Election-integrity watchdogs are raising concerns and demanding answers from state officials ahead of the 2024 election due to new data revealing tens of thousands of questionable voter registrations in Wisconsin.
According to the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, more than 41,000 voter registrations don’t match records in the state’s driver and ID database — nearly twice as many as were flagged during the last presidential election. The group says the surge calls into question the reliability of Wisconsin’s voter-verification process.
“In a suspicious development, it’s been exposed that a whopping 41,000 Wisconsin voters’ registration files do NOT match the driver and ID database… nearly DOUBLE from 2020,” the organization noted in pointing out the surge in mismatches.
State records reveal 11,174 active voter registrations missing a driver’s license number — nearly three times the total from 2020. Another 24,733 registrations contain name discrepancies, a sharp rise from 15,260 four years ago. Smaller categories include 680 records with mismatched names and birthdates, and 2,069 that could not be matched in the system at all, said the organization.
The total amounts to about 1.1% of Wisconsin’s active voter roll — a relatively small share, but in a battleground state where elections are often decided by razor-thin margins, it’s enough to draw concern. Joe Biden won Wisconsin in 2020 by just over 20,000 votes.
Wisconsin was the closest state in the election by margin with President Donald Trump winning it last year by 0.9%, as well as the only state to be decided by less than a 1% margin.
WILL Deputy Counsel Lucas Vebber urged caution against drawing immediate conclusions but said the discrepancies warrant serious scrutiny, according to The Center Square.
“We’re not in any way saying that these 40,000 votes were fraudulent votes,” Vebber said. “We don’t know that. We don’t even know if these 40,000 names were even voters in the election. We know that they’re on the voter registration list and it’s certainly likely, of course, that some of them voted.”
“But we don’t know because we don’t know who voted and we don’t know what all the discrepancies are. It could be something innocuous, it could be something more serious. But our point in the letter is just saying this is serious enough that questions need to be answered and we need a little more transparency here from the government,” he added.
One key concern: online voter registrations are automatically cross-checked against state ID records, while paper applications — including those submitted on Election Day — are routed through a far less transparent verification process.
“If you register to vote online… they will instantly check that number against the DOT database. If anything’s inaccurate, they will not allow you to register to vote. If you submit a paper application… WEC won’t tell us what process they used to verify the information,” Vebber said.
A Waukesha County judge recently ordered the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) to verify voter information against state transportation records, but that ruling is on hold pending appeal — leaving the mismatched registrations unresolved for now.
Lawmakers have also demanded answers from WEC, but the agency’s lack of response has only deepened skepticism in a state still scarred by contentious election battles and lingering doubts over record-high turnout.
“What are they doing to ensure the integrity of our voter registration list?” Vebber asked. “That’s a real good question for WEC. If they have this information, then they are aware of this discrepancy. What are they doing with it? We’d like to know.”
The Wisconsin Elections Commission says online voter registrations are automatically rejected if key information — such as a name, date of birth, license number, or residency — doesn’t match state records.
However, the agency offered little detail about paper applications, saying only that they go through a separate process.