Wisconsin leaders push to prevent noncitizens from registering to vote

Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney said Wisconsin needs a proper process to check its voter rolls for noncitizens and remove them, ensuring election integrity in the state.

Currently, election commissions cannot check their rolls with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation to ensure an estimated 90,000 individuals who are currently legally in the state, who can get a drivers license, do not register to vote.

Toney was one of several officials statewide to take part in a Tuesday morning press conference from the John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy about Wisconsin election integrity.

Wisconsin election managers recently pushed for an Office of Election Transparency and Compliance, with a $2 million budget request for the office approved by the Wisconsin Election Commission.

“We want to make sure that it is easy to vote but hard to cheat,” said Republican Congressman Tom Tiffany, who holds the state’s Seventh Congressional seat.

Tiffany pointed to the SAVE Act, pushed by Wisconsin U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, Chairman of the Committee on House Administration. The bill passed the House in July with a 221-198 vote but has not been taken up by the Senate.

Tiffany said that the bill would setup a process ensuring that only citizens are registered to vote and that states must check voter rolls to ensure that is true. Ohio and Arizona were just some of the states where noncitizens have been removed from rolls.

Dodge County Sheriff Dale Schmidt, meanwhile, said that it’s essential that each citizen gets just one vote and that election laws are followed. He pointed to a Supreme Court ruling that only the voter can put their own ballot in a ballot drop box as one way to ensure that.

Dodge County does not use drop boxes because it did not have proper monitoring to ensure that only the voter was dropping a ballot. The only exception to the rule comes if a person is bedridden.

“Election laws are just like any other laws, they must be followed,” Schmidt said.

Toney called election and ballot integrity a nonpartisan issue that all in Wisconsin should want to ensure. He said that it would be more difficult for someone in the country illegally to vote because they cannot get a driver’s license but it essential to have a process in place to check those who are in the country legally but are not allowed to vote.

“It is a felony to do this and it is a deportable offense,” Tiffany said.