WATERTOWN, Wis. — A damning report is raising the alarm about a legal loophole allowing thousands to vote in Wisconsin without showing photo identification as required by state law.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty’s Monday morning release reveals the “indefinitely confined” voter rolls have reached more than 144,000, up 116% since 2016.
This state accommodation designed for the disabled, elderly, ill and infirm came under the spotlight in 2020 when Wisconsin’s two largest cities — Milwaukee and Madison — told citizens to use the little-known law to vote without a photo ID during COVID restrictions.
President Biden won the state by almost 21,000 votes in 2020; former President Donald Trump won by about 27,000 in 2016. Polls show Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris neck and neck this year.
Dairy Staters are required to show a government-issued photo ID when voting but not when registering to vote. “Indefinitely confined” voters check a box when registering to sign up for automatic absentee ballots “for every election” until they are no longer indefinitely confined or fail to return a ballot.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court put a stop to that, but it didn’t keep the indefinitely confined voter rolls from quadrupling from almost 67,000 in 2016 to more 265,000 in 2020 — about 8% of the total votes cast four years ago.
Thanks to state law requiring voter-roll cleanups, the number of voters with indefinitely confined status is down to just over 144,000 but still more than twice what it was in 2016.
Five Democratic strongholds have the highest number of voters with indefinitely confined status: Madison, Milwaukee, Green Bay, Kenosha and Janesville, all of which went hard for Biden in 2020.
Report author Will Flanders was quick to point out the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty has not found evidence of widespread voter fraud of those using this status in Wisconsin. Still, the conservative legal and policy center thinks there’s cause for concern.
“We have a loophole here that lets people not have to show a photo ID,” Flanders told The Post.
WILL’s worry is the bloated indefinitely confined rolls could be used as an opportunity to question the election results, as it was in 2020.
One solution, Flanders said, is to change the law to require a doctor’s note, as some states do, or require a photo ID to qualify for the status.
Republican state lawmakers passed such a bill, but Democratic Gov. Tony Evers vetoed it in 2022.
In 2020, the Wisconsin Elections Commission confirmed 78% of indefinitely confined voters had shown a photo ID at some point, but that figure has not been updated.
Most municipal clerks have complied with state-law requirements to identify and remove inactive voters from the status, WILL found. But Madison failed to respond to WILL’s Open Records request — far surpassing the law’s expected 10-to-14-day turnaround.
The conservative group believes there could be as many as 38,000 registered indefinitely confined voters who are no longer eligible under state law.
Flanders issued a warning when asked what can be done about cities not complying with the law to clean up their voter rolls.
“If a municipality is non-compliant with the legal requirements to remove individuals from the indefinitely confined list, then a voter from that community would need to file a complaint with WEC,” Flanders said.
“WILL would be open to discussing particularly egregious cases with anyone in noncompliant communities.”
