Here & Now

Here & Now for March 23, 2018

Announcer:

The following program is part of our “Here and Now” 2018 Wisconsin Vote election coverage.

Frederica Freyberg:

I’m Frederica Freyberg. Tonight on “Here and Now,” a court orders Governor Walker to fill empty seats in a special election. Questions over deactivated voters in Milwaukee. Mayor Tom Barrett is here. So is the attorney who successfully sued over his client’s maltreatment at Copper Lake. A UW study that reveals Russian influence on Twitter. It’s “Here and Now” for March 23.

Announcer:

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

Frederica Freyberg:

In tonight’s first look, the Republican legislative majority and Governor Scott Walker will set about undoing a ruling from a Dane County judge this week. The judge ruled the governor must call special elections for two seats left vacant when the legislators took jobs in his administration. Now legislative leaders have called an extraordinary session to rewrite the law. WPR Capitol Bureau Chief Shawn Johnson joins us on this. And thanks for doing so.

Shawn Johnson:

Hey Fred.

Frederica Freyberg:

So rather than go the judicial route, which might have been seeking a stay or appealing this ruling out of Dane County, lawmakers are taking it, as we’ve said, into extraordinary session.

Shawn Johnson:

Yeah. This is all happening very fast. I mean, it was just Thursday that they were hearing testimony in this case. And the judge ruled from the bench because she said the law here was clear that under the law, the governor had to order these special elections. Today, we heard some rumblings that legislative leaders might call some type of an extra session. They did it. And Governor Scott Walker came out and said he would sign what they pass right away.

Frederica Freyberg:

In fact, in a statement the governor released he said, “It would be senseless to waste taxpayer money on special elections just weeks before voters go to the polls when the legislature has concluded its business.” Concluded its business of course except for this.

Shawn Johnson:

We’ve got a stack now of special sessions and extraordinary sessions after this one gets called where the legislature keeps extending that calendar that was maybe going to end in February and now who knows.

Frederica Freyberg:

So stepping back, you said the Dane County judge found that it was quite clear that she had to rule in the way that she did and so perhaps it would suggest that going the judicial route for the governor or the legislators wasn’t going to be successful. They had to do something else.

Shawn Johnson:

We don’t know. I mean, the final say on this would have been up to the state Supreme Court. But we do know that the law, if you look at it, says if there’s a vacancy in an election year before the second Tuesday in May that you call a special election. The governor said because these vacancies occurred last year, that law didn’t apply. But the judge was saying that would lead to an absurd result because you could have somebody leave the legislature in early May and the governor would have to call a special election. Where under his rationale, he wouldn’t have to for something that happened in December.

Frederica Freyberg:

Meanwhile, the plaintiffs Thursday, yesterday, thought they had won this case. And they did. It still has this next step to go, of course. But what were the plaintiffs saying?

Shawn Johnson:

Alvin Meyer was one of the plaintiffs who was there at the court hearing on Thursday. Afterward he said he was happy. He said he’s a taxpayer and he deserves to have a senator like everybody else.

Alvin Meyer:

Is the view that the role of legislator is so insignificant that we don’t need one for a year? I just don’t comprehend that, even what was the purpose here. Somebody quits, resigns, moves on, why not fill their job? We’re either saying that the role of a state senator is important or we’re not.

Frederica Freyberg:

So one has to wonder what the reaction to all of this might be from Eric Holder, President Obama's former Attorney General, whose firm or whose group lodged this case against Wisconsin and Governor Scott Walker. But other Democrats stateside are weighing in.

Shawn Johnson:

Yeah. We know that Democrats have–at least in a statement Senate Majority Leader Jennifer Shilling released a statement saying, “It’s not surprising to see another temper tantrum from Republican leaders when something doesn’t go their way. Republicans are clearly intimidated by the thought of losing power and would rather create chaos and confusion going into a tough re-election year.” Essentially Democrats are saying the governor doesn’t want to call these elections because earlier special elections suggest they might lose them. It is a lot of national attention now being focused, though, on two state legislative districts.

Frederica Freyberg:

Very interesting stuff. Shawn Johnson, thanks very much.

Shawn Johnson:

You’re welcome.

