Firm asks to take case purging 232,000 from Wisconsin voter roles to Wisconsin Supreme Court

MILWAUKEE (CBS 58) -- Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett held a press conference Friday, Dec. 20 to say Wisconsin is too tight politically, to quickly take people off voter roles using an imperfect electronic system.

"It's important for us to make sure that those individuals in our community, who are eligible to vote, do not face additional hurdles," Barrett said.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission says they sent letters to 232,579  people statewide, asking them to confirm their registration and if they had moved. They have gotten no response from 169,491. 60,676 were returned by the post office as undeliverable, and 2,412 requested voter continuation. The commission says when they went through the same process in 2017, about 7 percent hadn't actually moved.

Some simply registered a car in an area they didn't live, or provided the post office with a forwarding address.

"Their registration has been deactivated do to a data error," Milwaukee Elections Commission Director Neil Albrecht said.

But the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty says leaving people with old addresses registered, opens the state to fraud. And every fraudulent vote cancels out a legitimate one.

"I don't think that voting is the one area of human activity in which no one will ever cheat," WILL President Rick Esenberg said. "There are people who will try to get an unfair advantage."

A circuit court judge ordered the Wisconsin Elections Commission to remove those on the list from rolls within 30 days.

WILL is now asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to take up the case and bypass the appeals court.

"If the judge's order doesn't go into effect now, it will be impossible to follow that law in the February election, and so we don't think the state is appropriate."

Wisconsin state law does allow people to register at the polls on election day.