Judge orders state to purge more than 200,000 Wisconsin voters from the rolls

[RandySF]

PORT WASHINGTON - An Ozaukee County judge on Friday ordered the state to remove hundreds of thousands of people from Wisconsin's voter rolls because they may have moved.

The case is being closely watched because of the state's critical role in next year's presidential race. Circuit Judge Paul Malloy also denied the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin's petition to intervene.

Lawyers for the League and for the Wisconsin Elections Commission indicated they will appeal and asked Malloy to stay his ruling pending those appeals, but he declined.

At issue is a letter the state Elections Commission sent in October to about 234,000 voters who it believes may have moved. The letter asked the voters to update their voter registrations if they had moved or alert election officials if they were still at their same address.

The commission planned to remove the letter's recipients from the voter rolls in 2021 if it hadn't heard from them. But Malloy's decision would kick them off the rolls much sooner, and well before the 2020 presidential election.



https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2019/12/13/judge-orders-wisconsin-purge-more-than-200-000-voters-list/4412776002/

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. Okay, here's the thing.

If you move, you need to re-register at your new address. If you don't vote for several cycles, it's not all that unreasonable to purge you from the rolls. You, the voter, really do have an obligation to register, to keep that registration current, and by the way, to VOTE!

In 2004 I ran for the Kansas State House. I went house to house, knocking on doors, asking people to vote for me. I had excellent voter rolls. But at some addresses I'd have six or eight different surnames listed. Clearly that was because of voters who'd moved and not yet been removed from that address. It made for awkward conversations at the door. "Hello! I'm Poindexter Oglethorpe and I'm running for the Kansas State House. Are you Mr Wayne Johnson? Ms Annabelle Smith? No? Are you by any chance Mrs. Walter DuMont?" Do you get the problem?

I have no problem with people being removed from the rolls because they've moved or not voted for some years. That is NOT voter suppression.

[RandySF]

3. Most state purge rolls are inaccurate

and take out people who did the right thing.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

4. Really? And what is your proof of that?

Remember, I had lists that showed voters going back ten years or more at the same address. It really is up to the voters to register properly.

Let me put it this way: Do you think that a voter should be able to register once, and once only, and that registration follow them around forever? Even if they move? To another city? Another county? Another state?

The other solution would be a universal same day registration everywhere, for all voters. Not sure if that's really feasible, given how the entire system of registration and voting works in this country.

I would like to know how other countries handle all this.

[RandySF]

5. Listen to Stacey Abrams on Pod Save America

Many states do not send notices, etc and target poorer neighborhoods.

[W_HAMILTON]

7. For starters, the article itself is proof.

It says that "about 2,300 recipients of the letters said they continued to live at their address." That's a pretty significant amount. I highly doubt there are 2,300 voters kicked off the rolls in this purge that would commit voter fraud and vote twice, therefore, this purge clearly hurts more legitimate voters than it does protect the vote.

[Igel]

16. About 1%.

You get a 1% raise, it's probably not a "significant amount."

On the other hand, states typically have two ways to fix the situation when people are inappropriately purged.

1. It's easy to reregister.

2. If you show up and were purged, affidavit ballot. (I think in most places they're called "provisional ballot".) They see you were registered, are still there at the same address, and you're back. Retroactively.

You know those figures, "45% of the voters in this jurisdiction voted--and that's a shame?" Well, what happens if the number of registered voters exceeds the jurisdiction's total population? "10% voted"--it might be 50% of those living there who *could* vote, but because nobody's been purged for 20 years the voter rolls are truly huge. That happened in an area I used to live in. And you know what? Don't purge the rolls for 20 years and advocates still say, "Must not purge." 20 years of deaths, moves, name changes. It had a college in the area. Students registered, voted for 3-4 years, and left. 20 years of them. Corrupt practices, corrupt data, and we think it's all good.

[W_HAMILTON]

18. If they are even disenfranchising *one* legitimate voter through this, it's a sham...

...and should not be done.

