Boxes of ballots wait to be counted at Milwaukee's central count on Election Day 2024. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

A Waukesha County judge on Monday issued a temporary partial stay of his ruling in a case over how state election authorities verify the citizenship status of people registering to vote. 

The partial stay was issued after the state Department of Justice had requested that Judge Michael Maxwell hold up the entirety of his order pending an appeal. Oral arguments will be held Oct. 31 to determine if the rest of the order should be stayed. 

Maxwell ruled Friday that the Wisconsin Elections Commission and Department of Transportation have a duty to match citizenship records with the state’s voter registration system to determine that non-citizens are not registering to vote. In his order, he also required that state and local election officials stop accepting new voter registrations without checking citizenship status and that the parties in the lawsuit meet to determine a plan for checking the existing voter rolls for non-citizen voters. 

The Monday order that partially stayed the decision put a pause on the halt to accepting voter registrations. 

DOJ had argued that Maxwell’s order would require a “massive overhaul” of the state’s voter registration system and take months to implement, that the ruling doesn’t make clear what the citizen verification requirement actually entails and potentially violates state law requiring the elections commission to maintain the electronic voter registration system. 

Non-citizens are not allowed to vote. Current law requires that people seeking to register to vote attest under penalty of imprisonment that they are U.S. citizens. In Wisconsin, immigrants without legal documentation are unable to obtain a driver’s license and a state-issued photo ID is required to register to vote. 

Despite little evidence that non-citizen voters are casting ballots in large numbers, the issue has been repeatedly raised by Republicans in recent years — particularly since President Donald Trump falsely claimed that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and among Republicans who are already skeptical of the election system as a whole.