Swingstate Wisconsin: US judge removes hundreds of thousands from electoral roll

A district judge in Ozaukee County ruled that a total of 234,000 people should be removed from the Wisconsin electoral roll. The judge asked the state election commission to "comply with applicable laws" with this move, reports CNN.

The background to the process is a call sent by the Wisconsin Electoral Commission in October. The letters went to 234,000 people who the Commission believes may have moved. In such a case, it would also be necessary for registered voters to register again, the Commission explains. This also applies if you have only moved to another apartment within one building.

According to the report, the persons in question had therefore been sent a letter asking them to either register again or to confirm their already reported address. The list of recipients was created on the basis of official data. For example, it contains people who have registered or applied for a driver's license in another country.

Why Wisconsin Matters

In April 2021, long after the upcoming election, the Commission's plan was to remove all those recipients of the mass mailing from the electoral lists who had not yet registered. The conservative law firm Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty had filed a complaint against this procedure. The argument the judge now followed: According to Wisconsin laws, voters who don't respond to such a mailing within 30 days should be immediately removed from the directories.

The judge's decision is noteworthy in that Wisconsin is counted among the so-called swing states, those states in which neither Democrats nor Republicans are clearly in the lead, in which each camp presidential election decides which camp the respective state is assigned to. In the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump secured the ten Wisconsin voters with a lead of 23,000 votes over Hillary Clinton.

Reminder: In the US electoral system, the one who has the most votes does not necessarily win the presidency, but it is important to conquer as many individual states as possible in order to achieve a majority in the so-called electoral college ("Electoral College"). In the end, the committee appoints the president; it is made up of 538 delegates from the 50 states and Washington DC according to a specific distribution key.

Similar procedures, such as those in Wisconsin, which are intended to remove voters from the electoral lists, have already been carried out in several conservative US states, including Texas and Ohio, according to CNN. A spokesman for the Wisconsin Election Commission announced that "next steps" will now be discussed, including the possibility to contest the verdict.