Here, we already know their process falsely identified thousands of people that were legitimate voters and therefore should not have been purged or threatened with purge, nor should they be subject to jumping through additional hurdles to get re-registered or validate their registration based on false pretenses.

[StarfishSaver]

20. Yes, it's a sham. We know that. People are fighting it. In the meantime, work around it.

Complaining about it isn't the solution. Go out and help make sure people are registered. If you can't do that, donate money to organizations that are. If you can't do that, share information about how people can get registered and stay registered.

[pnwmom]

8. The non-partisan League of Women voters said the database the state was relying on was unreliable.

Also, of the 200K voters, only 60K were returned as undeliverable, and another 15K had registered at another address. Why would they delete registration of people whose notices were deliverable? Should you lose your right to vote if you skip an election or miss a postcard amid all the junk mail?

[Igel]

17. Why?

The addresses were good. Forwarding notices might have expired, in which case the mail's delivered.

Post office doesn't check to make sure that the names are right. I get mail both for neighbors (not that the USPS would ever make a mistake) and for previous inhabitants of my residence. They don't live here--and yet the mail was deliverable.

You typically don't lose your right to vote. You just need to reregister. And it's not usually just missing a postcard. It's missing the postcard and after not voting for a few elections.

[pnwmom]

22. The League of Women Voters, a non-partisan group, opposed the action.

They didn't think the circumstances warranted it.

It seems odd to have so-called progressives try to justify it -- as if there's some significant chance that these voters will try to vote in two places.

And if your registration has been cancelled and you don't know it, yes, you have lost your right to vote. When you go to vote, you will be turned away.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

30. As pointed out above, they don't purge you for missing just one election.

Usually it's at least two full cycles.

As I said above, I was working with lists that had never been purged, and had multiple people at the same address, some of whom hadn't lived there for a decade or more.

I am not sure what the balance between never purging and ever purging might be. Certainly same-day registration should be universal

[pnwmom]

31. "usually"? Why are you defending this situation when you don't know what the standard was

and the only thing the article said was that the LWV said it wasn't fair?

[lostnfound]

10. Minority voters understand they are targeted. Nt

[kcr]

14. You're skeptical that people live at the same address for 10 years?

Many people live at an address for much longer than that. People should not be purged from the rolls for not "re-registering". That's stupid. There is only one reason people are targeted with such nonsense. These roll purges are a right-wing tactic, pure and simple. Hate to see it pushed at DU.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

15. What I'm skeptical is that I have three or four different surnames

at the same address. Yes, many people live at the same address for a decade or more. I have myself. But when I have a listing of (and I'm inventing names here) of Sam Smith, Donald Smith, Alicia Smith; Robert Jones, David Jones, Ellen Jones, Maria Johnson, Ed Johnson, Jane Johnson, Steven Dixon, and Edna Dixon all at the same address, well count me skeptical. All of those people are not living at that same address at the same time. Some of them have moved. Purging those who have moved is not a terrible thing. Those who have moved really need to have re-registered to vote at their new address. I see no problem here.

And trust me, when I was running for office and working with actual voter rolls, I ran into this. Multiple people, varying surnames, at the same address.

I'm not saying people need to re register. I am saying they really ought to vote at least once every four years. Or if they move, re-register. It's not a difficult concept.

What problem I do see is the apparent insistence that all registrations remain in place, not be purged, no matter the time passed nor any consideration of not having voted for two or three election cycles.

Isn't not voting some kind of statement of not being very involved in the process? Otherwise, what have I missed?

[pnwmom]

32. That's a very narrow way of viewing family structures. Many husbands and wives

have different last names, and people often have to move in with friends or relatives. There was a period we had people with four different last names living in our house and that's probably happened to lots of families.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

33. Ahh, but when I'd ask

if a specific person was there, the answer I'd get was along the lines of, "We bought this place from the Johnsons, and I think the Smiths lived here before they did, and I have no idea who those others are."

