The Wisconsin Elections Commission met Thursday to assess its preparations for the midterm elections in November, review reports on allegations of voter fraud and determine the outcome of two complaints against election officials. 

The commission met as concerns continue to swirl around Wisconsin and the country over the possibility that President Donald Trump and his Republican allies will work to undermine confidence in the results of the election. 

In the meeting, WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe gave the agency’s pre-election readiness report in which she outlined the ways the commission works to keep the state’s voter rolls accurate, train election officials, ensure the election’s security and answer any questions that come from local officials or voters. 

One of the most frequent complaints about the election system made by conspiracy theorists is that Wisconsin’s voter registration database includes the information of “inactive” voters who have moved, died or been convicted of a felony. The critics argue that leaving these files in the database makes it easier for fraud to occur.

The report states that WEC and local election officials have reviewed or updated nearly 500,000 voter files ahead of the election to make sure that only eligible voters cast votes in November. 

“And in total, since the last general election, our municipal clerks have updated or deactivated over a half a million records, and so I think that’s really, really important to highlight how much work goes into maintaining Wisconsin’s voter registration list all day, every day to ensure that anybody that’s lawfully registered will show up on the registration list,” Wolfe said. “They’ll show up on the polls when they go to vote on Election Day, and anybody who is not eligible, so anybody who maybe has been convicted of a felony or is otherwise not eligible, is removed from the list or their record is updated.”

Commission Chair Don Millis, a Republican, said that leaving the inactive voter files in the database actually protects against fraud. 

“Basically, you have one database with 7 million records, and there’s a very good reason why we keep records of inactive voter records, deceased voters, because if you got rid of those, you would lose one of your best tools to combat election fraud,” Millis said.

Wolfe also said that in an effort to provide as much information as possible to voters and clerks, the WEC office is set to open at 5 a.m. in the weeks ahead of the election. 

Commissioner Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, said she appreciates the sacrifice from WEC staff to help people, but that the agency’s 30-person staff is not large enough to handle the demands of the public. 

“We have put in a request for our budget for many more positions because the work we’re doing has expanded dramatically,” Jacobs said. “It shouldn’t be something where people are sacrificing as much as they are. And I want to express my admiration for our staff’s devotion to this work and commitment to it. And also say that our need for additional staff is real. It’s profound. And I hope if any legislators are out there listening, that you treat our budget request for more personnel with great attention, and hopefully give us those staff positions.”

Voter fraud, felon reports 

Commission staff also presented the results of the agency’s regular reports on felons who have voted and reported election fraud. 

As is generally the case, neither report shows widespread levels of election fraud at the level Republicans have regularly alleged in recent years. 

The report shows that since the 2020 general election, nearly 22 million votes have been cast in Wisconsin. Only 445 of those votes, 0.002%, were matched to voters with felony convictions and an even smaller number of those instances were actually referred to prosecutors and charged. 

The commission’s annual report on voter fraud found that in the elections since November 2025, municipal clerks have referred 53 cases of election fraud to local prosecutors. The WEC report, agency staff said, could be an undercount because it’s dependent on clerks reporting the referrals to WEC when they happen. 

Most of the referrals, 44 of them, were made because the “election day registration” postcard delivered to a person’s address after they register at the polls was returned undeliverable. 

Milwaukee Complaint

The commission also voted on Thursday that there is no probable cause to further investigate a voter’s complaint that the city of Milwaukee violated state law by sorting absentee ballots at its central count location behind a curtain. 

The complaint alleged that city staff were conducting “observable” election activities behind the curtain at the city’s central count location during the November 2024 and April 2025 elections. The commission’s discussion of the complaint reopened long-running arguments between commission members — most notably from Republican Robert Spindell, who has long been the WEC member most friendly to election conspiracy theories. 

Spindell argued that people continuing to have doubts about Wisconsin’s elections is evidence that Wisconsin’s elections aren’t run competently or transparently enough. 

“Let’s stop having these problems that we have, where 45% of the citizens of Wisconsin feel that there’s something wrong with this thing,” Spindell said. “I’m sure Mayor [Cavalier] Johnson does not like the bad publicity that comes out regarding the lack of transparency. There’s no reason why that black curtain is up. There’s no reason why all these actions are being blocked if there’s nothing nefarious going on.” 

Jacobs pointed out that the complaint included several blatantly false statements.

“Bob, I’m concerned by your comments because I know you’ve been to Central Count. I know you have seen ballots being opened in the machines. I know you have seen the tables. I know you have seen the poll workers calling out names. I know you have seen all this,” Jacobs said. “And this complaint was by someone who swore under penalty of perjury that those things were happening behind this curtain. This man brought a lie to us, a lie, because he’s so invested in putting forward this conspiracy theory of secret things going on behind black curtains that he’s willing to lie on these documents to us. You and I both know, we’re both there, you and I both know that’s not true and he lies to this commission with the hopes of diminishing the work being done in the city of Milwaukee and I think you should be as offended as I am by that, because I’m pretty darn offended.” 