Frederica Freyberg:

For more on the special election court ruling, head over to our news partner at WisContext.org. Reporter Scott Gordon has several stories. And this program reminder. Next Friday night, Shawn Johnson and I will co-moderate a one-hour debate between state Supreme Court candidates Rebecca Dallet and Michael Screnock. That’s live on Wisconsin Public Television and Radio from 7 to 8 p.m. Less than two weeks away from the spring election, the city of Milwaukee is sounding the alarm over the possibility that thousands of people there may have had their voter registrations erroneously inactivated because in efforts to have clean voter registration data, Wisconsin joined a multistate program called the Electronic Registration Information Center in 2016. ERIC, as it’s known, purges voters from the rolls for having inconsistent voter registration addresses. But city election officials say the ERIC system is flawed because of inaccurate address information provided by the state DMV and the U.S. Post Office. This year Milwaukee was informed by the state that nearly 47,000 records were flagged for those address inconsistencies. After some voters verified their addresses or re-registered, about 32,000 records were inactivated. That leaves Milwaukee with the lowest number of registered voters in 50 years. And officials there worry about disenfranchising potentially thousands of voters in the upcoming spring and fall elections. Mayor Tom Barrett joins us from Milwaukee. Mayor, thanks very much for doing so.

Tom Barrett:

Thank you very much.

Frederica Freyberg:

Of the 32,000 records deactivated, do you know how many were done so in error?

Tom Barrett:

We don’t and that’s the problem. We don’t know. And I don’t know that the state officials know. And let me start this out by saying we are not claiming there’s something nefarious going on here. We though believe this is not ready for prime time. That in order for this system to be put in place, you want to make sure that you are not taking people’s names off the voting rolls if they’re eligible to vote. The Constitutional right to vote should be paramount here. And if that means we’re going to have a few extra names on the voting rolls and the people don’t show up, that doesn’t offend me as much as having someone who is legally able to vote being denied the right to vote because they can’t, for whatever reason, register on election day.

Frederica Freyberg:

Now, the state says that if 100 Milwaukee voters had to re-register with their same addresses in February as they did, April's election will probably see 200 who have to do that. But that every voter deactivated the state says, will be on a supplemental poll list and can affirm their address and vote. Doesn’t that fix the immediate problem?

Tom Barrett:

I think it’s a short-term fix, but we have two very important fall elections as well. And we have had no assurances that we’re going to be able to use that same system in the fall. I think it’s a little bit more cumbersome obviously to have to go to a second list because if you’re not on the first list, you don’t know necessarily that you’re on the second list. It’s going to take some additional training, obviously, to make sure that our poll workers know if someone doesn’t show up, then you have to look at the second list. But once you get to the November election, for example, if you’re using that system then, and we don’t even have any assurances we can use that system then — that could result in longer delays and some people not being given the right to vote.

Frederica Freyberg:

How did these errors with the ERIC system occur, in your understanding?

Tom Barrett:

My understanding is that the state relied on a Department of Motor Vehicles and that the computers didn’t talk well to each other. I hear a lot of different things. And people who are much more attune to this than I I think probably could give you the nuances. But let me give you an example. What happens if on your Department of Motor Vehicle’s address it says apartment 3, and it doesn’t say apartment 3 when you vote. And you get dropped because of that. That’s one issue. A second issue might be that you live in Madison or you live in Baraboo but your car is registered in Jefferson County because you have a separate residence there. That would be an example of someone who’s getting bumped. I think students who may have their address on their driver’s license as one location in the state of Wisconsin and then a second location for voting, they may run into difficulties. And of course when you’ve got low-income people, they’re going to be moving much more often. And if they don’t coordinate those moves, it’s going to make it more difficult for them to re-register on election day.

Frederica Freyberg:

And here’s one more thing the state told us. They said, “We have learned that some people who fill out a USPS change of address form do so because USPS has been having trouble delivering mail to their address, not because they moved. Because of that, we reactivated approximately 7,000 voters statewide after the February 20 spring primary.” So just one more kind of explanation for how some of these errors might have occurred. But ERIC is in place in 23 other states. Are you familiar with other states having these kinds of issues?