I know about different last names, as I'm one who never changed my name and I'm honestly astonished that so many women do change their names. And I know that unrelated people can live together.

But no. These are lists of all the voters who ever lived at that address for the past twenty or thirty years. Eight or ten different names attached to a not very large three bedroom house. Yeah, I know that sometimes a surprising number of people will cram into one dwelling, but remember, I was the one going door to door with those lists and I know what I'm talking about in this particular instance.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

9. Most state purge rolls are inaccurate?

What exactly is your proof of that?

I keep on thinking back to the somewhat inaccurate voting lists I had that hadn't purged anyone for ten years or more. The problem was not that current voters were purged, but that non current voters were kept on the rolls.

Remind me again why voters shouldn't ever double-check their registrations?

Which is something I do, by the way.

Maybe I'm unusually fortunate to live in a state run by Democrats. But I have never, in nearly 50 years of voting, ever been taken off the rolls. But then I've always registered when I've moved and I've always voted. Even in the off-year elections. I know, bizarre, isn't it.

[lostnfound]

11. You are fortunate.

This is just one of many tactics they can, and will, use to make it harder for likely democratic voters to vote.

Personally I don’t go by my own experiences to recognize what is happening to others.

[lostnfound]

13. " Ohio Was Set to Purge 235,000 Voters. It Was Wrong About 20%."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/14/us/politics/ohio-voter-purge.html

The League of Women Voters identified the errors, not the state.

In the Wisconsin case, the judge ruled League of Women Voters couldn’t intervene.

In the Ohio case, “ an unexplained tranche” of 20,000 voters “who had been marked to be purged because of inactivity in future election cycles, but were actually active voters in previous Ohio elections. These voters were in Franklin County, a Democratic stronghold in the state.“

Don’t you see how these tools are so useful for suppression? So much more convenient than
the old methods...

[Joe941]

21. Sounds like Republican talking points to me.

[csziggy]

28. In 2008 when our volunteers were going door to door they had a similar problem

But the thing is, the "neighborhoods" they were canvassing were really family complexes. There could be a half a dozen houses close together that all belonged to members of extended households. Sometimes the children would move from their parents' house to their grandmother's or their aunt's then back again all within the space of a year. Although the physical address was fluid, the people still mostly lived in the same little groupings of houses.

Every so often, we'd find a person who was not in a particular complex for a short period - they'd gotten a job or were in school a little too far away to commute, but the family complex was still considered their legal address for most uses.

The big problem was that many of them had never been registered to vote. This is the Deep South where people of color have been discouraged from voting ever since they have been considered citizens. Our early canvasses were registering people and we had to work with the addresses they used for legal addresses.

The volunteers would return to make sure their voter registrations had gone through and often the notification and card were not at the house where they were living - but their relatives had told them it had come. Since Florida no longer considers the voter registration card a valid ID, we just made sure they had a valid ID and made sure the address matched that on their voter registration and in the voter database. It was the best we could do.

[Laura PourMeADrink]

2. Trump will absolutely positively "win" Wisconsin. We need

to draw a new map!

[33taw]

6. I check my voter registration every election since 2004 when I was dropped in Colorado.

Now I live in Wi and do the exact same thing. We really need to push voter registration in WI. My guess is Milwaukee will be the hardest hit and it is what we are dependent upon, because the democratic candidates sure as hell don’t campaign north of Milwaukee or East of Eau Claire.

[Tech]

12. Anything WI republicans do is suspect.

[StarfishSaver]

19. This is frustrating, but there's a solution. REGISTER AND VOTE

If you move, re-register. Go into communities and help people check their registration (there are apps for that) and get them registered if they fall off the rolls.

And if you're still not sure you're registered, REGISTER AGAIN just in case. There's no penalty for registering more than once if your info is the same.

Yes, it's a pain. That's the point. That's the voter suppression. But we all have it within our power to overcome it. The local registrar isn't forcing anyone to count the bubbles in a bar of soap or recite some obscure clause in the Constitution. No one's head's getting bashed in on the Edmund Pettis Bridge. This is burdensome and wrong and unfair, but it isn't really all that hard to work around it.