Mark Thomsen, another Democratic member of the commission, said that it’s Spindell’s repeated indulgence of conspiracy theories that has allowed distrust of the system to continue. 

“For you to turn this discussion about a complaint and a recommendation into the politics of the election, I think that hurts us more than anything,” Thomsen said. “I think that promotes mistrust, and … years and years of this is like it’s like Chinese torture, Bob. I mean, it’s enough.”

A federal grand jury indicted 10 noncitizens for unlawfully voting in Minnesota, U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said Wednesday, highlighting the administration’s effort to keep election security a top issue, in line with President Donald Trump’s longstanding unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.

The indictments, which include nine counts of unlawful voting and nine counts of falsely claiming citizenship to register to vote, bring the number of noncitizens charged nationwide with election-related crimes since Trump re-took office last year to 90. The census reports 154 million people voted in the 2024 election.

Blanche said at a news conference at Justice Department headquarters in Washington, D.C., that the indictments show how seriously the administration takes election security.

“We have talked repeatedly about the importance of election integrity, and we’re certainly not going to stop talking about that now,” he said. “Voter fraud erodes the public’s trust in our electoral system, and it’s vital to our democratic process that we do everything that we can to restore that trust.”

Blanche’s participation in a press conference, alongside fellow Cabinet member Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, underlined the administration’s continuing focus on noncitizen voting, though numerous studies have shown it to be rare. Trump has for years amplified debunked conspiracy theories centered on election fraud.

Mullin made that connection explicit Wednesday, saying the indictments confirmed Trump’s accusations.

“The president said it for a long time, and the Democrats were sitting there denying it and saying, ‘There’s no fraud. That wasn’t taking place. There’s no fraud. There’s nothing, nothing here. Don’t look over here,’” he said. “We’re realizing there’s actually a lot. And we believe that some of these states probably even knew about it, chose not to look into it. Well, we are.”

But the allegations of illegal voting in Minnesota in the 2022 and 2024 general elections and 2026 primaries made virtually no difference to election results. 

The seven alleged illegal votes in the 2024 presidential election, for example, would account for only .0002% of votes cast in that election in Minnesota.

Five weeks before Election Day, President Donald Trump’s sprawling effort to identify and remove noncitizen voters hasn’t produced the kind of large purges that could meaningfully affect the midterm elections.

Even a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision giving states access to a supercharged Department of Homeland Security computer program to verify voters’ citizenship will have a limited immediate impact, election experts say. 

As Republicans fight to retain control of Congress, Trump and his allies have spent the past year aggressively seeking to root out noncitizen voting. 

They have called into question the security of the upcoming elections, following the lead of the president, who has long made spurious claims of voter fraud to dismiss unfavorable results.

Those efforts are now colliding with federal law — and the reality long shown by studies and available data that noncitizen voting is rare.

Little impact seen from court ruling

The Supreme Court on Sept. 25 ruled in a 6-3 decision that states can access Homeland Security’s SAVE system, which draws upon citizenship information stored across the federal government to scour voter rolls in the hunt for possible noncitizens. A district court judge had blocked the program in June.

But the high court’s decision came during a quiet period under the National Voter Registration Act that prohibits most states from conducting mass purges of voters in the 90 days before a federal election. 

The timing limits election officials to only searching for information on individual voters, even though Homeland Security has touted SAVE to states as a tool that can quickly scan millions of names.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority acknowledged as much, writing in its unsigned opinion that the quiet period “limits the potential impact” of the court’s decision. 

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, writing for the court’s three liberals, agreed the decision would have minimal short-term effects but argued the possibility of disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighed any risk of harm to the government.

David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, in a statement emphasized that voters will continue to experience the same safe, secure and reliable voting process this year as in the past.

“This decision will not have any significant impact on the 2026 election, as systematic voter list maintenance is prohibited within 90 days of a federal election, which the Supreme Court explicitly confirmed,” Becker said.

Post-2026

The more significant fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision may come in the weeks and months after the election, when states can once again remove large numbers of voters from their rolls. 

The Supreme Court is also set to hold oral arguments in December in a case that involves the reach of the National Voter Registration’s Act’s quiet period — leaving open the possibility the justices could give states more leeway to purge voters ahead of elections.

But for now, the restrictions remain in place.

“Until the Supreme Court says, reinterprets otherwise, the quiet period is still the quiet period,” Aaron Blacksberg, federal policy counsel at the Institute for Responsive Government, said in an interview.

Separately, a U.S. district court judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to require states to use SAVE as a condition of receiving some Federal Emergency Management Agency grants. Judge Amir H. Ali, an appointee of President Joe Biden, wrote that FEMA exceeded its authority in imposing election-related requirements.

