Author: gbump

“Those ballots would not have been counted,” Mayer told FRONTLINE. “And now, no ballots that arrive after elections will be counted, and it is a certainty that there will be some.”

“Things are really running rampant, so there is a lot of discontent,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“It’s going to be volatile control of Congress in the near term,” said University of Wisconsin Professor Barry Burden. To keep or gain an edge, partisans “want states like Wisconsin where one party seems to have really baked in its power in the legislature, but it’s still a purple state.”

“If they aren’t confident that they believe the result, some legislatures will be tempted to take the authority and appoint electors directly,” said Barry Burden, founding director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

“There’s almost no daylight anymore between what happens in the presidential race and what happens in the Senate race,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin and the author of a book on ticket-splitting.

Young Mie Kim studied Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and continues to monitor for Russian-linked accounts during the 2020 presidential election cycle. Kim is a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she is part of a research project called Project DATA, or Digital Ad Tracking and Analysis. The project focuses on the 2020 election and tracks digital political ads to learn how parties, organizations and candidates target and speak to potential voters.

Throughout the year, the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been surveying the same Midwestern battleground state voters. These surveys show President Trump was in trouble early.

Katherine Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, said many voters are probably holding their noses as they cast ballots.

“There are many Republicans in that part of the state who are telling themselves, ‘I am not voting for Trump, I am voting for Supreme Court seats, the unborn, the Second Amendment,’ that kind of thing,” said Cramer, who wrote a 2016 book on rural Wisconsin titled, “The Politics of Resentment.

Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, shared Hasen’s worries, outlining in an email what he views as “the most likely scenario”:President Trump falsely condemns the election as fraudulent and illegal. He will build on his allegations that millions of noncitizens voted illegally in 2016 to claim that millions of absentee ballots were submitted in duplicate or by foreign governments, neither of which will be true. He will intensify his rants against the supposed fraud as Biden’s lead in the popular vote grows in the days following the election.

Even so, Barry C. Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the number of otherwise legitimate votes that will not be counted as a result of the ruling was difficult to predict. “We don’t know what the number will be, but it won’t be zero,” he said.

“It’s a sad situation when a ballot is rejected,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s a real risk voters take. I don’t think most voters would like their odds if they knew them.”