Sun Setting Laws

For John, BLUF:  We have a lot of old and out of date laws on the books, and they need to be replaced, lawfully.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Judge orders 234,000 purged from Wisconsin voter rolls

From MSN, by Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Reporters Bruce Vielmetti and Patrick Marley, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 15 December 2019.

Here is the lede plus four:

An Wisconsin judge on Friday ordered the state to remove hundreds of thousands of people from Wisconsin's voter rolls because they may have moved.

The case is being closely watched because of the state's critical role in next year's presidential race.  Ozaukee County Judge Paul Malloy also denied the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin's petition to intervene.

Lawyers for the League and for the Wisconsin Elections Commission indicated they will appeal and asked Malloy to stay his ruling pending those appeals, but he declined.

At issue is a letter the state Elections Commission sent in October to about 234,000 voters who it believes may have moved.  The letter asked the voters to update their voter registrations if they had moved or alert election officials if they were still at their same address.

The commission planned to remove the letter's recipients from the voter rolls in 2021 if it hadn't heard from them.  But Malloy's decision would kick them off the rolls much sooner, and well before the 2020 presidential election.

First off, "hundreds of thousands seems like lazy journalism.  The mailing went to 234,000 voters, per the article. 

Of the 234,000 letters that were sent, about 60,000 were returned as undeliverable as of Dec. 5, according to the Elections Commission. As of then, about 2,300 recipients of the letters said they continued to live at their address and about 16,500 had registered to vote at new addresses.

That is nit-picking.  The real issue is that unelected officials were not following our democratic procedures and allowing appointed officials to override our laws and procedures.

But [Judge] Malloy went further than issuing an injunction.  In granting a writ of mandamus – essentially a court order that a government official or agency do its job – he said he was convinced the commission had a clear, positive, plain legal duty to purge the voter rolls within 30 days.

"I don't want to see someone deactivated, but I don't write the law," said Malloy, who was appointed to the bench in 2002 by Republican Gov. Scott McCallum and has been re-elected by voters.

He said the commission didn't like the policy so it set a new one without following a formal rule-making procedure that would have included notice to the public and a chance for input.

To be filed under "It's All About Me":

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers on Twitter railed against the ruling.

"I won the race for governor by less than 30,000 votes," he wrote.  "This move pushed by Republicans to remove 200,000 Wisconsinites from the voter rolls is just another attempt at overriding the will of the people and stifling the democratic process."

This is rubbish.  the invocation of 200,000 is sloppy math.  Further, the Governor doesn't talk about how some of those voters might be Republicans.  When someone in my District casts an illegal vote, that is the suppression of my vote.  In my own City, Lowell, a group has sued, and the City folded, so next local election my vote will, in some Districts be reduced in value by a factor of ten.  And Gerrymandering is alive and well.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff