Wisconsin appeals court overturns ruling ordering voter purge
The Wisconsin Appeals Court has ruled that more than 200,000 voters who were set to be purged from the state’s voter rolls will officially stay registered, court documents show.
The appeals court “reversed” a previous circuit court order that said the voters were invalid because they may have moved recently. The court also reversed a previous contempt order against the Wisconsin Board of Elections for not removing the voter registrations. The commission was facing a $50-a-day fine and three Democratic commissioners who voted against the removals were to be fined $250 a day until they complied.
Friday’s decision will allow for the thousands of voters to stay on the rolls going into the state’s April 7 presidential primary. Previously there was a hold on the registrations that temporarily allowed them to remain on the rolls.
“We appreciate the Court of Appeals decision and will move forward with the process approved by the members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission in June 2019 for handling mailings sent to potential movers,” the WEC said in a statement on Friday.
In a state viewed as a battleground in 2020, the removal of 200,000 voters could have profound implications. In 2016, President Donald Trump won Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes through defeating Hillary Clinton by less than 23,000 votes.
“Wisconsin deserves clean elections in 2020. It is our intent to seek review in the Wisconsin Supreme Court to ensure that the Wisconsin Elections Commission complies with state law,” said Rick Esenberg, the president and general counsel of the Wisconsin Institute on Law and Liberty, which filed the challenge, in an email to CNN.
Though the Wisconsin Supreme Court could step in, they previously denied a petition from the conservative law group to bypass the appellate court in hopes of getting a final decision to remove the voters.
“We are still entitled to appeal the case to the Supreme Court (and the Court has to decide if they will take it) to decide the actual merits of the lawsuit,” said Collin Roth, a spokesman for the institute, in an email to CNN.
State law requires the commission to remove from the active voting rolls those who hadn’t responded to a recent mailing, made as part of a regular effort to update records, within 30 days.
In October, the Wisconsin Institute on Law and Liberty filed a complaint against the commission to force the voter registration list maintenance.
In December, Judge Paul Malloy of Ozaukee County ordered the Wisconsin election officials to remove the roughly 234,000 inactive voters. Since then, several thousand have clarified their voter status and been re-added to the rolls.
