“It culminates in having designated state officials provide a formal stamp of approval for the election,” said Robert Yablon, associate professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and expert on election law. Depending on the state, that official could be the secretary of state, an elections commission or a board of canvassers created for this purpose.
“Direct appointment of electors by state legislatures is being discussed in some circles as an extreme measure, but is not actually a plausible scenario,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Skipping those beloved traditions and not celebrating with family members and loved ones adds stress to what has already been a difficult year, said Shilagh Mirgain, a distinguished psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
Dr. Jeffrey Pothof, an emergency medicine physician and chief quality officer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s health system, said exit testing can be helpful as long as students understand the limitations, stressing that a negative result “doesn’t give you a free pass” to act recklessly.
Students should take other preventive actions to avoid spreading the virus over the holidays. That means limiting social activity with groups, wearing face coverings and social distancing as much as possible, Pothof and others said.
“There are people who are talking about suicide. Because they’re just waiting and waiting — because the backlog is so bad,” said Victor Forberger, supervising attorney for the University of Wisconsin’s Unemployment Compensation Appeals Clinic, who has represented dozens of jobless clients during the pandemic.
Barry Burden, a UW-Madison political science professor and the director of the Elections Research Center, said politicians have a role to play in how the public perceives elections. “When they raise questions about elections that are not based on fact or don’t have that kind of substantial foundation below them that actually undermines confidence,” Burden said. “A person saying publicly that they lack confidence or they have a suspicion about something going wrong, that actually fuels suspicion or lack of confidence so it becomes kind of a vicious circle.”
The coronavirus pandemic is still here, and it’s not going anywhere for a while. Experts say it’s worse than ever before. UW Health’s Director of Infection Control Dr. Nasia Safdar joins Live at Four to talk about the state of COVID-19 in Wisconsin.
“I hate to be the bearer of bad news. We used to say 10 people, that was an OK number to gather with. Right now with covid so prevalent in our communities, we really cant be gathering,” Dr. Jeff Pothoff, UW Health chief quality officer said.
“We’re not spared, we’re in the middle of it. We’re doing worse than most any other state.”
The research team, led by two experts in the genetics of viruses — Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Dr. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill — studied the so-called D614G version of the coronavirus.
Amid the bleak landscape that has been 2020, finding moments of brightness and pleasure has been an understandable challenge. For Sami Schalk, a Black and disabled writer and professor, navigating the physical and emotional strain of the pandemic has proved particularly challenging. Enter her multi-part project, #QuarantineLooks: Embracing the Fabulously Mundane, soon to be presented as part of the ongoing exhibition Indisposable: Structures of Support After the ADA, now online via the Ford Foundation Gallery.
Oguz Alagoz, a University of Wisconsin-Madison engineering professor who specializes in modeling the spread of infectious diseases, said many factors, like changing human behavior or the availability of a vaccine, could impact the accuracy of a projection. But he agrees with IHME’s estimate.
“If you’re a rural resident, you’re seeing that economically, your type of community is struggling,” said Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“This is what exponential math looks like,” Malia Jones, a social epidemiologist with the University of Wisconsin Applied Population Laboratory and the UW-Madison Department of Community and Environmental Sociology, told MarketWatch.
And while it’s not easy to ignore Indigenous lawmakers if they’re sitting across the table, they often can be pigeonholed, said Richard Monette, who teaches federal Indian law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Surfaces can occasionally be a source of transmission,” said Dave O’Connor, an expert on the genome of the virus at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “They do not appear to be a major, or the major, source of transmission in areas where the virus is already endemic. If you have otherwise eradicated the virus, such as New Zealand or this region of China, vigilance will be required to prevent reintroductions by both goods and travelers.”
Much the same occurred in Wisconsin, says University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Barry Burden.”Biden won the state by a narrow margin and only shifted the vote about a point and a half from 2016,” Burden says.
“Such a small change did not produce significant shifts in the state legislature, where districts have been drawn to prevent it from responding to movement in the popular vote.”
Professor Robert Yablon, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison law school, told Checkpoint Trump has the same power he always has had as president, and can do what he wants, “within the standard bounds of the US Constitution and the law.
“We’re shedding farms,” Randy Jackson remarks grimly one autumn day over video conference. A professor of grassland ecology in the department of agronomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Jackson points to the fact that a record 10 percent of dairy farms in his state of Wisconsin shuttered in 2019, another milestone for a local economy that led the nation in farm bankruptcies last year.
