Here & Now

Here & Now for Sept. 29, 2017

Frederica Freyberg:

I’m Frederica Freyberg. Tonight on “Here and Now,” a first look at a new survey that shows fewer votes in the 2016 presidential election due to Wisconsin's voter ID law. After that, a closer look at what the governor’s veto to a popular tax credit for rehabbing historic buildings means for developers. An inside look at the state elections commission about what happened with Russian hacking in Wisconsin. State senator now Democrat running for governor, Kathleen Vinehout is here. And a sendoff for Wisconsin Public Radio’s Joy Cardin. It’s “Here and Now” for September 29.

Announcer:

Funding for “Here and Now” is provided, in part, by Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.

Frederica Freyberg:

A first look tonight at a study of Wisconsin voters sparking national attention. UW-Madison Political Science Professor Ken Mayer surveyed Dane and Milwaukee County registered voters who did not vote in the 2016 presidential election, finding that Wisconsin's voter ID law discouraged thousands of voters. According to the survey, commissioned by the Dane County Clerk, 11.2% of eligible nonvoting registrants were deterred from voting which according to the study results, corresponds to well over 16,000 people and could be more than 23,000 people, depending on the survey’s margin of error. The survey also found that a disproportionate number of people who did not cast ballots citing the voter ID law were low-income and minority voters. Just more 21% of low-income voters were deterred from voting, compared to just over 7% of higher earners. While 8.3% of white voters were deterred by the ID law, 27.5% of African Americans were deterred from voting. We caught up with the study’s author, Professor Ken Mayer upon its release this week. We started by asking about the survey’s conclusions.

Ken Mayer:

What we concluded is that the voter ID law had a substantial effect on a number of voters. I think it’s really one of the first studies that has demonstrated that there were thousands of people whose right to vote was interfered with. We call it deterred. Or in some cases I think we can state that people were effectively prevented from casting a ballot because of the ID requirements.

Frederica Freyberg:

Who, according to your results, was most likely to be deterred from voting?

Ken Mayer:

Well, there’s — past research has demonstrated that there are vulnerable populations: low-income, minority, poor. These are the types of individuals who are most likely to be affected because they’re least likely to possess the forms of ID and our findings were consistent with that. We found that African-Americans were over three times as likely to report that they had either been deterred in voting or prevented from voting. And you see a similar difference when we’re looking at low-income individuals, where actually about six times as likely to say that they were affected by this than high-income individuals. Again, this is consistent with other research that looks at patterns of ID possessions and where the burdens of these laws tend to fall.

Frederica Freyberg:

Given those demographics, is it your professional opinion that this is in fact the purpose of Wisconsin's voter ID law and others across the country?

Ken Mayer g:

Well, we’ve been very careful in presenting the studies not to make those conclusions. This was a specific empirical question. We were interested in how many people were affected and what their demographic characteristics are. So I'm not going to make a claim about motivation. Our intention was to present the empirical findings and contribute to the debate over the nature of these laws.

Frederica Freyberg:

Such laws are supposed to address voter fraud, though. Is that right?

Ken Mayer:

That's correct.

Frederica Freyberg:

And in your mind, do they?

Ken Mayer:

No. The research is absolutely conclusive. The forms of voter fraud that these laws can address, which is really nothing other than voter impersonation. Someone showing up at the polling place and claiming to be someone else on the rolls and voting in that person’s place. Study after study after study, anybody, any neutral or informed person, scholar, academic, student who has looked at this has concluded that that kind of fraud is just vanishingly rare. We’re talking about maybe one or two cases in an election. Justin Levitt who’s a law professor at Loyola University in Los Angeles looked at credible cases of voter impersonation over a 18-year period and found out of more than a billion votes cast, there were maybe 30, 31 cases. So the notion that these laws actually address a form of voter fraud is just simply incorrect. And so here, again, we make an empirical statement that we have good evidence that thousands of people were essentially prevented from voting by these laws. Balancing against that that there are no cases of voter impersonation that these laws can address.

Frederica Freyberg:

As to what your survey found, you discovered that people who actually had qualifying ID to vote didn’t because they were confused about the law.

