Here & Now

What Happens with a Disputed Election

Frederica Freyberg:

Election Day turned into election week after voters cast their ballot, then waited for the count. Wisconsin chose former Vice President Joe Biden by a 20,000 vote margin. Within hours after the ballots were tallied, President Donald Trump said he would request a recount. Down ballot, seats flipped at the state Capitol. Republicans maintained majorities, but majorities not large enough to overturn the governor’s veto. A state divided by politics remains a state divided by the pandemic. Positive COVID cases continue to skyrocket in the absence of a statewide plan to fight the virus.

I’m Frederica Freyberg. Tonight on “Here & Now,” making sense of what happens next on the presidency. A top UW elections expert is here. Senior Political Reporter Zac Schultz pinpoints the results of the state races. And McCoshen and Ross look at the political divide that will persist long after the next president is sworn in. It’s “Here & Now” for November 6.

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Funding is provided by the Focus Fund for Journalism and Friends of PBS Wisconsin.

Frederica Freyberg:

Joe Biden was expected to address the nation tonight at about this hour, but reportedly pulled back from that awaiting a call on the election. A little more than 24 hours ago Donald Trump spoke saying as the ballots count started going in his challenger’s direction with absentees tallied last, he was being illegally robbed of his victory.

Donald Trump:

Good evening. I’d like to provide the American people with an update on our efforts to protect the integrity of our very important 2020 election. If you count the legal votes, I easily win. If you count the illegal votes, they can try to steal the election from us. If you count the votes that came in late, we’re looking at them very strongly. But a lot of votes came in late.

Frederica Freyberg:

Wisconsin is in President Trump’s sights as part of what he believes is the fraud cabal against him. This state helped put Joe Biden into the lead, as did mail-in absentee ballots across the state counted after in-person votes. We turn to elections expert Barry Burden, Professor of Political Science at UW-Madison. He’s also the director of The Elections Research Center which conducts the Battleground Poll. Thanks for being here.

Barry Burden:

Glad to be with you.

Frederica Freyberg:

First, I wanted to ask what your reaction is to President Trump’s claims he outlined Thursday night.

Barry Burden:

I don’t think there’s a lot of truth in them. He referred to legal and illegal votes. To my knowledge, there are no illegal votes being cast. Right now essentially all of the votes that are being counted, especially in Pennsylvania which is getting so much scrutiny, those are ballots that were cast before Election Day, in some cases weeks before Election Day or on Election Day itself. So there’s really nothing late or questionable about them. It’s simply taking the state a while to work through what is a pretty big pile of mail ballots.

Frederica Freyberg:

Part of the Trump campaign’s fight against these results is lawsuits in battleground states and a call for a recount, for example, in Wisconsin, where he also cites irregularities, which our Elections Commission we should point out, say did not occur. What do we know about whether recounts in Wisconsin flip results?

Barry Burden:

Well, luckily I suppose we have a little bit of a record here of doing statewide recounts. After the 2016 presidential election, there was a full recount of the state. Most of that was done by hand. It was a painstaking process. That was the result of a request from Jill Stein, who was the Green Party candidate in that contest. It changed a few hundred votes in the difference between Clinton and Trump after two to three weeks of counting ballots. It did turn up more ballots that were countable for both campaigns. Ballots that had initially been rejected often because machines had trouble reading them. So it added to both candidates totals but it didn’t change the balance between them. Very similar pattern if you go back a little further to the 2011 Supreme Court race. That also turned into a statewide recount and had very little effect on the overall balance.

Frederica Freyberg:

So would it be possible as the president said was perpetrated on the part of Democrats to effect widespread fraud across states?

Barry Burden:

I don’t think it would be possible even to effect wide spread fraud within a state. It would be more challenging, I would say impossible to do that in a systemic way around the country given all of the different election systems, the election rules, the amount of transparency in this process, all of what’s happening both before Election Day, on Election Day and now in states where there’s tabulation going on is visible, either in person or on camera. So I don’t see how that sort of thing could happen.

Frederica Freyberg:

Would the U.S. Supreme Court step in to resolve lawsuits and with its conservative majority support the President?

Barry Burden:

It might. I think the most promising path there to the Supreme Court is in Pennsylvania, where there was a state Supreme Court decision that extended the deadline for return of absentee ballots by three days. Those ballots needed to be mailed by Election Day and then if they arrive later can be counted according to the State Supreme Court. The state is currently segregating those ballots so they can be handled separately in case there’s more court action. Republicans are trying to elevate that now to the U.S. Supreme Court which already had one look at the case but that was before Amy Coney Barrett had joined the court before the ballots had actually come in. And now Republicans are asking that the court take it up again. So there’s a possibility of I guess another examination of that case and something to happen in Pennsylvania.

Frederica Freyberg:

The President included pollsters in the conspiracy to steal the election, saying survey results showing Biden way ahead mounted to what he called suppression polls. What’s your reaction to that, with your own Battleground State Poll that showed Biden up nine?

Barry Burden:

It doesn’t make a lot of sense. Both the Democrat and Republican campaigns were using the problems with the polls in 2016 to motivate their supporters. Democrats were telling their backers that they should not get comfortable with the lead that Biden was showing in the polls, to remember what had happened in 2016 and to make sure they showed up and I think they took that seriously. For the Republicans there was a similar message that you should not trust the polls, that there’s a hidden group of Trump voters who are being included there, not being represented. So both sides were, I think, remembering and leveraging the failures of the polls four years ago to try to turn out supporters. You know, Trump’s trailing in the polls also happened in 2016 and he managed to win these states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. This year he appears to be losing all three states even though the polls show a similar pattern. So it’s hard to see why it would work differently in one year than another.

Frederica Freyberg:

Just real briefly about polls, any ideas yet why they were off to the extent that they were?

Barry Burden:

It’s still quite a mystery. They were off in some states like Wisconsin, but not off in others, like our neighbor, Minnesota, where the polls showed Trump behind by seven or eight points and that looks to be about where the vote is ending up. So it’s not a consistent pattern but is repeating some of the problems we saw four years ago.

Frederica Freyberg:

So I want to ask this with only about a minute left. Could this come to the point where Republican legislatures like our own subvert the electors?

Barry Burden:

I think not. There have been a few voices on the fringes calling for that kind of activity. There’s been a call to do that in Pennsylvania. I think the process is unfolding in a pretty orderly fashion there. And, importantly, Republican leaders in the state legislature in Pennsylvania have said that’s not an appropriate action for them. The legislature has no role in the process at this point. I think that’s the right attitude and seems to be holding up among legislative leaders.

Frederica Freyberg:

All right. We leave it there. Barry Burden, thanks very much for your expertise.

Barry Burden:

Thanks.