Congratulations Wisconsin!

Only New York is worse!

Wisconsin has 7,744,986 voter registration records in the 2024 version of the voter rolls I have. This is compared to 21,373,402 records in New York’s 12/22/2022 dated version of their voter rolls. This makes Wisconsin’s rolls about 36% the size of new York’s. And yet, Wisconsin almost beats New York for clone registrations.

I call them clones, but they are more commonly known as “dups” or “duplicates.” The reason I avoid those terms is that it is possible to have a duplicate that isn’t a clone. As I define the terms, a “duplicate” is a copy of a record, where everything is the same except for county identifier. A “clone” is similar, but it has unique state ID numbers for each record.

Under New York and other state laws, County and State Boards of Election must check all registration applications for duplicates before proceeding. They have to check first name, last name, and date of birth (DOB) for any matches in the system. If found, they must then check a secondary identifier, like driver’s license or SSN. If matched, the application must be denied and the existing record must be updated instead.

I used the same method in NY (match first/last name and DOB) to identify clones. There were 1,467,208. This number is the total excess records only, not counting the original records the clones are based on. Every clone record is evidence that the state of NY does not follow its own election law when registering voters. If they had followed the law, those records would have never been made.

Counting clones in Wisconsin is different fro NY. This is because the WI voter rolls cleverly don’t provide DOB information. They do, however, include phone numbers, email addresses, and street addresses. Not every record has a phone number or email address, but many do. Enough to use those values instead of DOB as a way to find clones.

The good news about phone numbers and email addresses is that they are more unique than DOB. Meaning, they are a more accurate method of identifying clones than what is available in NY. Using this method, 874,455 Wisconsin records were identified as likely clones. Over 2 million other records matched for first and last name, but had no email or phone number listed, so they were ignored.

New York’s 1,467,208 clones are 6.86% of all records. Wisconsin’s 874,455 are 11.29% of the total. However, some of the Wisconsin records, no more than half, are the originals the clones are made from. Meaning, the actual number of excess records in this group is closer to 5.65%, or 437,228.

It is possible that Wisconsin has more clones than this, but without DOB information, it’s impossible to confirm. Regardless, the number that can be seen is higher than any other state I’ve looked at after New York, and has the potential to be even higher. However, thanks to the incomplete state of the records, they cannot be fully audited. This is another failure of the Wisconsin Election Board.

Based on this cursory examination, it appears that:

1. Wisconsin is not following the law regarding checking for duplicates before assigning new ID numbers

2. Wisconsin has violated the law at least 400,000 times by creating new ID numbers for people who already have ID numbers

3. Wisconsin is preventing full public disclosure of their rolls, as required under federal law, thus limiting their utility for purposes of public audit.

4. Wisconsin is not using standard data validation software, as required by law, or it would have been impossible to create the clones found in their database.

And now for the reason I wrote this article. Take a look at the image at the top. Notice how the number of clones increases each year as a percentage of total registrations. This is not a cumulative total, but new registrations by year. There was a time when clones represented less than 1% of total registrations in any given year. Now, it tends to be over 20% of all registrations.

In 2021, 35.82% of all new registrations in Wisconsin were clones. What does this say about Wisconsin? It seems to me it means that someone is not doing their job properly.