asking the wrong questions.

“The very word ‘fair,’ there’s some question of philosophy and some question of ethics and some question of law,” Ellenberg said. “There is not really a good answer to what is fair, so then you may say, ‘Well, what are we even doing?’ Like, why am I here talking about it? Because there is a good answer to what is unfair. That’s a different question.”

Quoted: Barry Burden, the director of the Election Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said Ayyadurai’s claim can’t be taken seriously.

“His statements about Massachusetts seem completely implausible,” Burden said. “These sort of artificial multipliers and things that he latches onto seem completely detached from reality.”

Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Election Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said at Wednesday’s news conference that the partisan efforts would hurt the public perception of a well-run election.

“They are decreasing confidence in the election system, rather than increasing it, regardless of what they find,” Burden said. “The fact that questions and suspicions and allegations are being launched and there are multiple tracks of reviews happening simultaneously all coming in at different times with different conclusions is likely to undermine the trust that people have in the system.”