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CONLEY COMMENTARY (WSAU) – If you’ve ever moved from one state to another, there’s a lot to do. You have to pack everything, arrange for a moving company, find a new place to live, transfer your utilities, get a new drivers license, transfer your vehicle registration.
I bet one thing you did not do was call your local city clerk’s office, tell them you were moving, and ask to be removed from the voting rolls. I’ve moved in my adult life from Connecticut to New York, then to New Hampshire, then back to Connecticut, and now Wisconsin. Not once did I inform local election officials that I was moving away.
Usually people get removed from the old voter rolls when they register to vote somewhere else. But not all states communicate with one another. The system for removing voters who’ve moved away… or have died, or have become convicted felons, is imperfect. In many states there are tens of thousands of voters who are registered even though they can’t legally vote.
Having accurate voter rolls is an important part of fair elections. And yet getting outdated names off the voting lists is always a court fight and often ends with ineligible names remaining.
In Wisconsin, this should be no issue at all. We have same-day voter registration. If you went to your polling place and found your name had been removed, you can re-register right then and there. Yet legitimate efforts to remove people who haven’t voted in the last four elections and haven’t responded to an address verification postcard are a cause-celeb in court. The bias news media describes this as a voting role purge.
In North Carolina, an effort to remove inactive move-aways or deceased from the voting rolls also got tangled up in court. A compromise left 73,000 inactive names on the lists. You think that’s no big deal? 73,000 fraudulent votes would have changed the results in at least six states: Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico and Michigan.
Election integrity matters. And its foundation is accurate voting rolls.
Chris Conley
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