Republican state Rep. Scott Krug is introducing legislation to, among other things, allow counting of absentee ballots the day before Election Day, and is hoping for bipartisan support. Data centers being built all over Wisconsin are going to use a lot of water for cooling and also a lot of energy to power equipment inside — UW-Madison engineering professor Line Roald said they will change the scope of electricity use for the state. When the Trump administration said using acetaminophen during pregnancy is related to autism, scientists and health experts like the Waisman Center’s Lily Wagner said that claim is not supported by research.
 

State Rep. Scott Krug
R-Rome

• Krug took over as vice-chair of the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections after the rocky tenure of a previous chair who promoted election-related conspiracy theories. Touting his new efforts in a bipartisan press conference, Krug is offering a set of proposals to overhaul state election practices, including AB 312, which would set a minimum requirement for the number of hours early voting is available, and AB 374, which would change state deadlines related to the results of federal elections to conform with federal law. Another proposal Krug said he plans to put forth would allow for counting of absentee ballots to start on the Monday before Election Day, in part to stop the late Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning reporting of results.
• Krug: “We just know from the last few cycles that Milwaukee has been the later reporter amongst the election results in the state of Wisconsin. It’s led to conspiracies that there is late night ballot dumps, and all kinds of conjecture that is built from that and exploded over the years every time we have a statewide election. So, the answer is to do what 43 other states do and to figure out a way that we can get the ballots counted, and people can go to bed knowing who won the election on Election \Day.”

Line Roald
Professor, UW-Madison College of Engineering Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering

• Wisconsin has 43 data centers and counting as of July 2025, with the most prominent being a 1,900-acre site in Mount Pleasant in Racine County that Microsoft is building. These data centers need millions of gallons of fresh water to cool processing equipment, but they also require huge amounts of electricity to operate. Roald said the Mount Pleasant data center facility will use as much as all the households in Milwaukee.
• Roald: “With AI and these large language models and these very, very large models that need really, really large data centers for training and inference, it’s really been quite explosive, I would say. So, it’s a bit unprecedented for the grid to see this amount of growth in this short time period. In Wisconsin, do we have the capacity to provide the electricity? It’s not like there are hundreds and hundreds of megawatts of power that is just kind of laying around, waiting to be used. We don’t necessarily have the capacity to meet all that demand as it is today. And so, we are going to need new infrastructure, new transmission lines, new power plants in order to meet that demand, because it’s also not like the regions around us necessarily have that energy.”

Lily Wagner
Director, Waisman Center Autism and Developmental Disabilities Clinic

• President Donald Trump has repeatedly said people who are pregnant should not take acetaminophen —- brand name Tylenol — because he claims its use is associated with causing autism. Numerous physicians and other health experts around the county reject this claim, including Wagner.
• Wagner: “I think the best answer that we have and that we can tell patients of ours confidently is that the really good science and good studies do not support that Tylenol causes autism. We do have decades of research showing that things like maternal fever and pain during pregnancy can have significant risks, including some developmental delays or differences. But no, there’s no evidence of a causal relationship.”

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