Friend –

We're going to court to stop a bad-faith attempt to purge hundreds of thousands of Milwaukee voters from the rolls.

Last week, a group of voters, represented by an attorney notorious for his involvement in frivolously prosecuting the results of the 2020 presidential election, sued the Milwaukee Elections Commission and the Wisconsin Elections Commission, seeking to force the agencies to remove thousands of people from the voting rolls based on unreputable USPS data, less than a month before Election Day.

This lawsuit is the latest attempt to purge voters and prevent them from receiving absentee ballots, making voting harder, so we're fighting back in court.

The data the plaintiffs are using to challenge the legitimacy of voters' registration status – information supposedly gleaned from the U.S. Postal Service's National Change of Address Registry – is a notoriously unreliable and debunked means of identifying voters who have moved out of their voting districts.

People often request changes to their mailing address for reasons that do not affect their standing to vote. They may change their address to forward their mail elsewhere temporarily, or they may have temporarily relocated to attend school or travel for work while maintaining their permanent Wisconsin address. USPS also has a history of mistakenly reporting someone has moved when they haven't.

Using the legal system to disenfranchise voters, remarkably so close to Election Day, is a voter suppression tactic being carried out around the country to impact the future of our state and nation.

This is not only about protecting Wisconsin voters' rights to participate in this election – it is about Wisconsin's future and upholding the values of democracy – issues we will continue to fight for during this election season and beyond.

Thanks for sticking with us,

Ryan Cox
Pronouns: He, him, his
Legal Director, ACLU of Wisconsin