Tom Barrett:

I think in some states it’s worked well. I think in some states there have been issues. Our election commissioner–election director essentially said that this is a situation where we want to make sure that it’s done right before we go live with it. There’s no rush to go live with it until it’s done right. And, again, it gets back to the fundamental right to vote. I don’t want to be in a situation where people are being disenfranchised because of inaccurate data supplied by the Department of Motor Vehicles, inaccurate data supplied by the U.S. Post Office. I want people to be able to vote.

Frederica Freyberg:

You’ve written to the governor about this matter. What’s been the response?

Tom Barrett:

We haven’t heard back. We sent a letter out earlier this week so again, I’m not raising a flag that there’s something nefarious going on here. It’s a problem. I want to solve the problem. It’s that simple. I don’t think that this should be a political battle because it’s the fundamental right to vote. I think everybody should agree if someone is eligible to vote, they should be able to vote. I’m well aware that we’re in a political environment where there are times when people want to make it more difficult for people to vote, but I certainly don’t think this is a situation where we should be making it more difficult to vote for anybody, but certainly not for someone who has the correct information but the state might have the wrong information.

Frederica Freyberg:

What does this do, in your mind, to voter confidence?

Tom Barrett:

Well, I think anytime you go to the polls and you’re standing there and you show them your photo ID and they say, “Well, you’re not on the list.” You’re taken aback. What do you mean? I’m on the list. And then to be told that you’re not, I think obviously has an impact on your confidence in the system when something like that happens. Again, as you pointed out, for the April election, if you know enough to go to the second list, you might be on the second list. That assumes two things. That assumes either, one, the poll worker knows to go to that second list and we’re going to try to make sure that happens. I can’t guarantee that 100% of the time. Or that you know that there’s a second list that you should be checking.

Frederica Freyberg:

All right. Mayor Tom Barrett, thanks very much for spending the time to talk with us about this.

Tom Barrett:

Thank you.

Frederica Freyberg:

A busy week at the state capitol. Both houses of the state legislature this week voted to close Wisconsin's juvenile correctional facilities in Irma. The $80 million plan will close Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake by 2021 and replace the institutions with smaller, regional facilities.

The measure now goes to the governor. Also this week, both houses passed a $100 million school safety plan and a $100 per child tax credit and a scaled-back sales tax holiday. A separate bill that strengthens background checks for long guns such as rifles and shotguns was passed by the Assembly, but the Senate leader says it is unlikely to move forward in his chamber.

The legislature voted to close down the state’s juvenile correctional facilities the same week the state agreed to pay nearly $19 million to a former inmate there. It’s described as the largest civil rights settlement ever in Wisconsin. A Janesville teenager, 19-year-old Sydni Briggs will use the money for her lifelong care after suffering severe brain damage while she hanged herself while an inmate at Copper Lake School for Girls in 2015. She had been at the youth prison after stealing from a liquor store, but found herself depressed, anxious and homesick, according to her lawyer. And began self-harm, which culminated in trying to kill herself. But prison staff did not respond to the emergency call light she turned on. According to the lawsuit against the state, staff failed to check on Briggs every 15 minutes as required and ignored her call light for 24 minutes. Her attorney, Eric Haag, joins us tonight. Thanks very much for being here.

Eric Haag:

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Frederica Freyberg:

Does Sydni understand at this point that this settlement will allow her this kind of best care that money can buy as you’ve described it for the rest of her life?

Eric Haag:

Unfortunately, Sydni doesn’t understand it because her brain injury is such that she’s not even aware that this case exists. She doesn’t even remember what happened at Copper Lake School for Girls. She’s unaware — I've met her ten times over the last couple years, and each time I have to reintroduce myself and she doesn’t have any concept of what this money will do or what it’s for or what it’s from.

Frederica Freyberg:

I have read that when asked about her experience there, she says simply it was bad.

Eric Haag:

I was there when she said that. At other times I've asked Sydni do you remember being at Copper Lake and she says no. She may say that at one point, but a minute later she may say something different.

Frederica Freyberg:

When you took this case and started digging into it, how outraged were you about what happened to her?

Eric Haag:

Well, when I took this case, I didn’t know what I was going to find or what I was getting into. I knew that I had read the early articles on the chaos at Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake. I knew that there was a mom sitting in front of me who told me her daughter was in a coma after having tried to hang herself at Copper Lake. And that’s all I knew. As I dug into it and started finding evidence that was supportive of our case, obviously it became outrageous eventually.

