Wisconsin State Journal, Madison, Nov. 8
The biggest loser in the election: polls
The biggest loser in last week’s election wasn’t any of the candidates for president - not even entertainer Kanye West, who collected little more than 60,000 votes, which was less than one-tenth of 1% of ballots cast.
Nor was it Donald Trump, who lost the White House to challenger Joe Biden, according to an Associated Press projection Saturday. Our litigious and conspiratorial president is fighting the results in court. He actually did much better than expected, especially in Wisconsin.
Which brings us to the polls: We can say with great confidence - and with a margin of error of plus or minus 0% - that political polling lost the 2020 election in a landslide. In the category of “Worst Performance in a Supporting Role” during the fall campaign, pollsters easily earned the dishonor.
In fairness, most polls pegged Biden to win, and the Democratic nominee appears to have squeaked out victory. But a slew of pre-election surveys gave Biden large leads in several states that never materialized.
For example, an ABC News/Washington Post poll released Oct. 28 had Biden up 17 percentage points in Wisconsin, which he won by only half of a point. The New York Times/Siena College poll on Nov. 2 claimed Biden had an 11-point lead.
Even the highly respected and data-driven website FiveThirtyEight gave Biden an advantage of more than 8 points, as it averaged polls from across the country on election eve.
The Polling Industrial Complex was way off - again - just four years after predicting Hillary Clinton was comfortably ahead. That’s not just annoying or misleading. It could alter who wins. Biden might have spent more time and resources in Wisconsin, rather than bothering with Texas, if he had known Wisconsin was so tight. Some voters might have backed Biden to be on the winning side, thinking he was way ahead. Others might have skipped voting, assuming their vote didn’t matter because of a blowout.
Maybe it’s time for a poll on whether anybody is going to pay attention to polls anymore. They need to get better, or we need to ignore them.
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Journal Times, Racine, Nov. 8
Last-ditch court fights over election not needed
You know, we’ve been doing this for more than 200 years: voting for president.
Wisconsin a little less so. Badger state residents cast their first ballots for president in 1848, the year we became at state.
We’ve voted for Republican candidates 25 times and for Democratic candidates 17 times. And, over the course of those 43 presidential elections, we’ve chosen the winning candidate 33 times and the eventual loser 10 times. Add in this week’s results for the complete tally.
The point is, we’re not new at this and we should be getting it right by now; not only here in Wisconsin, but across the nation.
But no, in our highly charged partisan frenzy with political parties seeking every possible advantage to prevent opposing candidates from gaining office, we fight at every turn and go to court after court after court to “settle” disputes - sometimes with unsettling results.
This year, the COVID-19 year, we saw that in spades.
As election clerks struggled to deal with gathering and county votes in a fair and timely manner, they were whipsawed by last-minute court challenges and election law appeals and some voters were disenfranchised by court decisions that meant their ballots got tossed.
Here in Wisconsin, one fight was over mailed-in early or absentee ballots that were received by election clerks after Election Day. A lower court had called for the mailed-in ballots to be counted if they were received within six days of Nov. 3, but the U.S. Supreme Court flipped that decision in late October and said the ballots had to be in the hands of election clerks by 8 p.m. on Election Day.
But that wasn’t the case in Pennsylvania where the high court preserved a state court order extending the absentee ballot deadline.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote: “Different bodies of law and different precedents govern these two situations and require, in these particular circumstances, that we allow the modification of election rules in Pennsylvania but not in Wisconsin.”
Say what?!
That’s about as clear as mud. What is disconcerting is that this issue had already been raised - and bungled by the state Elections Commission - after the state Supreme Court ruled that mailed-in ballots had to be postmarked by the April 7 Election Day. The Elections Commission faced with a problem of determining how to judge mailed-in ballots that were smudged or unclear or – in some cases not postmarked at all - deadlocked 3-3 and punted the issue to local clerks, telling them: “Each municipality must determine whether the ballot was postmarked timely.”
Now there’s a non-standard standard if we have ever seen one.
