Category: Experts Guide

Elections expert Barry Burden said he thought the partisan differences that voters expressed in the poll over voting-by-mail reflected the political debate that surfaced between the parties over the April election in Wisconsin, with Democratic politicians pushing for an all-mail election and Republican politicians opposing changes in the timing or conduct of the election.

President Donald Trump’s attacks on voting by-mail also fed the partisan debate.

But Burden expressed skepticism that the gap between how Democrats and Republicans choose to vote in November — whether by mail or in-person — will be as large as the poll suggests.

“It doesn’t reflect what we saw in the April 7 election (when) there was consistent but I would say modest differences between liberal and conservative voters in how they used mail ballots,” said Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the way elections are administered.

Quoted: “This may sound small at first, but it is the largest drop since World War II, as emissions have generally increased year-over-year, even during recessions,” Ankur Desai, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told USA TODAY.

Quoted: “The question I have is why they should be going to court at all,” University of Wisconsin Law School constitutional law professor David Schwartz said. “(GOP lawmakers) are asking the court to basically rewrite this law — to turn it into something much narrower than it is.”

Quoted: Tash and Brown’s comments get an endorsement from Kathleen Bartzen Culver, who directs the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Quoted: “You’ve certainly seen in places that stopped isolation measures too early — what the flu pandemic did in those places,” said Dr. James Conway, an infectious disease expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health and a self-described history buff.

But virus expert David O’Connor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison said he thinks too little is known to rule out any source, except the idea the virus was manmade. Finding the source is important, he said, because it may harbor the next pandemic virus.

Quoted: “It’s pretty clear that pushing the economy to go back to work before coronavirus is brought under control is going to be like being in a vehicle and pushing on the accelerator and the brake at the same time,” said Ian Coxhead, an economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Noted: Misleading people by providing real information divorced from necessary context is not a unique strategy, said Dave Schroeder, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who tracks disinformation on social media.

He’s been following how public health information on the COVID-19 pandemic is being “attacked by actors with an agenda” and twisted to suit certain narratives.

Patrick Remington, professor emeritus at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said health officials would need to first determine the proportion of people who voted out of the total number of people who tested positive for COVID-19 during the time frame in which they could have exhibited symptoms from the April 7 election, or roughly two weeks.

Quoted: Not only is social distancing impractical in prisons, they are places where “contagion is hard to avoid,” said Cecelia Klingele, an associate professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in criminal justice administration.

“People are given very little access in many prisons and jails to hygiene supplies from soap to toothpaste. Often, we ask prisoners to buy individual supplies,” she said. “There’s no easy access. They’re not washing their hands frequently and not bathing as much as we would hope.”

UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden said late ballots — those returned after Election Day — tend to favor Democrats, who tend to be younger, more transient and newer to voting.

Quoted: There are many options for reducing jail and prison populations, which in turn will reduce the risk of COVID-19 to the public, according to Cecelia Klingele, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Some prisoners have families willing to take them in, but others have nowhere to go, and the social service agencies that can help them are overloaded.

“These are hard questions,” Klingele said, “but they’re ones that we need to answer quickly.”

Podcast: Interview with Dr. Patrick Remington, an expert at UW-Madison on how disease spreads and is prevented.