Wisconsin election officials have been able to account for all but a third of the voters who were originally identified in 2019 as possibly having moved from the address where they were registered.
Of those 71,578 that election officials are still trying to nail down, none voted in the Nov. 3 election, according to materials provided for the Elections Commission ahead of today’s meeting.
The voters who may have moved, but remained on the rolls became an issue as President Trump raised a series of baseless claims about Wisconsin’s election as Joe Biden won the state by fewer than 21,000 votes Nov. 3.
In an early December speech, Trump said the Elections Commission couldn’t confirm the residency of more than 100,000 people “but repeatedly refused to remove those names from its voter rolls before the election. They knew why, nobody else did. I knew why. They were illegal voters.”
Originally, 232,579 voters were identified as having potentially moved by the Electronic Registration Information Center in Washington, D.C. The commission sent a mailer to them, but planned to wait until 2021 to remove them from the rolls if they failed to respond.
The conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty then sued, resulting in an Ozaukee County judge ordering the Elections Commission to deactivate the registrations if those voters failed to respond within 30 days. The ruling was overturned by the 4th District Court of Appeals, and the case was eventually heard by the state Supreme Court, which has yet to rule on the merits.
According to the materials prepared for today’s meeting, nearly 17,000 voters initially identified as having moved affirmed that their original address was correct.
Of the other 232,579 who were originally identified as having possibly moved: 58.4 percent are registered at a new address; 30.8 percent may have moved and haven’t confirmed a new address; 7.2 percent are registered at the same address; and 3.6 percent were inactivated.
Among the 8,476 voters whose registrations were inactivated, 3,845 had moved, while 2,538 had died and the mailer was undeliverable for 1,308.
See the meeting materials:
https://elections.wi.gov/node/7305
