What to know about mass challenges to voter eligibility and voter rolls in Wisconsin

Voter eligibility challenges burden election administrators, undermine confidence in elections and intimidate voters, according to a new report by Protect Democracy, a nonprofit focused on protecting Democracy from authoritarianism.

The study found widespread voter eligibility challenges grew following attempts to prove fraud in the 2020 presidential election. They often rely on flawed data and are frequently rejected.

“The deceptive tactics and tools deployed by election-denying organizations to fuel mass voter challenges are both baseless and redundant,” Clint Swift, co-author of the report and policy strategist with Protect Democracy, said in a statement. “These frivolous challenges serve only to sow doubt and disrupt our electoral process. They are not only illegal but also an assault on the very foundation of our democracy and must be rejected.”

Wisconsin was one of 11 states the report names as likely to see widespread use of mass challenges in the 2024 election.

Here’s what to know about voter rolls, election falsehoods in Wisconsin and the challenges that could arise this year.

Mass pre-election challenges to voter eligibility grew as a result of false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election

The report found that election deniers turned their focus to perceived issues in voter registration after widespread attempts to prove fraud in the 2020 election failed. Many used a false premise that any inaccuracy in voter rolls equates to fraud. Reports frequently find voter fraud isn’t a persistent problem and that reported incidents are traceable to sources like clerical errors or bad data matching.

Groups like the Election Integrity Network and True the Vote developed software programs to organize mass challenges, but they often used flawed data sets from outside sources, leading to inaccurate conclusions, according to the report.

Litigation in several battleground states claimed state officials failed to properly maintain voter rolls.

Last fall, Wisconsin Republicans attacked Assembly Speaker Robin Vos for not impeaching Meagan Wolfe , Wisconsin’s top elections administrator, and misleadingly accused Wolfe of mismanaging state voter rolls.

“She refuses to clean up our voter rolls,” a voiceover narrated in one ad.

However, alleged voter roll issues cited in the impeachment case ignore state law governing Wisconsin’s voter lists — and falsely place the blame at Wolfe’s feet. The impeachment articles against Wolfe misleadingly stated Wisconsin has more than 7 million voters on its rolls. For reference, Wisconsin's state population was 5.9 million in the 2020 census .

The lawmakers who drafted the impeachment articles added more than 3.5 million inactive voters — people who are dead, moved to another state or are in any other way deemed ineligible to vote — to the number of active, registered voters to reach an inaccurate figure.

Neither the WEC nor Wolfe is responsible for removing voters who may have moved from the rolls. State law assigns that responsibility to local elections officials, the state Supreme Court ruled in 2021, and anyone who may have moved must affirm their address before receiving a ballot.

How do voter rolls work in Wisconsin?

States and localities maintain lists of voters, as there is no national registration list. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 requires states to provide adequate opportunities to facilitate voter registration and to keep their lists updated. In the time since 2020, election deniers have raised concerns about aspects of election administration like voter rolls.

Wisconsin's voter list is compiled by the Electronic Registration Information Center, a consortium that helps 24 states and Washington, D.C., maintain accurate voter rolls. ERIC was formed in 2012 and uses data on state voter registration, deaths and changing addresses from the Department of Motor Vehicle data, the U.S. Social Security Administration and the U.S. Postal Service to provide member states with reports on potentially inaccurate information in their voter rolls.

Voter records include a registered voter's name, address, which elections they voted in, and whether they voted in-person or absentee. As people move, die or ask to deactivate their registration, election officials are tasked with updating these lists. More than 100,000 voters were removed from Wisconsin’s voter rolls as part of routine maintenance in August.

Inactive voters are not registered voters. Wisconsin law requires WEC to maintain an active and inactive voter list. State law also bars inactive voters from voting in Wisconsin elections unless they reregister and provide proof of in-state residence.

Voter challenges can discourage voting. How are politicians setting the stage to challenge voting processes this election cycle?

