NEW DOCUMENTS: Records we obtained through #FOIA show members of the supposedly non-partisan Wisconsin Elections Commission and state legislators coordinating on voter purge efforts.

This adds to our concerns about ongoing voter-suppression efforts. https://www.americanoversight.org/in-the-documents-partisan-communications-between-wisconsin-elections-commission-members-and-state-lawmakers

In a December ’19 email, WEC Commissioner Dean Knudson recommended that Assembly Speaker Robin Vos introduce legislation that would strengthen the WEC’s authority to purge voters & would weaken local clerks’ power to make decisions about individuals’ voting status.

“Dean Knudson is there because Republicans trust him to toe their party line,” said Mike Browne, deputy director of @onewisconsinnow.

“And that is exactly what he’s doing — advocating for more voter roll purges and pushing an alleged ethical violation by a Democratic Assembly candidate to the attention of the Republicans who run their campaigns.”

There’s more. Emails & texts from the office of Wisconsin Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald reveal that WEC Commissioner Robert Spindell shared recommendations with Fitzgerald related to the WEC’s operations.

While they addressed administrative issues, these communications as well as those from Knudson point to potential coordination between the WEC and state legislators. This is not surprising, but it is concerning given the WEC’s purposefully bipartisan split.

Additionally, records we obtained showed some discrepancies. We made nearly identical records requests to Vos’ and Fitzgerald’s offices seeking communications between their offices and representatives of the law firm that had brought the state’s voter-purge complaint to court.

Speaker Vos’s office responded with 239 pages of emails from June 2019 to Jan. 2020. Fitzgerald’s office produced only 3 pages, raising concerns about whether Fitzgerald’s office was entirely forthcoming.

Wisconsin’s conservative legislators seem intent on restricting voting access. American Oversight will continue to investigate obstacles that impedes the vote, in Wisconsin and elsewhere.