Category: State news

Quoted: “It feels a lot like the criticism we heard five or six years ago of the GAB,” University of Wisconsin-Madison Elections Research Center director Barry Burden said in a recent interview.

What is the fairest and most efficient way for citizens to pay for police and fire protection, safe streets, libraries, parks and other public services cities provide?

This is the real question University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Manuel Teodoro indirectly raised in his recent commentary urging elimination of the long-standing practice of municipal water utilities making payments in lieu of taxes — what are known as PILOTs — to municipalities. But Teodoro is mistaken in calling for an end to PILOTs in the absence of making any other changes to how municipalities are funded.

Quoted: Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the people Gableman is meeting with “are all election skeptics who have bought into the big lie.”

Gableman, who last year without evidence claimed the election was stolen, has insisted he has no preconceived ideas about his review and hopes to find that the election was run properly.

“It’s hard to see how he could ever reach such a conclusion given this set of oddballs who he’s working with,” Burden said.

Quoted: “The idea is is that they will discuss the evidence, share their opinions with one another, spend time discussing whether they think the prosecution has met their burden of proof, but they don’t really get a blueprint for how to go about doing that other than to just discuss the evidence and listen to one another and keep an open mind,” said John Gross.

Gross is a UW-Madison Law School professor who has more than twenty years of experience serving as a criminal defense attorney. Gross expects jurors will spend a great deal of time sifting through video evidence.

“The jury is going to be able to look at that video as much as they would like in their jury room and figure out what they think you can see and hear and then conclude from all of that video evidence,” he said.

Quoted: Keith Findley, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, called the lack of decision “odd.”

“The only reason I can think of for waiting is perhaps he wants to give the jury a chance to acquit so he doesn’t have to, but that’s speculation on my part,” Findley, co-founder of the Wisconsin Innocence Project, said in an interview.

Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said while Trump and other Republicans complained about the practice there isn’t a single definition of what “ballot harvesting” refers to.

“To most observers, harvesting is done by a private, partisan group or individual when they gather ballots from individuals and then deliver them to an election office,” Burden said in an email. “Kleefisch claims that Democrats do this sort of thing ‘non-stop,’ but I am not aware of widespread ballot collection by Democratic volunteers or operatives in Wisconsin.”

Quoted: “When the list was first brought up in 2019 going into the 2020 election, there was a lot of concern,” Barry Burden, Director of Elections Research at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, said. “You heard outcry and eventually lawsuits to try to move things along. But that’s completely different from the regular list maintenance that the state has done for a number of years.”

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.

“For conservatives in Wisconsin, (they) made two keys argument against the 2012 recalls. First was that Governor Walker had only been in office for a year and deserved to have more time to prove himself before facing another election. Second was that the motivation for the recalls was merely a policy debate about labor unions and not over malfeasance in office, which is what recalls should be used for,” Burden said.

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.