A long-running battle over bloated Wisconsin voter rolls that had more than 230,000 registered voters who might have moved caught the attention of former President Donald Trump.
Trump wrote in a statement from his Save America PAC on Saturday:
"Wisconsin has just canceled 205,000 voter registrations because they say they could not find the voters. Why did they wait until AFTER the election? Would this mean that we would have won Wisconsin? Congratulations!"
Conservatives filed a lawsuit in 2020 demanding the Wisconsin Elections Commission remove voters from the rolls if they did not respond to mailings within 30 days. The lawsuit ultimately failed and Democrat Joe Biden went on to beat Donald Trump by about 20,000 votes.
The commission mailed more than 230,000 voters by the Electronic Registration Information Center as possibly having moved.
Elections officials deactivated 174,307 voter registrations last week because they did not respond to the mailing and had not voted in four years. They are required by Wisconsin law to identify voters who have not voted in the past four years and deactivate them.
The commission also noted 31,854 registrations were removed under the belief they have moved and did not respond to the mailing.
The commission voted in summer 2019 not to deactivate them until after the April 2021 election to give them several chances to affirm they had not moved. That stance prompted a lawsuit from a conservative law firm, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, demanding the commission remove those voters within 30 days if they did not respond to the mailing. The state Supreme Court ultimately ruled the commission wasn't required to remove voters within that window.
Also, this week, the leader of the Wisconsin Assembly's elections committee issued subpoenas Friday demanding extensive election materials, including all ballots and voting machines from two counties in what she called a "top-to-bottom" investigation of the state's 2020 presidential results.
Republicans have heavily criticized Milwaukee and Brown County's election procedures.
They have questioned why Milwaukee officials did not release results until the early morning after Election Day. They have also accused Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich of ceding authority over the election to Facebook-funded consultant Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein, questioning why Genrich handed over keys to the city's central ballot counting location to him.
Information from The Associated Press was used to compile this report.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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