Wisconsin state Assemblywoman Janel Brandtjen, a Republican, worries that not enough has been done to prevent the upcoming midterm election from becoming a replay of 2020.
“Going into the midterms, a person can still register, get a ballot, and vote before his or her identity and address are verified with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, as required by law,” Brandtjen told The Epoch Times. “I saw this going on in the August primary. Nothing has changed since 2020. There is still no instantaneous identity check for the thousands of people utilizing Wisconsin’s same-day registration law.
“There remains continuing opportunity for bad actors to take advantage of this and other security vulnerabilities in the balloting process.”
According to law, local clerks have 30 days after a state election and 45 days after a federal election to verify a same-day voter’s ID and address.
“What good does that do? By that time, the election is already over, and there is no way to take a potentially illegal vote back or to link the ballot with the unqualified voter who cast it,” she said. “This is not the fault of the local election clerks. They have not been provided the equipment they need, nor is there a process in place for an instant identity check for same-day registrants who vote that day.
“The Wisconsin election system has a poor balancing process and is very bad about removing any names from the voter rolls. Many of these problem names and addresses are likely still on the rolls.”
The Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau documented the size of the 2020 problem in a report published in October 2021.
The audit discovered that the identity and address information of more than 46,000 same-day voting registrants didn’t match the information in the Wisconsin Department of Transportation (DOT) database.
Brandtjen said some of these may be explainable by things such as spelling errors, but the sheer number discovered is cause for concern.
“It also doesn’t change the fact that the errors that were caught were found after the person voted,” she said.
By Steven Kovac
