A Wisconsin judge ordered the state to take as many as 234,000 people off its registered-voter list Friday because they may have moved — a decision that could impede residents of this swing state from voting in next year’s presidential election.
The case centers on a letter that the state Elections Commission sent in Octoberto hundreds of thousands of voters, asking them to respond if they were still at that address or to update their registrations if they had moved.
Conservatives filed a lawsuit alleging that to avoid fraud, the commission should have thrown out the registrations of voters who did not respond to the mailing within 30 days, the Associated Press reported. The Elections Commission, composed of three Republicans and three Democrats, is challenging the suit by arguing that it has the legal power to manage the registered voter list and that removing people now would cause confusion if some of them had not actually moved.