Ken Mayer:

That's correct. Most of the people who cited ID as a reason they didn’t vote actually turned out to possess a qualifying form of ID. And that’s actually consistent with other similar studies that have concluded the same thing. One of the most common misconceptions is that people believe that their driver’s license or photo ID has to have their current address or the same address that they registered under. And that’s not true. It doesn’t have to. And that kind of confusion contributes to disenfranchisement because people don’t quite understand what the law means and how it works. And so they wind up thinking that they’re ineligible to vote when they actually are.

Frederica Freyberg:

Why did the Dane County Clerk commission this survey?

Ken Mayer:

So, his goal, as he explained it to me, is that he wanted to find evidence of what the effect was and how he might best deploy his resources to educate people on the nature of the law. It was basically to identify the empirical question, how many people were affected and is there anything that he might be able to do to educate people about the law.

Frederica Freyberg:

Now, your survey shows that the number of voters deterred from casting a ballot would not have been enough to change election results. So why is this information important?

Ken Mayer:

Well, again, we are also very clear not to make the claim that the numbers that we found would have flipped the election or that the numbers that we find in Dane and Milwaukee County can be immediately extrapolated to the state. In my view, the harm here is not simply whether the election would have changed. That’s the wrong metric. When you have thousands of people who are effectively disenfranchised, unable to vote — and I should point out that about 80% of the people that we identified as being affected by this, the voter files show that they actually voted in 2012. That’s a serious harm. Disenfranchising people for no reason is in itself a harm to the integrity of the electoral process.

Frederica Freyberg:

Ken Mayer, thanks very much.

Ken Mayer:

My pleasure.

Frederica Freyberg:

In reaction to Mayer’s voter ID study, the state treasurer said Dane County should have its shared revenue reduced by $55,000, calling that amount for its commission of the survey a “complete waste of money.” In tonight’s closer look, one of Governor Scott Walker’s budget vetoes has some developers scrambling and unsure whether their projects can go forward because the governor put a $500,000 cap on the historic tax credit. It had been set at 20% of the total project cost. The legislature’s budget put a $5 million cap on the credit program for rehabbing historic buildings. But Walker scaled that back, saying he objects to continuing this program with almost no limitation on the amount that can be awarded each fiscal year, saying the program has grown to cause an annual tax revenue loss exceeding $60 million. We check in now with Matthew Jarosz, Director of the UW-Milwaukee Historic Preservation Institute, which describes itself as dedicated to the preservation and adaptive re-use of historic buildings. Matthew, thanks very much for being here.

Matthew Jarosz:

Thank you.

Frederica Freyberg:

So what was your reaction when you saw that veto of the governor’s?

Matthew Jarosz:

Well, we were quite surprised. We suspected through several months of interaction with some of the legislators that there might be a desire to cap the program. So we collected a lot of data over the summer, really since April or so, on all of these projects, over 118 projects around the state, to really get a sense of what they meant and perhaps what this cap might mean. And we also did it in the context of programs around the country and other states. And really a lot of the successful programs were uncapped. And we had been, as you described, uncapped for three years. So we were hoping very much that the program would continue and some of the economic numbers that have been created and concluded by Baker Tilly show that it’s a tremendously successful program. So it caught us by surprise quite frankly a week and a half ago when we saw the $500,000 project cap.

Frederica Freyberg:

What does it do to the kinds of projects that are ongoing now or had people wanted to start?

Matthew Jarosz:

Well, when the program for the last couple years had no capping restriction, clearly there was a flood of projects of a lot of kind of pent-up possibility of reusing historic buildings that hadn’t happened for 15 years. We tracked the projects for 15 years. And there were something in the average about 11 per year that were being done because the credit at that time was down at 5%. So once it was elevated to 20%, there was sort of this pent-up demand that hit us.

Frederica Freyberg:

In fact, since 2014, I understand, about $177 million went out to Wisconsin projects through this program, more than half of those in Milwaukee. Were developers just kind of gobbling up this money and going on this rehab binge?

