Clipsheet

A growing number of states, including Illinois, prohibit openly carrying “long guns” — meaning rifles and shotguns — at protests. Those rules aim to prevent armed confrontations between protesters, counterprotesters and law enforcement, said University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor John Gross. “What (law enforcement) don’t want,” he said, “is a situation where you have two armed groups facing off against one another with the police in between them.”

Andrew Reschovsky, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs, said Wisconsin has a particularly complex system of school funding.

“The legislature said we are not going to increase state aid at all, not by one penny of general aid,” Reschovsky said.

Bryna Godar, a staff attorney at the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said Madison’s argument is “conflating two different things.”

“The Legislature has, in these absentee voting statutes, made clear that it considers absentee voting to be a privilege, in that absentee voting as a method is not constitutionally required, and that the Legislature can impose some additional procedures on absentee voting that it maybe couldn’t impose on in-person voting,” said Godar. “That privileged language does not mean that when you vote absentee, you don’t have a right to have your vote counted.”