An appeals court on Wednesday ruled that more than 200,000 registered voters could be purged from the Wisconsin database because they have moved. Election officials believe these people might have moved because they changed their address at the local post office, registered vehicles at a new address or provided a new address to some other government agency, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.
The State of Wisconsin sent letters in October to roughly 234,000 people asking them to confirm their address or update their voter registration with their new address.
According to the Elections Commission, 60,000 letters were returned as undeliverable. Another 2,300 people confirmed they still lived at their address and roughly 16,500 registered to vote at their new address.
Those who failed to take action would be purged from the voter rolls beginning in 2021.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, however, brought about the lawsuit, saying the state needed to take action earlier. The judge agreed and ruled that the state must take action 30 days after notifying the person about being purged from the database.
When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) received word of the "alarming" news, she took to Twitter to say voters would be "prohibited from voting" with less than year from the 2020 election.
It’s beyond alarming that more than 200,000 registered Wisconsin voters will be prohibited from voting.
— Nancy Pelosi (@TeamPelosi) December 17, 2019
Less than a year from the election, we must ensure @WisDems have the resources to respond with a massive voter registration effort.
Don’t agonize. Organize! ?? https://t.co/pTZPttXf6B
PolitiFact, the leftist "fact checking" website, gave her a "pants on fire" rating for her bold-faced lie:
Weighing in on the Wisconsin voter rolls controversy, Pelosi says these 200,000-plus people "will be prohibited from voting."
That’s a major overstatement of how this actually works.
Yes, the pruning process — if allowed by the courts — could potentially remove more than 200,000 people from the voting rolls before the upcoming elections. But there is no punitive element that would ban future voting. Everyone can re-register, even on Election Day.
The use of the word "prohibited," in particular, goes too far, in that it suggests there is no way to vote in the future.
We rate Pelosi’s claim Pants on Fire.
This is another one of those examples where Democrats try to use hysteria to claim there's some kind of voter suppression. And you know if Trump wins Wisconsin in 2020, which is looking more and more likely, the Democrats will claim their voters were "suppressed."