Wisconsin’s Voter-Roll Purge

In October 2019, the Wisconsin Election Commission sent a letter to about 230,000 voters who might have moved, asking them to update their addresses before the spring of 2021. But a lawsuit from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), a conservative litigation group, has threatened to kick those voters off the rolls much sooner.

In December, a county judge ordered the state to remove more than 200,000 of those voters from the rolls. Wisconsin election officials appealed the ruling, and in February a state appeals court struck down the county judge’s ruling, and blocked the purge. But the president of WILL has said that the organization intends to take its case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In a state where elections are decided by narrow margins, any successful effort to corrupt the vote or greatly alter registration numbers could change the outcome. As the legal battle makes it way through the courts, American Oversight is investigating whether any unlawful coordination or partisan intent was behind Wisconsin’s voter purge.