Such fights were not restricted to the Badger State, either. Minnesota had a similar postmark fight and the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered ballots received after 8 p.m. on Election Day be set aside - but made no determination on whether they would be valid, setting the stage for a post-election fight. In Houston, there was a dispute over whether drive-through ballots conducted by the clerk should be accepted; in several states there were fights over certifying signatures on early ballots - with some municipalities throwing them out if they didn’t match previous signatures, others using computer technology to do a signature check and still others either being lenient or directing poll workers to contact the voter to double-check.
We don’t need this kind of mess.
The massive use of early balloting by voters here in Wisconsin this year and across the country show us that, COVID-19 or not, this will be the wave of the future. To be clear, we have no issue with the court ruling that ballots have to be in by Election Day. In our view, the United States Postal Service should not be drawn into election matters by disputes over mail delivery times or postmarks. Voters themselves have the responsibility of making sure their ballot reaches the municipal clerk by Election Day – if they want to rely on the postal service for that, so be it, they’re taking that chance. With early balloting there is plenty of time to do that or to drop it off at the municipal clerk’s office in advance – just the same as having to go to the polls on Election Day.
What we don’t need is the last-minute court fights that change the rules in late October, disrupt previous decisions and cause disenfranchisement.
That needs to be fixed, both here in Wisconsin and across the country. And that is the responsibility of state legislatures, ours and others. Our wish list for other states, like Pennsylvania, would be that they allow clerks to start counting ballots when the polls open and not wait until they close in order to get timely results.
Like we said, we’ve been doing this for more than 200 years, we should be able to get it right by now. So, dear Legislature, get cracking. You’ve got four years to get it right and spare us the anguish of a messed-up sequel.
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Janesville Gazette, Janesville, Nov. 6
Voters do their part to fund education
Who could imagine a worse time to ask voters for more money?
A pandemic rages. Unemployment is up. Wages have been cut. And don’t forget the tension cast by the most bitter and divisive national politics in memory.
Even so, several area educational institutions held out their hands looking for taxpayer help.
We wouldn’t have been surprised if they had gotten their hands slapped Tuesday.
That didn’t happen.
Instead, voters agreed to dig deeper into their wallets to support local education.
Two Janesville School District referendum questions-one for $22.5 million to replace boilers and improve school security and another for $37 million of additional operational revenue-passed comfortably.
In the Milton School District, which has a bitter history of rejected school referendums, voters narrowly renewed an operational referendum to allow the district to raise an additional $2.5 million a year for five years.
Blackhawk Technical College asked for permission to borrow $32 million to build a new training and education facility. Voters said OK.
In the Delavan-Darien School District, voters gave the green light to spending $6.5 million for a new stadium, track, field and tennis courts.
The Clinton School District had two referendum questions on the ballot-one for $32 million in facility upgrades and another for millions of additional dollars for operations. Voters approved both.
What’s going on here?
Maybe the huge voter turnout played a role. In Rock County, 85,617 people went to the polls, a record.
Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll, doesn’t think so.
“Usually we’d think a November general election is harder to pass school referenda,” Franklin told The Gazette. “Only about 30% of registered voters have school-age kids, so a high turnout November election brings out a large-this time huge-turnout in which parents are a distinct minority while retirees who might worry more about property taxes than their grandkids’ schools would be a large share of voters.
“Some political folks have argued for moving referenda to only general election ballots because they think that makes them harder to pass. Obviously that wasn’t the case this time,” Franklin said.
More likely, it’s part of a larger trend in voter attitudes.
“Our polling has shown a clear change in opinion. Prior to 2015, more wanted lower property taxes rather than increased K-12 funding. But beginning in 2015 and continuing since, a substantial majority (55%-65%) of registered voters have favored increased school spending over holding down property taxes,” Franklin said.
That’s probably it: The referendums passing are an indication of people putting their money where their mouths are.
But we have an additional theory: Parents who have been helping their children learn remotely from home have found a new appreciation for what educators do every day.
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