A Wisconsin judge has ruled that state election officials need to purge 200,000 people from state voter rolls immediately.
Last month there was public uproar when a Wisconsin judge sided with a conservative advocacy group and ordered Wisconsin election officials to quickly remove hundreds of thousands of people from the state’s voter registration lists that it believed had changed addresses. Wisconsin election officials, however, appealed the ruling and declined to move forward with the purge while the case was in court.
Now, the Ozaukee county circuit judge Paul Malloy fined the Wisconsin elections commission and its three Democratic commissioners on Monday for refusing to move ahead with the purge.
Malloy’s order is the latest salvo in a closely watched fight over the removals in a state Donald Trump won by just under 23,000 votes, and could impact how other states like Georgia react to the same issue. Civil groups said the purge was an obvious attempt to make it more difficult for students and minority populations – who tend to favor Democrats – to vote.
Last year, Wisconsin election officials sent mailings to 232,579 voters it believed had moved and did not receive responses from over 230,000. But the Wisconsin election officials did not believe the information was “reliable” and so it planned to wait until 2021 to remove them. The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative advocacy group, sued the state over that decision and Malloy ordered the purge in December.
Malloy ruled the commission was in contempt of his order on Monday and ordered the panel to pay $50 a day and the Democratic commissioners to pay $250 a day until it moves forward with the purge. “I can’t be any clearer than this,” Malloy said, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “They need to follow my order.”
Reid Magney, a spokesman for the commission, declined to comment on the order, noting the commission was meeting Tuesday to discuss the issue.
If the commission does move forward with the purge, a voter could re-register online, with their local clerk or on election day. But voting rights activists say voters shouldn’t have to go through additional hoops to re-register if they are eligible.
“They’ll wait in line and then they’ll find out that they’re not registered and then they’ll be told they have to register,” Jay Heck, the executive director of the Wisconsin chapter of Common Cause, told the Guardian in December. “You’ll have people who just say ‘to hell with it’.”