Matthew Jarosz:

Well, there was probably a dimension of that. Now, it came three years ago. That was a bit of a surprise that they were elevated. We had tried for years before then to show the virtues in states like Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois and other states who had higher tax credits, what a great stimulus and catalytic program it was in those states. So at that point all of a sudden that was a surprise. But clearly then developers got their act together. But what we’ve found in our numbers, in our research, is after two or three years, who was doing projects and where changed fairly dramatically, to small towns in Wisconsin, to smaller projects.

Frederica Freyberg:

Now, the governor wanted the program to emphasize job creation potential, but you maintain that it does do that. How so?

Matthew Jarosz:

Well, we looked at and we’ve spent a good deal of time at the institute really trying to gather up all the pertinent information. But of course we didn’t stop there. We’ve hired Baker Tilly to look at those numbers and to analyze that and found that over almost 11,000 jobs were created in that three year period, full-time construction jobs. 5,000 as permanent jobs after the buildings were restored. So maybe the numbers weren’t great, but they certainly were pretty good.

Frederica Freyberg:

Let me ask you — and we have some photos that you provided of examples of some of these historic tax credit projects. I mean, what kind of old buildings, what kinds of new uses, where are they located?

Matthew Jarosz:

Well, we have a variety — and I kind of gave you a variety of scale of projects. We have of course some very large multimillion projects, but also some very small main street projects. There’s a great small restaurant in Dodgeville that used the tax credits, a barbecue restaurant in Dodgeville. The smallest project you can imagine and from small, medium to large projects. And as a matter of fact, a kind of wave now of smaller projects that have been coming through because owners and developers could count on that credit because it wasn’t capped. There’s really some speculation — and we’ve talked to developers who might not risk going into the program — you have to invest in an architect. You have to really do this properly in order to get the credits. And I think that in some ways a lot of development won’t happen because of that kind of capping uncertainty.

Frederica Freyberg:

You were saying that many of these buildings that might be rehabbed with this credit would just sit vacant for decades.

Matthew Jarosz:

Listen, I’m not going to speculate about what happens in the future but we have the numbers of what has happened now in the past. For the three years, 60% of those buildings that were remodeled, rehabbed, using the tax credit program, had been vacant for over 20 years.

Frederica Freyberg:

All right.

Matthew Jarosz:

So, I mean, there’s the proof in itself, that any other programs weren’t moving the dial on these vacant buildings. This program came along and all of a sudden these buildings left vacant, some for 50 years, left vacant now all of a sudden had the kind of bridge loan that this offers. Because it isn’t a grant. It eventually comes back via higher property values and jobs and so forth.

Frederica Freyberg:

All right. Well, we need to leave it there. Matthew, thank you very much.

Matthew Jarosz:

Thank you.

Frederica Freyberg:

Did they or didn’t they? Did the Russian government target Wisconsin’s elections in 2016? A week ago, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said the Russian did scan Wisconsin’s election system looking for vulnerabilities in the voter registration database. Then this week Homeland Security changed its story telling Wisconsin officials the Russians actually targeted the state Department of Workforce Development. But by week’s end, Homeland Security doubled back and said no, it was also the election system. So what gives? Reid Magney is the Public Information Officer for the Wisconsin Elections Commission. And thanks for being here.

Reid Magney:

You’re welcome.

Frederica Freyberg:

So what does give?

Reid Magney:

What gives is that there has been some definite confusion this week, but the bottom line is that nobody got hacked. No information was stolen. No penetration was made. The state’s IT infrastructure protected Wisconsin’s elections systems. It appears, though, that the Russians were looking for sort of other possible entrances. What we understand from Homeland Security, now finally, is that they may have been like try the door over here instead of the main door. See if we can learn anything about how this door works before we try this door. But in the end nothing happened. They were looking at an IP address where there was no server attached to it.

Frederica Freyberg:

Bottom line, they tried but they didn’t get in.

Reid Magney:

Correct.

Frederica Freyberg:

But meanwhile the commission’s chairman said this “Either they were right on Friday,” this being Homeland Security “and this is a cover-up or they were wrong on Friday and we deserve an apology.” Why would it be a cover-up?