Frederica Freyberg:

How do you know that the prison staff ignored her call for help when she turned on her call light?

Eric Haag:

Sure. I have video footage from a couple of different cameras. I had actually requested those for the first time in December of 2015, shortly after I took the case on. I first got those more than a year later, after I started litigation. And you can see Sydni's call light, her call light come on clearly, and then you simply watch the video and see when they respond. Another camera shows staff in their what they call the dayroom, sort of an open area where kids can kind of hang out. They have some treadmills and they have some tables. You can see multiple staff members in there sitting around talking, sitting on tables, drinking soda, drinking water and not reacting for nearly 24 minutes while that call light is on down the hall.

Frederica Freyberg:

Why did they say they didn’t respond to it?

Eric Haag:

Well, they said that they didn’t know the call light was on. That became an incredible story, because — for two reasons. One, I toured the facility and I took a videographer with me. The call light was clearly visible. They could see it from multiple locations. And there’s an indicator light in the staff booth, which is right where the staff members were, that comes on when one of the kids turns on their call light. So that indicator light would have been five feet away from staff members.

Frederica Freyberg:

So if this could be called indifference or worse, was that kind of thing endemic at that prison, did you find?

Eric Haag:

Well, because my investigation was limited to Sydni's case, you know, I don’t know if I can go as far as to say it was endemic at the prison. Certainly the discovery I did, the depositions I took, the documents I looked at led me to believe that it was a known problem. And, for example, the federal government did what’s called a pre-audit in July of 2015, so about four months before this happened. The auditors found during that visit that call lights were on and were not being responded to by staff. So the institution had been warned about this four months earlier, and the unit manager had promised the federal auditor that they would retrain staff and that the policy was to respond to the call lights immediately.

Frederica Freyberg:

Since that time, since that promise made about that retraining, has some of this been fixed?

Eric Haag:

Not that I'm aware of. It certainly hadn’t by November. And in fact I asked for any records to support the fact that the retraining had occurred and there was no record that any retraining had actually occurred and those responsible for doing the retraining were unable to remember any specific, formal retraining that was done. The best that they could come up with was that they had at least talked to staff within the units to remind them of the obligation to respond to call lights.

Frederica Freyberg:

Meantime, the state legislature has voted to shut down those two facilities for boys and girls up there. What’s your reaction to that?

Eric Haag:

Well, I think it’s overdue. I think it’s a good step. I think it’s overdue. You’ve got families that have to travel too far to visit the youth. They’re lonely. They’re not getting visits from family and friends. It was chronically understaffed, chronically suffering from an inability to attract staff. The more modern model of more community-based, local facilities is certainly — seems to be the way to go. I’m not going to claim that I'm an expert in running juvenile corrections. I’m an expert in this case. But I saw enough in this case to know that there are some problems. And they go beyond just the location. There are policies here that clearly no one had ever read, that were incapable of being carried out. There were procedures that just were simply obsolete or didn’t make any sense. And it’s hard for me to believe that anyone could have actually been playing attention to the problem of suicide and self-harm here or these policies and procedures wouldn’t have existed. They would have been updated.

Frederica Freyberg:

And so you feel as though, again, just moving these facilities into specific regions across the state is a good first step, but not the final step.

Eric Haag:

Exactly. I commend the decision to do that. I think it’s the right thing to do. But it isn’t going to fix the problems if we don’t start holding people accountable, we don’t have competent people in place, if we don’t have the right policies and procedures in place.

Frederica Freyberg:

All right. Eric Haag, attorney, thanks very much.

Eric Haag:

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Frederica Freyberg:

Russian influence in the Twittersphere before and especially after the 2016 election gets a close eye from UW-Madison researchers. Their paper titled, “The Twitter Exploit: How Russian Propaganda Infiltrated U.S. News” looks at just that with surprising and troubling implications. One of the researchers and co-author Associate Professor of Journalism Chris Wells is here. Thanks very much for being here.

Chris Wells:

Thanks.

