A bill released last week for co-sponsorship aims to remove ineligible voters from the state’s official voter registration list in a more timely fashion, a key election integrity concern that has dogged Wisconsin’s voter rolls for years.
The legislation, authored by state Rep. Ty Bodden (R-59th Assembly District) and Sen. Andre Jacque (R-1st Senate District), would require the Wisconsin Elections Commission to clean up the WisVote database. Currently, the database includes both eligible and ineligible voters. The bill requires permanent documentations of WEC’s actions, including the date and reason for removing a voter to establish a chain of custody that can be followed.
“Consistent with current law, an individual who is removed from the registration list and subsequently becomes eligible to register to vote in Wisconsin may reregister as provided by law,” the sponsorship memo states.
Wisconsin’s voter rolls have been a bone of contention in recent election cycles.
At one point, Wisconsin’s voter database included some 230,000 individuals identified as having potentially moved. The state Elections Commission refused to purge names from the voter list when individuals failed to respond to commission’s mailing seeking confirmation of their residence. In 2019, WEC agreed to maintain the suspected “movers’ on the active voting list until after the April 2021 election.
Leaving inactive voters in the database raised questions about potential fraud and abuse of the system as the contentious 2020 presidential election drew near. The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty took the Elections Commission to court, arguing the law made clear recipients of the notices had to respond within 30 days to remain active on the voter list. Failing to do so would render the individual ineligible to vote, requiring the voter to re-register.
In April 2021, the Wisconsin Supreme Court reversed a lower court decision and ruled it’s up to the state’s 1,800-plus municipal clerks, not WEC, to remove ineligible voters from the rolls.
The database includes approximately 7.1 million people, more than Wisconsin population. That number includes about 3.6 million inactive voters. Beyond statutory purging of ineligible names on the voter list, individuals are supposed to be made inactive after they die, move and register in another state, are convicted of a felony, are found to be fraudulently registered and/or lack citizenship or are found incompetent to vote by a court.
Lawsuits have followed a Racine County Sheriff’s Department investigation in 2021 that found the Elections Commission broke election law in its decisions barring special voting deputies (SVDs) from nursing homes during the pandemic, opening the door to voting manipulation. The sheriff’s department probe found at least eight long-term care facility residents who were or are severely cognitively impaired that voted in the 2020 presidential election, even though a court ruled them legally incompetent. In many cases, the individuals could not even recognize their family members, according to Racine County Sgt. Michael Luell, lead investigator in the case.
In one lawsuit, Paul Archambault claims his mother was ruled legally incompetent in 2015 by the Waukesha County Court. The elderly woman was diagnosed with a degenerative brain disorder. Archambault was named his mother’s legal guardian. Her rights to register or to vote in an election were revoked in full in the Guardianship Order, and “may not be exercised by any person,” the lawsuit states. Archambault was unaware of any attempts to assist his mother vote until December 2020, after the November 2020 presidential election. He checked the WisVote website and discovered his mother had “cast ballots in the August 11, 2020, Partisan Primary and the November 2020 General Election.”
“Unfortunately, lack of maintenance and list vulnerability can open the door for fraud,” Bodden and Jacque wrote. “While current state law requires the voter registration database to be updated regularly and clearly gives the elections commission responsibility to maintain the list, the State Supreme Court has ruled that the job of removing voters from the rolls is solely up to local municipal elections officials, not the state commission, leaving likely ineligible voters active within the database.”
Courts currently report to WEC when individuals have lost the right to vote (adjudicated incompetent for voting purposes), and courts also report to WEC when individuals have their right to vote restored by the courts, but these changes are not automatically reflected by WEC within WisVote, the lawmakers note.
Jacque said it should be common sense that election officials would want to remove temptations to fraud.
“We have an Elections Commission that has clearly not been willing to take the steps needed to ensure confidence in our voter database,” the senator said.
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M.D. Kittle is the National Political Editor for The Star News Network.
Photo “Ty Bodden” by Ty Bodden for Assembly. Photo “André Jacque” by Sen. André Jacque. Background Photo “Election Day” by Phil Roeder. CC BY 2.0.
