Wisconsin Elections Commission Updates Voter Lists As Republicans Continue Attacks

By Henry Redman, Wisconsin Examiner

September 1, 2022

The Wisconsin Elections Commission last month made two changes to its voter registration lists, yet Republicans — who have become increasingly hostile to the agency as they spread disproven conspiracy theories about election administration in the state — continued to attack the agency’s decisions.

On Aug. 12, commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe filed a declaration that more than 30,000 voter registrations had been reactivated following a settlement with the League of Women Voters.

In 2019, the WEC was part of a lawsuit over its methods for deactivating the registration files for more than 232,000 voters identified by a national group as people who might have moved out of state or died. In 2021, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that local clerks are responsible for deactivating these voter files but the commission was still responsible for deactivating the files of certain voters who may have moved but hadn’t responded to mailers asking to confirm their address.

The League of Women Voters filed a lawsuit challenging these deactivations, arguing that the voters didn’t get enough notice. In July the LWV and WEC reached a settlement to reactivate 31,854 registrations.

Rep. Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls), the chair of the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections and a frequent source of election conspiracism, said the reactivations were “mind-boggling.”

Also last month, the WEC changed a function in the state’s voter registration system to accommodate allegations from Republicans that the commission lets dead people vote.

Previously a search of the system, MyVote, for a dead voter would produce a result that indicated their file was “Inactive – Deceased.”

Republicans have often claimed, without evidence, that keeping inactive registrations in the system leaves it open to fraud. On Aug. 25, the WEC changed the MyVote system so the files of dead voters don’t even show up during a search.

“To avoid any confusion caused by Inactive – Deceased records appearing in MyVote search results despite the fact such records cannot register to vote or request an absentee ballot, WEC staff have decided to discontinue the functionality,” a communication to local clerks reads.

Next week, Brandtjen is holding a hearing of the elections committee on the state’s voter rolls. The only witness listed for the hearing is Erick Kardaal, an attorney for the Thomas More Society who has been heavily involved in Republican efforts to find fraud in Wisconsin’s election system.

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