Reid Magney:

I don’t think it was a cover-up. DHS is a really, really big government agency. A lot of bureaucracy. And what we’ve learned is that there are the people who worry about the cyber threats, who are looking at IP addresses and doing things like that. Then there’s intelligence people on the other side and everything sort of needs to get put together. And, you know, you’re not always talking to the right people. But as the week has gone on, my boss, Michael Haas, has been talking to people with some very long titles. And he’s gotten some apologies from them for how this all happened. So going forward, I think we’re in a good place.

Frederica Freyberg:

What concerns are there that this kind of who’s on first response on the part of the feds to Russian interference reduces public confidence in our election system?

Reid Magney:

It’s unfortunate that we couldn’t have been on the same page. That we didn’t really learn about — it really took us about a year to find out really what happened. The Homeland Security is learning about elections. They know how to defend the airports. They know how to protect us from a lot of other terrorist threats. Elections, which they’re just getting into, is a new world to them and we’re very decentralized. Things don’t work the way that maybe they expected they worked. And we’re learning to communicate about that, too. So we’re going in a really good direction. I’m sorry that it was a little bit herky-jerky.

Frederica Freyberg:

So what is Wisconsin doing to maintain the security of our vote now and going forward?

Reid Magney:

We’re doing a lot of things. We’re developing a — we have one plan in place now that we put out before last November's election. We’re working on a new plan that’s really going to look at what are the best practices for election security all over the country. We’re going to basically take those best ideas and make sure that they’re in our plan. That we have not overlooked any single thing. If there’s something we can’t do or we’re not doing, we understand why we’re not doing it. Because it won’t work with our particular system. We’re doing things like encrypting our state voter registration database. We’re going to go to things like not needing just a user name and password for the clerks who use that system to get into it. Sort of multi-factor authentication. We’re going to look at a number of other things. So the system that we have now has worked really well and we’re going to make it even better.

Frederica Freyberg:

All right. Reid Magney, thanks very much.

Reid Magney:

You're welcome.

Frederica Freyberg:

A look ahead tonight to the 2018 election and continuing interviews with candidates running in the democratic primary for governor. Tonight we talk with Kathleen Vinehout, a dairy farmer and former professor. She was elected to the state senate in 2006. She ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2012. Senator Vinehout, thanks for being here.

Kathleen Vinehout:

My pleasure.

Frederica Freyberg:

What sets you apart from the other democrats in this crowded field?

Kathleen Vinehout:

I have a very different background as you just mentioned. I come to politics later in my career. I worked in health care. I spent ten years as a university professor teaching health care and health administration. I then became a full-time dairy farmer and found myself without health insurance when our family had to make a difficult decision to either sell the cows or drop the health insurance. It was that experience that led me to say I know how to fix this. I’ve studied this. I’ve researched it. I’ve made written proposals. But we need to help farmers and small business people find a way to get affordable health care. It was that that brought me to the Senate. In my first six months, I worked with Senator Miller and Senator Erpenbach on a plan that covered everybody called “Healthy Wisconsin.” That didn’t pass the Assembly. But I then put together another group of bills that did pass that the State Journal said was the biggest change in a decade in health care. Since then I’ve spent a great deal of time on the Audit Committee studying how programs work. How to fix them and understanding state finances. I don’t think anybody else has that background.

Frederica Freyberg:

So even as you launch your campaign, though, this week, the Republican party is blasting you for writing a character reference letter for a former capitol employee convicted of child pornography. What about that?

Kathleen Vinehout:

David was the staff for my committee. I sent a lot of time with him and I was asked by a judge to write a character reference. He did something that I was appalled and shocked at. No one knew. My mother taught me that you should hate the sin, but not shun the sinner. I did something I don’t think anybody would object to. The letter is published on the Cap Times website. People can read it and see it and see what I wrote. It was a professional recommendation just based on his professional experience with me.

Frederica Freyberg:

All right. Let’s move along to the issues. What do you think is the most important thing that Wisconsin needs to do for its education system?

