The Wisconsin Capitol on Election Day in the spring, April 7, 2020. (Photo by Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)
Speaking to a group founded by a leading election denier, a top Wisconsin lawmaker on Thursday laid out an ambitious plan to identify noncitizens on voter rolls and remove them just weeks before this fall’s elections in the crucial swing state. have it removed.
Election experts say the approach outlined by Rep. Scott Krug (R-Nekoosa) is likely illegal and, if implemented, could lead to eligible voters being removed from the rolls. They add that there is no evidence that non-citizens vote in large numbers.
Krug, the Republican chairman of the Assembly Campaigns and Elections Committee, said he plans to compare Wisconsin’s statewide voter rolls with a separate list of legal noncitizens who have driver’s licenses to identify noncitizens identify those registered to vote. as well as those who actually cast a vote.
Krug said he will take his investigation to every municipal clerk in the state — there are 333 — in September and urge them to remove the noncitizens.
“I think this is probably the most important project that we can do in the state of Wisconsin to rebuild trust in just making sure that our voter rolls are clean,” Krug said. “It shouldn’t be that complicated.”
Krug spoke June 13 at an online meeting hosted by the Election Integrity Network, which was founded by former Donald Trump attorney Cleta Mitchell and is dedicated to mobilizing grassroots activists across the country to hunt for illegal voting.
Mitchell played a key role in Trump’s failed attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
“For many years, Republicans have been more than happy to disenfranchise voters at every opportunity,” said Rep. Lisa Subeck, a Democrat on the Campaign and Elections Committee. “The net result is that eligible voters will find it more difficult, if not impossible, to cast their ballots on Election Day.”
Subeck linked the crackdown on noncitizen voting to potential efforts by the Republican Party to undermine the election results again.
“I think in the next election there will definitely be legislators who want to have another 2020 in their hands,” she said. “What I fear is that Republicans like Scott Krug and others are laying the groundwork for another January 6th. And that is horrifying.”
538.com’s forecast model shows that Wisconsin, along with Arizona and Pennsylvania, is the most competitive state in this year’s presidential election. In 2020, President Joe Biden won the state by fewer than 21,000 votes.
Krug acknowledged at the meeting that he currently does not have any of the lists needed for the project. But he said the state Legislative Technology Services Bureau agreed to provide his office with the statewide voter rolls after the state elections agency, the Wisconsin Election Commission, failed to cooperate. And, he added, the state Motor Vehicle Department was expected to give him the list of legal noncitizens with driver’s licenses.
A message left with the LTSB was not immediately returned.
Krug was vague about how the crucial and complex process of comparing the two lists would be carried out.
“We’re going to have to do some data comparisons,” he said. “We’re going to have to work with some people who are able to do that because I don’t think LTSD will be able to handle that project alone. That is why we are looking for people who can make that comparison.”
Krug said the Department of Motor Vehicles told him that about 70,000 legal noncitizens in the state have driver’s licenses or IDs. He estimated that “nearly a thousand” of these could be on the electoral rolls.
“The goal is to give this comparison and list to every municipal clerk in the state of Wisconsin by September,” Krug continued, “and say, this is exactly how many people actually voted through this process, which should not be happening. have voted and who are technically still on your electoral roll – please remove them from your electoral roll.”
The September deadline, Krug said, would give clerks several weeks before the start of early voting to contact voters “to demand better evidence,” or to “just remove them outright if they don’t have evidence to have’.
“There will be a number of clerks in the state of Wisconsin who will likely refuse to remove individuals from their voter rolls,” Krug acknowledged.
Clerks would have good reason to refuse, election experts say. For starters, there are privacy concerns, according to David Becker, the founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, and a leading expert on election administration.
“This lawmaker is talking about sharing highly protected, highly sensitive and private personal information from motor vehicle data with unspecified third parties,” Becker said. “The legality of this is very questionable. But just as importantly, I believe the public has a right to know exactly who has access to this data, how it will be stored and how it will be used.”
Privacy aside, Becker says, the process Krug describes will likely result in significant numbers of eligible voters being wrongly removed from the list.
When other states tried to make similar comparisons, Becker explained, they found that many of the people on the list of legal noncitizens with a driver’s license would likely have become citizens some time after obtaining their driver’s license.
“It is really aimed at naturalized citizens, who for a variety of reasons are among the most patriotic and eager to participate in our democracy,” Becker said.
In addition, Becker said, many of the people and groups that have marketed themselves as experts at performing the kind of list matching that Krug’s project requires have failed to use high-quality data matching standards, which has led to basic errors such as identifying two different people as the same person because of a shared name.
“These kinds of things happen all the time, and unless you’re a highly sophisticated data scientist working with sophisticated software, you’re going to have a lot of false positives,” Becker said. “You are going to overestimate the number of non-citizens. And that is obviously a big problem.”
Becker’s Electronic Registration Information Center is a widely respected data sharing agreement of which Wisconsin is a member. Although several Republican Party-led states have pulled out of the pact in recent years, portraying it as a plan to boost Democrats, election officials from both parties have said ERIC data has helped them clean up their records without removing eligible voters, while protecting voters. privacy.
A spokesperson for the WEC, which runs state elections, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Krug’s plan.
Krug’s focus on non-citizen voting is in sync with that of the national Republican Party, which recently introduced legislation on the issue.
In announcing the measure, Speaker Mike Johnson said he knows “intuitively” that large numbers of noncitizens vote in federal elections. A comprehensive 2017 study by the Brennan Center found that there were only 30 incidents of suspected – not proven – non-citizen voting, out of 23.5 million votes cast in the 2016 election, or just 0.0001 percent.
During his tenure as chairman of the Campaign and Elections Committee, Krug developed a reputation for being relatively conciliatory and bipartisan.
But he described his plan as an attempt to circumvent Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, who last year vetoed a Republican Party-backed bill aimed at cracking down on noncitizen voting. to take.
“We don’t need the governor’s approval to take people off the voter list if someone shouldn’t be on the voter list,” Krug said.
And he struck an intensely partisan tone as he explained the need to go it alone.
“We have the legislature, but we don’t have a governor,” Krug added. “And last year we lost our Supreme Court to the new liberal majority. So I have one power lever that I can pull, out of these three. So to even get as far as we can today is a monumental victory.”
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