Is the data reliable?

SAVE’s critics, which include Democrats and privacy advocates, warn that the system relies on incomplete and sometimes outdated data, resulting in false positives. SAVE was previously used to check whether noncitizens were eligible for various government benefits before the Trump administration last year repurposed it into a tool to check citizenship.

When U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a President Joe Biden appointee for a district court based in Washington, D.C., ruled against the program in June, she highlighted sworn declarations by naturalized citizens that Texas had threatened to revoke their voter registrations because of inaccurate Social Security data in SAVE.

“SAVE was never designed to verify citizenship: it relies on outdated and inaccurate data that produces false matches, risks disenfranchising eligible voters, and exposes sensitive personal information to misuse and bad actors,” Tim Harper, a project lead focused on elections and democracy at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonpartisan organization focused on civil liberties in the digital age, said in a statement.

The Trump administration and some Republicans hail SAVE as a powerful tool to ensure the accuracy of voter rolls and identify noncitizens who shouldn’t be registered to vote. They note that its use by states is voluntary.

“It’s remarkable that we had to file an emergency petition in the Supreme Court just so we can use government data to stop noncitizens from voting illegally. American elections are for Americans,” James Percival, Homeland Security’s general counsel, said in a statement.

In an email to States Newsroom, White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis faulted Democrats for not voting for the SAVE America Act, a bill that would require voters to produce documents proving their citizenship before voting. The bill has stalled in the U.S. Senate amid bipartisan opposition.

“The American people overwhelmingly support this commonsense legislation that enacts basic election security measures like voter ID and ensures only Americans are electing America’s leaders. President Trump is absolutely right: we fix this now, or we lose our country,” Bis said..

How many instances of noncitizen voting?

The Trump administration’s intense focus on noncitizen voting — which also includes a legal effort to force states to turn over voter data to the Department of Justice — contrasts with the extremely rare nature of noncitizen voting, according to past studies and election experts.

The U.S. Census in August identified about 24,000 instances of noncitizen voting in the 2020 election out of roughly 160 million votes cast, or 0.015% of all votes. One study of the 2016 election placed the prevalence of noncitizen voting at 0.0001% of votes cast.

But Homeland Security has suggested large numbers of noncitizens may be registered to vote. In July, the department said it had identified over 250,000 potential noncitizens on the voter rolls in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

On Monday, U.S. Senate Democrats in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin wrote that they couldn’t trust those numbers. For instance, DHS initially floated nearly 16,000 possible noncitizen voters in Nevada. In the end, the agency provided state officials with a list of 185 people that officials said were noncitizens. All turned out to be citizens.

“Federal law already prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections, and every eligible voter across America has the right to cast a ballot — and should be able to do so without fear of being wrongly purged from the voting rolls,” Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said in a statement following the Supreme Court’s decision.

The alleged scale of potential noncitizen voter registration by Homeland Security also doesn’t match the scope of the agency’s law enforcement actions. Earlier in September, Homeland Security Investigations, a DHS agency, reported making 160 recent arrests from 1,600 open voter fraud cases.

When noncitizens do end up on voter rolls, administrative errors are sometimes to blame. In July, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, announced that a software glitch caused about 6,600 noncitizens to become registered to vote and that about 400 had cast ballots. 

And in April, then-Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson, a Republican, wrote in a letter to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that some noncitizens had been registered to vote because of a clerical error despite acknowledging on a voter application that they weren’t U.S. citizens.

“That is why we urge voter registrars to use all available sources to confirm a person’s citizenship status — including SAVE data and other information about the registrant — when they are investigating whether the person is eligible to be a registered voter,” Nelson wrote in an email obtained by Democracy Forward, a pro-democracy legal organization.

Federal officials charged a Utah letter carrier Tuesday with throwing 300 primary ballots in a church parking lot dumpster, an incident that a top U.S. Justice Department official said made the case for stricter regulations of voting.

The prosecution of Damon Matai Seei, of Payson, Utah, showed “voting fraud is real,” acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter said at a press conference at DOJ headquarters in Washington.

The Justice Department gave the arrest an unusually high profile, spotlighting the administration’s efforts to combat voter fraud after the U.S. Supreme Court this month blocked a new U.S. Postal Service rule limiting mail voting from going into effect for this year’s elections.

The regulation was meant to “address the chronically abused mail-in ballot system,” McCotter said. He criticized the trial judge who initially blocked the rule, which would have required special tracking and design features, among other things such as creating a national database of eligible voters.

“Election integrity should not be a political or partisan issue,” McCotter said. “Who could be against properly tracking mail-in ballots? Unfortunately, but entirely predictably, that regulation was blocked by a judge in Massachusetts. … The Trump administration, however, will continue taking aggressive actions to protect our elections.”

