(The Center Square) – Wisconsin’s governor says he is trying to give the state’s election clerks the freedom and ability to do their jobs, but not everyone is buying it.
A federal judge dismissed the Trump Administration’s lawsuit that sought to get Wisconsin’s unredacted voter list.
The judge ruled that Wisconsin’s “voter registration lists are not documents subject to production under [federal law]. That makes it unnecessary to decide whether the government has complied with the other statutory requirements to demand records.”
Gov. Tony Evers cheered the ruling.
“The Trump Administration only wants this info so they can prevent eligible Wisconsinites from voting, sow doubt in our secure elections, make it harder for our clerks and administrators to do their jobs, and claim there’s fraud when they lose elections,” Evers wrote in a post on X. “This is great news.”
But Dan Lennington with the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty said the Trump Administration is not “sowing doubt.” Instead, he said the Trump Administration simply wants to make sure Wisconsin is doing what it has promised it would do for years.
“The Wisconsin Elections Commission has received about $77 million over the last two decades from the federal government to maintain its computer systems, which includes the statewide voter registration database. The feds now just want the opportunity to inspect what they are largely paying for,” Lennington told The Center Square. “They do this all the time in other areas like Medicaid, unemployment, and other federally funded areas.”
Evers has also refused to turn over Wisconsin’s food stamp and Medicaid lists, as well. The governor said he has worries about the privacy of the information on those lists.
“What’s really going on here is that the Evers Admin and the Elections Commission are desperately trying to prevent anyone from finding out whether illegals or felons are on the voting rolls. They are hiding behind ‘privacy’ as a pretext,” Lennington added. “They just don’t want scrutiny about who they are allowing to vote in this state.”
The Trump Administration already has a copy of Wisconsin’s public voter roll. But it wants more.
The administration said it needs names, dates of birth, addresses, driver’s license numbers, and the last four digits of Social Security numbers for Wisconsin voters in order to cross-check with other data bases.
Lennington said the judge’s Thursday ruling is a “very cramped reading of a broad federal law.”
He said he expects the decision to “be carefully scrutinized on appeal.”