Ryan Owens is a UW-Madison professor of political science. He’s also the director of the Tommy G. Thompson Center on public leadership.“There’s an expression in politics that you don’t say something unless there’s something to say and surprisingly there was nothing to say here,” Owens said. “This is his first major public address on the issue so I think this in fact had a place in the spotlight.”
David Canon, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he believes a two-day head start in pre-processing absentee ballots is reasonable. Such a measure would have allowed Wisconsin to finish counting absentee ballots almost simultaneously with in-person votes, staving off now-rampant claims of voter fraud occurring in the middle of the night. “You would have been done by 8 p.m.,” Canon said. “For sure it would have taken care of the problem.”
Scheufele, Schweber and Dresang all agreed a recount would result in little to no change in the results. “Historically, Wisconsin recounts have never — in modern history — resulted in changes of more than a couple hundred votes,” Schweber said.
And while it’s not easy to ignore Indigenous lawmakers if they’re sitting across the table, they often can be pigeonholed, said Richard Monette, who teaches federal Indian law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “I think that, in the end, the scale tips toward being more good than bad,” said Monette, a former chairman of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. “That’s fair to say, but I will say this is complex.”
“They would effectively be nullifying the votes of the 3 million plus Wisconsinites,” UW-Madison Law Professor Rob Yablon said. He added that is not allowed under current Wisconsin law and can’t see the Legislature trying to change it.
Simple self-care practices can be easily integrated into your daily routine, said Richard Davidson, founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, noting that you can listen to a guided audio practice while you’re doing chores. “You literally don’t need to take a single extra minute out of your day,” said Davidson, a professor of psychology and psychiatry.
Tony Goldberg, a veterinarian at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and the head of the Kibale EcoHealth Project, said that he has seen the devastation wrought by respiratory diseases among chimpanzees. A deadly outbreak in 2013 at the reserve turned out to be the result of human rhinovirus C, the most common cause of the common cold worldwide. Until then, it had never been seen in chimps.
That’s roughly analogous to the warming the Earth experienced coming out of the last ice age between 19,000 and 8,000 year ago, said Jack Williams, a UW-Madison geologist and geographer who uses fossil records to study how species respond to climate change.
Jeff Pothof, chief quality officer for UW Health, said UW Hospital on Friday again broke the record for new COVID-19 patients. He wouldn’t provide numbers, but said the patient count is “at least triple what we had back in the spring.”
As of Friday, 57 COVID-19 patients were at the hospital, including 16 in intensive care, quadruple the volume from six weeks earlier. If Wisconsin’s coronavirus surge doesn’t turn around, the hospital may soon have to place infected patients in pre-op waiting areas or operating rooms, said Dr. Jeff Pothof, chief quality officer for UW Health.
“The polls were clearly off again and in a surprising fashion,” said UW-Madison political science professor Barry Burden. “Many of us expected the polls to be more accurate this year than they were four years ago.”
“I don’t want to say (changing the outcome is) impossible but really borders on impossible,” said UW-Madison Political Law Professor Howard Schweber. “The outcome was not based on a close result in one state, it was based on results in multiple states.”
“What we can say now is a woman’s place is in the House, in the Senate, in the White House…This is a crack in the glass ceiling of American politics,” said Linda Greene, UW-Madison Evjue-Bascom Professor of Law.
“So the trick in getting an accurate poll is getting a representative sample that’s the whole thing you’re trying to do is make sure the sample of people you have in your survey is representative of the population,” Prof. David Canon, of UW-Madison’s Political Science Dept. said.
David Canon, chair of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s political science department, said allegations of fraud are a “complete fabrication”. He said he expects little, if anything, to come from the Trump campaign’s attempts at litigation across the country.
Song Gao, a geography professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been aggregating cell phone data showing how far Wisconsinites are traveling each day.
“According to our tracking dashboard, overall mobility is already back to normal,” Gao said Thursday. “Also, the close contact (physical distancing) index has dramatically increased in September and October, which indicates more gatherings in the state.”
While Hantz Farms didn’t dispossess anyone’s land, the threat is real, said Monica White, author of “Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement.”
“There has been a historical dispossession of land from Black farmers, and redlining is a part of that history,” said White, an associate professor of environmental justice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The current legal maneuvering is mainly a way for the Trump campaign to try to extend the ball game in the long-shot hope that some serious anomaly will emerge,” said Robert Yablon, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School. “As of now, we haven’t seen any indication of systematic irregularities in the vote count.”