Postal Service rule

U.S. District Judge Indiria Talwani’s order blocking the rule is only in effect for the Nov. 3 elections, a provision meant to preserve the status quo because the rule was finalized mere months before the midterms. The merits of the case are still being argued. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Talwani’s decision.

The prosecution of Seei, and the attention the administration sought to give it, undercut a key argument the administration made in the case: The rule included only “modest” technical specifications for a category of mail and should not be interpreted as an election regulation.

The U.S. Constitution grants states the authority to administer elections, with policy oversight from Congress. 

In siding with the Democratic states and voting rights groups who filed suit, Talwani and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit said the rule was clearly an attempt to affect election policy and was not restricted to a modest mail regulation.

Trump and mail-in voting

President Donald Trump has railed against mail-in voting and claimed, without evidence, that it is a major source of election fraud and contributed to his 2020 loss to President Joe Biden.

Since Trump retook office in January 2025, the department has charged 70 immigrants with illegally voting, compared with only 13 in the four years of Biden’s term, McCotter said Tuesday.

“And we intend to bring many more,” he added.

Homeland Security Investigations, a Homeland Security Department agency, has made 160 recent arrests, from 1,600 open voter fraud cases, HSI acting Deputy Executive Associate Director Matthew Millhollin said.

A reporter in the room noted that 70 prosecutions amounted to a bare fraction of the 150 million votes cast in the 2024 election.

McCotter responded that the Utah case involved 300 ballots, and that law enforcement had only scratched the surface of possible incidents. “Thousands more” cases were being investigated, he said.

“The folks on the other side, the opponents of the president, insist this has never happened, that there is no voting fraud,” he said. “And so when we have dozens of cases … I think that discourages and defeats their characterization.”

No partisan motive alleged

Seei, who is no longer a postal worker, intentionally threw out about 300 mail ballots on June 3 that were being mailed to voters in advance of the June 23 primary in Utah, according to charging documents.

In an interview with law enforcement, he indicated he did not have a political motive but said he threw away the mail, which also included advertisements, “because he wanted to ‘lighten his workload’ so he could presumably go home earlier,” prosecutors said.

Melissa Holyoak, the top federal prosecutor for Utah, traveled to Washington, D.C., for Tuesday’s press conference. She noted that 95% of the state’s voters cast their ballots by mail.

Many people in Seei’s delivery area in Eagle Mountain, Utah, complained to the Utah County Clerk that they hadn’t received ballots, Holyoak said. Using county databases, the clerk found that voter participation was “remarkably low” in the area where complaints originated.

“As American citizens, we have certain freedoms and rights,” Holyoak said. “And one of those fundamental rights is the right to vote. But when defendant allegedly tossed the mail-in ballots into a parking lot dumpster, those citizens’ right to vote were also thrown away.”

The federal public defender representing Seei did not immediately return a call seeking comment.

WASHINGTON — Department of Homeland Security officers may have broken state laws carrying out the Trump administration’s orders to find noncitizens voting illegally in federal elections, Democratic senators alleged Monday following a whistleblower complaint.

U.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the whistleblower detailed the department’s “Unlawful Voter Initiative,” in which U.S Citizenship and Immigration Services immigration officers combed through state voter rolls, sometimes pretending to be the voter to access records. 

U.S. citizens were also swept up in the efforts due to faulty data and pressure from top officials to meet a quota of five investigations per hour, or 12 minutes per inquiry, according to the whistleblower’s account. 

“We just got more proof of (President Donald) Trump’s vile schemes to rig our elections,” said Schumer, a New York Democrat. “A DHS whistleblower warns that the department is pulling hundreds, hundreds of federal agents from national security roles, and sending them on a wild goose chase. The goal: to try and prove Trump’s sad, tired and long debunked election conspiracy theories.”

The New York Times was the first to report the existence of the DHS operation.

California Sen. Alex Padilla, the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration that oversees federal elections, said the president “will go to extraordinary lengths to try to interfere with the midterm elections.”

Padilla said the whistleblower came forward last week.  

Padilla and Schumer called for DHS to shut down the operation. The department did not immediately respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment. 

“Donald Trump knows his record has been so bad,” Padilla said. “His only chance at keeping Republican majorities in Congress is to interfere with the elections.”

Noncitizens are not allowed to vote in federal elections, and cases are extremely rare. Some localities have passed laws to allow for noncitizen voting in local elections. 

But the topic is a priority for the president, who has directed DHS to investigate voter rolls for illegal voting by noncitizens. On Monday, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin announced two noncitizens from Kansas and Louisiana illegally voted in federal elections.

“Voter fraud is already a serious problem, but non-citizens voting is even worse,” Mullin said. “Every time a non-citizen casts a ballot, it steals a vote from an American citizen.”