Frederica Freyberg:

You describe how Russia's internet research agency or IRA took to Twitter and Facebook spreading content resulting in hundreds of millions of impressions on the part of Americans. Most of it you say to sow social divisions and discord and reduce trust in American democratic institutions, but also with a specific eye toward harming Hillary Clinton. So I guess we weren’t kind of imagining it when we saw new heights of anger and divisiveness and polarization.

Chris Wells:

Well, I don’t know if I'd say that. I think what we’ve seen with the Russian campaign in 2016, 2017 is more an amplification of processes already going on in U.S. politics. That’s probably one of the reasons why they weren’t identified for so long is a lot of what they were producing looked a lot like the kind of polarized discourse we’re already seeing.

Frederica Freyberg:

What’s an example of how the Russians did this, amplified this?

Chris Wells:

Yeah. We have a lot of examples of a particular account, which is known as Ten GOP, which was pretending to be a Republican Party account from Tennessee. And what they would do is post real news stories and repost things from other people that were criticizing Democrats or making fun of Democrats or something like that. At one point during the campaign or actually after the campaign, once Donald Trump was president, Johnny Depp, the actor, said something about the president that wasn’t very nice and Ten GOP jumped right on it and said look at this Hollywood actor, he’s such a jerk to be criticizing the president.

Frederica Freyberg:

You found further that some of these kind of tweets from that kind of handle made their way into mainstream reporting in outlets like the Washington Post or USA Today or even NPR. So how did that happen?

Chris Wells:

That was really our contribution. We already knew from other sources like the special counsel’s indictment about some of the general social media activity. We found they appeared in American news media a certain number of times. It wasn’t a huge number of times. Cause you have to remember that a lot of these outlets are producing thousands of stories a month. So we found more like a handful, a hundred-some instances. But it seemed to happen when the outlets were trying to report on what was going on on social media. So it would often explicitly say, “Here’s what Twitter thinks about this issue.” And then they’d grab a bunch of tweets and sometimes those tweets wouldn’t be Americans at all by it turns out these IRA accounts from Russia.

Frederica Freyberg:

For journalists, how slippery a slope is embedding tweets in reporting or using them as sources of information?

Chris Wells:

I think from this study we see it’s pretty slippery. Journalism for a long time has used man-on-the-street perspectives. They ask people what do you think about these things. And that’s really important because it’s sort of the democratic process of the press, to see what people are thinking. So it’s probably important also to look at social media to see what people are saying there. But we’re finding that a higher level of verification of what’s being said is probably necessary.

Frederica Freyberg:

Do the Russians persist in this even after being outed, as you were saying in these Congressional hearings?

Chris Wells:

Yeah. What we’re hearing from the best research is that the Russian intelligence Operations continue on social media and other places. So this isn’t going away.

Frederica Freyberg:

So are there these IRA tweeters out there, even now, that we know of that people have specified their handles?

Chris Wells:

Yeah. There it gets a little bit more tricky because the accounts we used were formally identified by Twitter. Twitter itself said these are accounts coming from Russia. Twitter hasn’t released other names of accounts they believe are still operating. Twitter stops them once they identify them. But other fairly reputable research outfits are pointing to other accounts and suggesting they’re continuing to operate.

Frederica Freyberg:

So the challenge to journalists is clear. But what about for consumers of news? Should they trust kind of anything that’s out there?

Chris Wells:

Well, of course no. I think they should continue to be sort of critical about what they trust. But you also have to remember that most of what the Russians posted was not fake news. You weren’t going to learn something that was false from reading these tweets. Rather, as I mentioned before, they were mostly amplifications of really polarized discussion that’s already going on in our country. So you might become sort of more polarized. But the bigger story might be, be kind of cautious when you’re consuming this very partisan content that is very critical of the other side for example because they may be being critical of something that is really blown out of proportion or something like that.

Frederica Freyberg:

All right. Chris Wells, thanks very much.

Chris Wells:

Thanks for having me.

Frederica Freyberg:

And finally tonight, a reminder that next Friday we will have a one-hour debate between state Supreme Court candidates Rebecca Dallet and Michael Screnock. I’m Frederica Freyberg. Have a great weekend.

Announcer:

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

For more on “Here and Now’s” 2018 election coverage, go to WisconsinVote.org.