President Trump’s campaign said it has filed lawsuits to stop counting ballots in Michigan and Pennsylvania to increase access to observe the tallying process. Franciska Coleman, assistant professor of constitutional law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, says stopping ballot counts is an ‘extraordinary’ remedy. She joins ‘Closing Bell’ to discuss.
Hunting also increased in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan after wolves in those states were federally delisted, adds Adrian Treves, an ecologist who leads the Carnivore Coexistence Lab at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
“Fruits are treated differently in Asian culture and in Japanese society especially,” Soyeon Shim, dean of the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told CNN in 2019. “Fruit purchase and consumption are tied to social and cultural practices.
Nancy Wong, a professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said it’s because stockpiling items, like we had seen earlier in the pandemic, serves as a security blanket.
“People feel assured and soothed by something that is concrete,” she said.
Neuroscientist Richard Davidson, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds, has helped create a series of meditative soundtracks to cope with the anxiety of the election.
Broad-based shutdowns in March and April brought economic worries to places such as the rural upper midwest long before the virus was widespread there. Political scientist Kathy Cramer, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said this was certainly the case in Wisconsin, where an edge-of-your-seat finish is now playing out.
“There is no doubt that, in general, people were experiencing economic effects more than the health effects of the pandemic,” especially in the spring and summer, said Cramer. Cramer is also author of the Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker.
Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said earlier on Wednesday that Trump appeared to be trailing Biden by about 22,000 to 23,000 votes in the state, which would amount to less than one percentage point.
UW Political Science Professor Howard Schweber, who is an expert in constitutional law, judicial law, democratic theory and American politics, said the current political climate and election are complicated, and political parties are less sure than they thought they were with the election numbers and results.
“I wouldn’t want to speculate on how the Court would rule, but the argument that voters relied on the rules in place on and before Election Day – and should therefore have their votes counted – is very strong,” said Dan Tokaji, dean of the University of Wisconsin Law School.
“In case after case and time after time, allegations of material numbers of people intentionally committing vote fraud, they just don’t withstand any scrutiny,” said Kenneth Mayer, professor of American politics at the University of Wisconsin.
The fear created by threats and violence has a chilling effect on the nation’s political process, said Katherine Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Quoted: Mike Wagner, a political expert from UW-Madison, says President Trump will rely on rural counties as a path to winning the Badger State.“If he is able to get back to his 2016 numbers, he could very well win Wisconsin and win the election,” said Wagner.
“The almost daily increases in cases, deaths, and hospitalizations in Wisconsin keep voters’ attention on the pandemic and that attention does not help Donald Trump,” said Barry C. Burden, the director of the Election Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Steve Deller, a regional economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, agreed that data using online job postings leaves out an important component of hiring for many businesses: word of mouth.
Quoted: “I would think you would want to intensify the testing beyond just the antigen testing and you would want to include PCR testing,” says UW-Madison Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine David O’Connor. O’Connor stresses he does not speak for his department or the university and has not consulted with the UW Athletic Department.
By the end of the century Wisconsin’s climate could be similar to St. Louis, according to models developed by scientists with the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impact. That’s roughly analogous to the warming the Earth experienced coming out of the last ice age between 19,000 and 8,000 year ago, said Jack Williams, a UW-Madison geologist and geographer who uses fossil records to study how species respond to climate change.
Aaron Sojourner at the University of Minnesota and Menzie Chinn at the University of Wisconsin have constructed the graph below which projects the size of the economy based on various September quarter growth rates vs. the December 2019 quarter.
And while many of Wisconsin’s small towns and cities in its southwestern corner drove up Mr. Trump’s margins, most had not voted for Republicans in decades, says Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Things are really running rampant, so there is a lot of discontent,” said Barry Burden, the director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
To answer Hanson’s question, WPR’s “Central Time” reached out to Daniel Einstein, the historic and cultural resources manager for the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Einstein is in charge of campus structures and landscapes; archeology, including effigy mound sites; public art, like university commemorative objects and statues; and the campus art collection.
As a result, public safety measures have been largely left up to municipalities and individuals, said Patrick Remington, former epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Other wrinkles of our current political moment could further explain why so many Trump supporters approve of the president’s pandemic response. Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says the most consistent theme on the right-wing talk-radio shows she’s been listening to is a desire to trust people to make their own decisions, rather than trusting the government to make decisions for people.
“The question is not so much what policy needs to be enacted, but what are people willing to embrace?” said Ajay Sethi, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “A policy is only as effective as people will follow it.”
