Wisconsin election officials cancel 205K voter registrations

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Wisconsin elections officials said Wednesday that they have removed more than 205,000 voters from the rolls as part of routine work to keep the state's registration lists up to date.

Purging voters from the rolls has been a point of major contention in the perennial swing state. Conservatives filed a lawsuit in 2020 demanding that the Wisconsin Elections Commission remove voters from the rolls if they didn't respond to mailings within 30 days. The lawsuit ultimately failed and Democrat Joe Biden went on to beat Donald Trump by about 20,000 votes.

Commission officials announced Wednesday that they deactivated 174,307 voter registrations on Saturday because the voters hadn't cast a ballot in four years and didn't respond to a mailing. They said they are required by law every two years to identify registered voters who haven't voted in the previous four years and deactivate them unless they wish to remain registered.

The commission on Saturday also deactivated 31,854 registrations of voters who may have moved and didn't respond to a mailing. The commission mailed postcards during the summer of 2019 to more than 230,000 voters identified by the Electronic Registration Information Center as having possibly moved.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/wisconsin-election-officials-cancel-205k-151521854.html

[alwaysinasnit]

1. I am curious to know what the party break-down is of those purged voters.

[Geuricol]

5. No way to know

No way to know. In Wisconsin you don’t register as democratic or republican.

[alwaysinasnit]

6. Thanks for the info!

[Atticus]

2. There should be only two reasons to remove a registered voter from the list: verified death

or verification that the person no longer resides in the state.

"Not voting in the last four years" is a totally meaningless reason to purge someone from the registered voter list.

[unblock]

4. Exactly, it's not a use it or lose it inalienable right...

[AllyCat]

7. I agree with this.

What difference does it make if someone didn’t vote in the last election or more?

[sybylla]

8. This isn't a big deal in Wisconsin because

we still have same-day voter registration. Go to the polls and you're not in the poll book? Then you just register again. Yes, it's a pain in the ass and you have to have proof of residency (which can often be the registration for the vehicle you drove to the polls), but with a small amount of hassle, you can vote.

Dems also do a huge push to get people to register in advance, check their registration, and vote absentee in advance, etc. If you're worried about your registration in Wisconsin, you can check it and fix it by going to myvote.wi.gov at any time up to 2 weeks before election day.

All this said, I think it's stupid to remove people from the registration database. Everyone must show ID before they can vote, so removing people doesn't prevent fraud. It just creates hassles. That's the GQP trademark, though.