Kathleen Vinehout:

We need to change the funding formula. People have been talking about it for years. It could have been done with the same amount of money that’s in the budget now, the same amount of money the governor spent. There was great opportunity to really fix the problem with schools. Instead, the governor put a great deal of money outside the formula, which is going to make the system more unfair going forward. This is a solvable problem. It’s a problem that I showed how to solve in four different alternatives I've written over the last budget — four budget cycles to say, “Hey, this is a very important problem. We need to fix it. Here’s a way to do it.” Unfortunately, those ideas weren’t picked up and the inequities in the system will continue for next two years.

Frederica Freyberg:

Should the ACA remain in place? Would you accept expanded Medicaid in Wisconsin?

Kathleen Vinehout:

Absolutely. Absolutely. And take the money that the federal government would help us cover the people that we’re covering now and use it for addiction and community-based mental health treatment. Something that Minnesota did years and years ago and is responsible in part for the fact that Minnesota has half the number of people incarcerated than Wisconsin.

Frederica Freyberg:

How would you grow good-paying jobs in Wisconsin?

Kathleen Vinehout:

Well, first of all, I would make sure that not one single company got $3 billion but that every company had the opportunity to grow. We have a state that’s filled with entrepreneurs. People that want to get started in their business and maybe have a very small barrier, like they need a little cash to get started. We could do a very different job in economic development. Also by investing in our communities, the very things that are suffering as the governor spends all this money on this one single company.

Frederica Freyberg:

How would you fund Wisconsin’s roads and highways?

Kathleen Vinehout:

I would do it in a number of different ways. There was a study that was done by the governor’s own Secretary of Transportation that came up with 24 different ways. One of the pieces that I didn’t know until I read his 600-page budget was that Wisconsin owns 624 miles of freight rail line. And 80% of the cost of maintaining that is paid for by taxpayers and borrowed and the freight rail line spent not a single dollar to the state paying for that rail. Wouldn’t solve the whole problem. It’s a no-brainer that needs to be done.

Frederica Freyberg:

Why do you think you could unseat Scott Walker?

Kathleen Vinehout:

Because I believe in putting people first. I believe in policies that really lift up our people. And that’s not what we’ve had. It’s very different from what we’ve had in the last eight — well, six years, six and a half. We have a governor that puts really wealthy Taiwanese billionaires first, not the people of the state of Wisconsin and people want to get back to that.

Frederica Freyberg:

We leave it there. Kathleen Vinehout, thanks very much.

Kathleen Vinehout:

My pleasure.

Frederica Freyberg:

Now for our Wisconsin look segment. In a celebration of a public broadcasting icon who retired today after 31 years at Wisconsin Public Radio. For the past nearly 15 years, Joy Cardin has been the host of “The Joy Cardin Show.”

Joy Cardin:

I'm Joy Cardin talking with Joe and Terry.

Frederica Freyberg:

You heard her every morning from 6:00 till 9:00. A steady, friendly, informed voice behind the microphone of Wisconsin Public Radio. In her more than three decades, she was everything from beat reporter to news director and beyond.

Frederica Freyberg:

Hello. I’m Frederica Freyberg.

Joy Cardin:

And I'm joy Cardin.

Frederica Freyberg:

Joy lent her news chops to WPT collaborations over the years and has won several awards for reporting, editing and hosting. And it was as host of her namesake show, where she expanded the boundaries of the state from a 7th floor studio.

Joy Cardin:

31 years I've been doing a lot of different things. But it was all in the mission of inspiring and serving and engaging listeners in the state of Wisconsin. And I can’t think of a higher purpose. So that kept me going. I am going to miss Wisconsin Public Radio and my coworkers and my colleagues at Wisconsin Public Television. I am going to — I am going to miss the listeners. I’m going to miss the guests. But I am not going to miss getting up at 1:00 in the morning. I’m not going to miss my early morning morning schedule.

Frederica Freyberg:

Thank you, Joy, and congrats on your last day. Finally tonight, a look ahead to next week, when the U.S. Supreme Court hears oral arguments in Wisconsin’s legislative redistricting case. WPR’s Shawn Johnson will be in Washington for the hearing and he’ll join us with details. Until then, I'm Frederica Freyberg. Have a great weekend.

Announcer:

Funding for “Here and Now” is provided, in part, by Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.