The report also found that eligible voters who receive a notice of a challenge might be discouraged from casting a ballot, fearful that they could face consequences. Some challenges used door-knocking campaigns without identifying themselves as separate from election officials or law enforcement.

Ahead of the 2024 election, The Republican National Committee and the Donald Trump presidential campaign plan to deploy tens of thousands of volunteers and attorneys to monitor and challenge voting processes in battleground states, including Wisconsin — an effort rooted in the former president's false election claims, characterized as safeguarding from "Democrat tricks from 2020."

GOP officials say they plan to recruit 100,000 people nationwide to observe election processes and voting, an expansion of typical activities for political parties in election years. The volunteers are tasked with focusing on early voting, Election Day voting, absentee ballot processing, post-election processes and "logic & accuracy machine testing."

What does Wisconsin law say about challenging eligibility to vote?

Wisconsin law allows individuals to challenge a voter’s eligibility, as in most states, but also provides protections for challenged voters, including prohibiting threats to compel voters to vote or refrain from voting.

Protect Democray’s Wisconsin Policy Strategist Edgar Lin told the Journal Sentinel that Wisconsin “has some relatively strong guardrails in place.”

For example, challengers must submit to questioning under oath at an official hearing. There, they’re required to establish the ineligibility of each challenged voter beyond a reasonable doubt. Bad faith challenges or those with false statements may subject the challenger to felony charges, according to Lin.

If the process is correctly followed, Lin said, he doesn’t expect to see mass purges of voter rolls due to challenges, but that politicians may nevertheless attempt to do so.

“We anticipate frivolous mass challenges to be issued regardless of their success,” Lin said. “Consequently, Wisconsin's local election administrators will have to allocate valuable time and resources to address these challenges, diverting attention from other critical tasks.”

How voter eligibility challenges work in Wisconsin

In Wisconsin, registered voters can only challenge other voters in their municipality, and the challenge must be made through filing an affidavit with a municipal clerk or with the board of election commissioners in the case of the City of Milwaukee. The clerk or board then mails a notice to the challenged voter, who must appear before the clerk or board with the challenger within a week of notification.

While the burden is on the challenger to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the challenged voter is ineligible, challenged voters are burdened by the obligation to appear in person to present proof of their eligibility. Others may be dissuaded from voting if they aren’t confident with rules about eligibility. Mass voter challenges filed close to an election also may overwhelm election officials.

There is no deadline for when challenges must be submitted and no restrictions on bulk challenges in Wisconsin.

What election falsehoods grew out of the 2020 race in Wisconsin?

Attempts to prove fraud were a salient issue in Wisconsin, where Trump has promoted the falsehood he won the Badger State in 2020, a claim that helped fuel an attack on the U.S. Capitol in 2021 and still festers in Wisconsin.

In 2020, Trump's campaign sought to disqualify the absentee ballots of more than 238,000 voters in Dane and Milwaukee counties. Voters who would have been affected had cast their absentee ballots in person, known as early voting, and residents who identified themselves as "indefinitely confined," allowing them to vote absentee without meeting the state photo ID requirements.

Trump at a May rally in Waukesha doubled down on the falsehood of winning Wisconsin and didn’t commit to accepting the results of Wisconsin's presidential election in November if he does not win, saying he would do so  "if everything's honest."

“If everything's honest, I'd gladly accept the results. If it's not, you have to fight for the right of the country… But if everything's honest, which we anticipate it will be — a lot of changes have been made over the last few years — but if everything's honest, I will absolutely accept the results," Trump said in an interview with the Journal Sentinel.

But there's no evidence to support that Wisconsin's election was tainted by cheating or fraud in 2020. The results have been confirmed by recounts in Dane and Milwaukee counties that Trump paid for, court rulings, a nonpartisan state audit and a study by the conservative legal firm Wisconsin Institute of Law & Liberty, among other analyses.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: What to know about mass challenges to voter eligibility and voter rolls in Wisconsin