[Jake Stern]

23. Start a "Check Your Registration" campaign

especially in key states like Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan. Can go hand-in-hand with GOTV efforts.

[Wounded Bear]

24. Everybody needs to check their status...

https://www.vote.org/am-i-registered-to-vote/

They claim 50 state coverage. I'm sure there are other ways. I check mine occasionally, though we have vote by mail, so I get the mailers ahead of time, which shows I'm still OK. Of course, I live in a blue state that is not trying to suppress votes.

[LeftInTX]

25. In Texas there is something called "Suspense"

If your voter registration card bounces, your status is "Suspense" (strange wording), you can still vote and it doesn't effect your status at all. I have dead people who were on the Suspense list for over 10 years. I don't know when the state determines that the person is no longer eligible. If you have moved within the same county, you just vote at your old precinct. If you participate in early voting, you can vote anywhere. Poll workers ask the voter if they want to re-register at their new address.

If they are from another part of the state, they are given the opportunity to re-register and can go to the elections office and vote on a limited ballot. (Most people don't go through the hassle of going to the elections office, but they do update their registration)


Campaigns like to know who has moved etc. Usually Suspense status indicates that someone no longer lives at a certain address, however sometimes there are mistakes in the Suspense status.

[rso]

26. Wisconsin

Wait, do you know that the Governor, Attorney General and Secretary of State of Wisconsin are all democrats ? . What are they all doing about this ?

[csziggy]

29. Read the whole article - it wasn't the state's choice, but some 'voters' sued to get this done

From the article linked in the OP:

Three voters sued the commission last month with the help of the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. They argued election officials were required to remove voters from the rolls 30 days after sending the letters if they hadn't heard from them.

They asked Malloy to issue an injunction that would require election officials to purge their rolls. Kaul, commissioners and others say that would lead to some people getting knocked off the rolls who shouldn't be.

But Malloy went further than issuing an injunction. In granting a writ of mandamus — essentially a court order that a government official or agency do its job — he said he was convinced the commission had a clear, positive, plain legal duty to purge the voter rolls within 30 days.

"I don't want to see someone deactivated, but I don't write the law," said Malloy, who was appointed to the bench in 2002 by Republican Gov. Scott McCallum and has been re-elected by voters.

From an earlier article:

Lawsuit seeks to force Wisconsin election officials to remove people who may have moved from the voter rolls
Patrick Marley, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Published 9:21 a.m. CT Nov. 13, 2019 | Updated 12:30 p.m. CT Nov. 25, 2019

<SNIP>

But the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty contends state law requires the commission to remove people from the voter rolls much sooner. Three men it represents filed a lawsuit Wednesday asking an Ozaukee County judge to force the commission to remove people from the voter rolls if they did not respond to commission's letter last month.

The lawsuit follows a complaint the three men filed last month. The commission dismissed that complaint shortly after it was filed, contending it had been submitted too late.

The state generated the list of voters who have possibly moved with the assistance of the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, which helps 29 states keep their voting rolls accurate. The center gathers information from other sources, such as the U.S. Postal Service and departments of motor vehicles, to detect when someone has moved.

The lawsuit argues that state law requires the commission to remove people from the voter rolls within 30 days if it does not get responses after notifying them it has reliable information they have moved.
More: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2019/11/13/lawsuit-seeks-force-removal-some-people-voter-rolls/2577747001/

More on the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty:

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.[1] It is a conservative, libertarian, public interest law firm backed with millions in grants from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.[2] WILL is a member of the State Policy Network, a web of right-wing “think tanks” and tax-exempt organizations in 49 states, Washington, D.C., Canada, and the United Kingdom.[3]
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Wisconsin_Institute_for_Law_%26_Liberty

[Blue Owl]

27. Desperate times call for desperate measures

The GOP must be really hurting -- which is good news -- but we can't let them get away with this cheating bullshit!