No voters targeted for purge voted in Wisconsin in 2020

Listen to this article

By SCOTT BAUER
Associated Press

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The number of voters identified as possibly having moved in Wisconsin decreased by two-thirds before the November presidential election, and none of the people still on the list cast ballots in 2020, the state Elections Commission reported Wednesday.

More than 232,000 voters were initially identified in 2019 as possibly having moved. The Wisconsin Elections Commission wanted to wait until after the presidential election before removing anyone because of inaccuracies found while previously attempting to identify voters who may have moved.

The conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty sued to force the state to deactivate the voter registration for all of them. The lawsuit made its way to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which heard arguments in September but has yet to issue a ruling. At the time of the arguments, about 130,000 people were on the list.

The elections commission reported at its Wednesday meeting that the number of people still on the movers list had shrunk to 71,578. None of them voted in 2020, the commission said in a memo.

The majority of people on the original list, 58%, registered at a new address. Another 7%, nearly 17,00 voters, registered at the same address and nearly 4% were inactivated by local clerks for a variety of reasons, including because they had died or moved. That left nearly 31% of the people originally identified as potential movers still on the list.

Former President Donald Trump, after his narrow loss to Joe Biden in Wisconsin, had incorrectly referred to people on the list as “illegal voters.” Biden beat Trump by less than 21,000 votes.

The Wisconsin lawsuit was one of several across the country, many in battleground states, that sought to purge voters from registration rolls before the presidential election.