Spring Green, Wisconsin
Thursday, October 31, 2024 | Vol. 5, No. 20 FREE, Single-Copy
Inside this edition
APT: Announces 2025 season
Community Calendar: Halloween events, live music & more
2024 General Election: Voting info/checks
Pages 1, 6, 7
Pages 4, 5, 6
Pages 1, 2, 2
American Players Theatre announces 2025 season
Patty Heaston, Contributed
American Players Theatre (APT) is thrilled to announce its 2025 lineup, to run June through October, with the shoulder season production opening in late October. The Hill Theatre will open with the play that seems specially crafted for APT’s Hill Stage, William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Core Company Actor David Daniel. Next up on the Hill Stage, famous wit Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels, followed by William Inge’s American Classic, Picnic. Rounding out the Hill Season will be Nilo Cruz’s award-winning homage to Anna Karenina, Anna in the Tropics, and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, a little-produced play that hasn’t been on APT’s stage since 2009. Next season in the Touchstone Theatre offers four productions never seen before on APT’s stages, including a world premiere by Core Company Member Gavin Dillon Lawrence: The Death of Chuck Brown. Also on stage in the
Photo via American Players Theatre The stage is set for American Players Theatre's 2025 season. Touchstone, Yasmina Reza’s barbed comedy Art and Nina Raine’s family dramedy, Tribes. Fall in the Touchstone will see a very special production of the raucous comedy thriller The 39 Steps by Patrick Barlow. Artistic Director Brenda DeVita said, “First, I’d just like to say that I’m so proud of the season we produced this
year. Our 45th season. The work was exquisite from beginning to end, and I’m so grateful to our artists and actors, and the staff that takes such great care of our amazing audience. An audience who comes to these shows, whether or not they’re familiar with the story, and puts their trust in us, and in the art we make here. It’s incredible the com-
munity that’s been created out here, in the middle of Wisconsin farmland – it consistently fills my heart and blows my mind. This season has felt like a huge step in our growth as an organization. The company is gelling and maturing, which gives us confidence that the work we do here is special, and important, as well as being beautiful and engaging. We carry that confidence with us into 2025, when we will invite some exciting and new-tous directors – especially female directors, the most we’ve ever had directing in a season – to work at APT for the first time. Shannon Cochran, who is an actor and director, will do Noël Coward’s Fallen Angels, a playwright she is very familiar with, and can deftly play with that wit and language. Shana Cooper, the talented director who created that indelible, creative production of The Taming of the Shrew at APT in 2021 will return to direct The Winter’s Tale.
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9 checks the state of Wisconsin uses to prevent – and catch – voter fraud Peter Cameron and Howard Hardee, The Badger Project Voter fraud is rare, in Wisconsin and nationally, but many checks exist to prevent and catch it, whether it be accidental or intentional. In the 2020 presidential election, fewer than 0.003% of the nearly 3.3 million ballots cast in Wisconsin were submitted illegally by felons not yet eligible to vote because they hadn’t completed their full sentences, according to an investigation from the Associated Press. That’s the most common type of prohibited voting in Wisconsin, experts say. After the 2020 election in Wisconsin, voter fraud charges were filed against at least 24 people in 12 different counties, according to the AP. Of those, 16 were
suspected felons not yet eligible to vote. President Joe Biden won the state in the 2020 election by about 21,000 votes. Because Wisconsin runs its elections at the municipal level, rather than county or state, it has one of the most decentralized election administration systems in the nation. The state has about 1,850 municipalities and nearly 2,500 polling places. “What this means is that any attempted interference with the election process would have to entail widespread coordination and would have to target multiple systems that are run by different people,” said Aaron Weinschenk, a political science professor at UW-Green Bay.
The Badger Project talked to Weinschenk and Barry Burden, a political science professor and director of the Elections Research Center at UW-Madison, and also consulted the Wisconsin Elections Commission about the checks in place to deter and catch voter fraud in the state. 1. All voters are required to register Residents must register to vote online at www.MyVote.wi.gov, by mail, or at their municipal clerk’s office, though it’s too late to do that now. But anyone eligible can register at their polling place on Election Day also. Only voters with a valid Wisconsin driver’s license or state ID card can register online. To prove residency when registering by
mail, at their municipal clerk’s office, or at the polls on Election Day, voters must bring an official document, like a bank statement or a state ID, that has their name and current address. 2. Photo ID is required to vote by mail, and absentee ballots require a witness Voters who request an absentee ballot must be registered to vote. For those who request a ballot online, most need to upload a copy of their photo ID if they haven’t done it previously. Wisconsin also requires the filling out of absentee ballots be witnessed and signed by another person.
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