Wisconsin Judge Dismisses Right-Wing Challenge To State’s Voter Rolls
A Wisconsin judge dismissed a right-wing lawsuit alleging that the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) is failing to properly maintain its voter rolls.
In an Oct. 3 complaint, Amberg resident Thomas Oldenburg argued that WEC is violating state law by keeping records of inactive voters — who are deceased or have moved out of state — in the same database as active registrants. Oldenburg claimed that WEC’s system could allow a state or county election official to change a voter’s status from inactive to active at any time.
Wisconsin currently has 14 active voting rights cases with four of them related to voter rolls.
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“Thousands of unidentified persons can add…any ineligible voter found in the database, including a dead person, to the Registration List without any determination whatsoever that the person being added is, in fact, a properly registered elector,” the lawsuit maintained.
Oldenburg ultimately sought to compel WEC to maintain its voter registration list in a manner that would prevent “inactive” voter records from being changed to “active.”
The lawsuit also cited a Sept. 26 letter sent to WEC by the Republican National Committee (RNC) asserting that “1,208 voters in ‘inactive’ status have requested absentee ballots for the upcoming general election.”
In response to the RNC, WEC said the committee was “examining records where a voter’s status changed to inactive after the ballot was requested. In these cases, the ballot is nearly always rendered void and will show a ballot status of ‘inactive.’”
WEC added that the data request upon which the RNC based its claims “asked for records of all absentee ballots mailed to voters, regardless of whether the ballot was subsequently rendered void. That is why your report contains inactive voters. If you wish to only receive active ballots in your future data requests, you may so specify when requesting the data.”
Aside from the lawsuit dismissed today, Oldenburg has brought other election-related cases in the Badger State over noncitizen voting and absentee ballot envelopes — one of which was dismissed in July.