“Fraud Waiting to Happen”

 

On January 28 Wisconsin voters scored a big win in the epic battle for verifiability of our election results.  “Verifiable” means every vote cast can be tied to the name of an eligible voter. President Trump signaled he has Wisconsin in his sights in the fight for election integrity with a tweet on Truth Social about the more than 4 million ineligible voters who are maintained by the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) on the Registered Voter List.  We have every reason to be optimistic Trump is not going to let this issue go; and having him as an ally in the fight is as good as it gets.

 

It took just hours for Molly Beck, a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and Alexander Shur, reporting for Wisconsin Watch, a “news organization” based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to produce articles in defense of Wisconsin’s election system that were filled with lies and inaccuracies. Ann Jacobs, the Democratic Chair of the WEC, was a source. Jacobs is at the heart of Wisconsin’s election unverifiability. Beck’s and Shur’s blatant political activism have destroyed any semblance of journalistic integrity in their writing; it compels me to shred their lies with the truth and contribute what I can to hastening their descent into total irrelevance.

 

Molly Beck and Alexander Shur are Miserable Excuses for Journalists

Beck and Shur work hard to discredit any concerns about the susceptibility of Wisconsin’s election system to cheating.  Beck titled her piece, “Trump re ups myth about Wisconsin voter numbers. Here are the Facts” and Shur titled his, “No, Mr. President. Wisconsin’s voter roll figures aren’t a sign of ‘fraud waiting to happen’.” 

 

Excerpts from what they presented to their readers are listed below.  The truth follows.

 

Beck:

“The claims shared by Trump allege the state has more than 7 million registered voters, which is false”.

“The state of Wisconsin had 3.6 million active registered voters as of January 1…” “The state has 4.6 million inactive voters…”.

 

Shur:

“A misleading claim that Wisconsin has more registered voters than people eligible to vote is gaining traction on social media…”

“It’s just the latest in a long-running series of claims that misinterpret basic data about voter rolls to create alarm about the risk of voter fraud”.

“…his claim conflates two datasets in Wisconsin’s voter registration system: the Wisconsin voter list and active registered voters”.

“…voter fraud is extremely rare”.

“As of July 2025, the state had about 8.3 million names on its list…of them only 3.7 million were active registered voters. The remaining roughly 4.6 million are inactive voters”.

“Those individuals haven’t been removed from the voter list but…they cannot vote unless they re-register”.

 

 

Fact: Wisconsin’s Registered Voter List Contains the Names of More than 4 million Ineligible Voters

Beck says it is a false claim that Wisconsin has more than 7 million registered voters on its Registered Voter List. This is a lie. The total number is actually more than 8.2 million registered voters on the List.  On the WEC’s website called Badger Voters, the WEC calls the site “a simple and automated way for the public to request voter data lists”. They describe the available data as “voter names, addresses and any contact information they provided with their registration”.  Every name on this list is a person who at one time registered to vote. The WEC has deliberately created confusion about its indefensible decision to keep millions of names on the list, who have become ineligible to vote for any reason, by labeling them “inactive” and labeling eligible voters “active”, terms that do not appear anywhere in Wisconsin election laws.  As Beck and Shur both correctly reported, the “inactive” voters would have to re-register if they became eligible and wanted to vote in the future.  Critically thinking citizens across the state must ask themselves, “What then could possibly be the reason for such strenuous resistance to removing voters when they become ineligible and maintaining only currently eligible voters on the list?”  Why is this important?  Keep reading.

 

Cybercrime is the Real and Growing Threat

Those who are fighting to keep ineligible voters on Wisconsin’s Voter List are trying to convince the citizens that all this fuss is about an occasional voter here and there who may try to vote using an ineligible name. Beck describes it as, “State election officials keep inactive names on hand to be able to catch people trying to register to vote under a dead person’s name, for example, or to flag a person registering in two different states”. Election officials are trying to sell this as a security measure. They are trying to dupe the citizens into believing the entire matter is small and inconsequential.

 

The real threat is a massive breach of a “secure” database by sophisticated cybercriminals.

It wasn’t long ago that most important business was conducted on paper and in-person.  We now live in an electronic world where most things are done over the internet using computer networks.  “Cyber” is the term to describe this paperless world. Cybersecurity is a booming new industry, made necessary because cybercrime has rapidly become the method of choice for stealing things of value. Nothing would be more valuable to steal than an election.

 

Extensive information about how cybercriminals work is on the internet and easily accessible to any journalist who is seriously interested in truth. Criminals are combining advanced persistent threats (APTs) with cutting edge artificial intelligence (AI) to launch complex attacks that bypass modern security systems.  Cybersecurity experts define APTs as sneak, long-term cyberattacks where skilled threat actors break into a network, remain hidden for extended periods (months/years), and systematically steal data, spy, or disrupt operations, often targeting high-value entities like governments or corporations.  

 

A criminal technique called SQL injection is the leading cause of data breaches. A destructive code is injected into websites to manipulate or delete database content.  (converting “inactive” voter names to “active” voter names to create fraudulent ballots, for example. This would be child’s play to highly skilled criminals who are handed a reservoir of millions of voter names.)  Massive fraud in our elections (defined in this case as the less than 1% of the vote it will typically take to steal a statewide election) will be sophisticated and undetectable by the current means of re-checking election results (recounts, court decisions) and makes claims that “voter fraud is extremely rare” both dishonest and unverifiable.

 

Cybercrime is a huge and growing problem tracked and addressed by the FBI and other agencies depending on the nature of the crime.  Over the past few years, the US recorded more than 3,000 data breaches each year impacting finance, healthcare, retail and other sectors and exposing the personal records of more than 353 million individuals.

 

 In Wisconsin, the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer protection (DATCP) publishes significant data breaches that are reported to them. In 2025, 6 companies reported breaches that affected more than 10 million people with thefts that included names, addresses, social security numbers, financial account information and dates of birth.  Business sectors included education, insurance, health care, law, and even the Green Bay Packers.

 

Truthful Reporting

The most credible and comprehensive investigative reporting on the unverifiability of Wisconsin elections has been done over the past 2 years by John Ellis, whose integrity is beyond reproach. He has reported regularly in On Wisconsin Outdoors, a bi-monthly statewide publication, and has also directly distributed his work to elected officials, business leaders, patriot groups, media personalities and concerned Wisconsin citizens throughout the state. The result has been a growing chorus of Wisconsin voters demanding change.  You never have, and never will, hear a single elected official, member of the Wisconsin Elections Commission or member of the media refute the facts Ellis is reporting.  They cannot.  He has exposed the truth.

 

Ellis has proposed a 7-step plan to make Wisconsin elections verifiable. He has disseminated his plan widely and stressed that it is not a finished product, but rather intended to ignite discussion and the spirited debate of ideas fundamental to a free society.

 

The Plan:

1. The Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) will be dismantled. The WEC is unaccountable to voters, facilitates unverifiable elections, and provides cover for the state legislators who have refused to correct Wisconsin’s serious election problems. Responsibility for our elections will be returned to those legislators, where Wisconsin’s voters can hold them accountable.

 

2. Wisconsin will discontinue membership in the Electronic Voting Information Center (ERIC). ERIC is a multistate agreement, promoted as helping member states improve the accuracy of their voter rolls. But Wisconsin’s membership in ERIC has contributed to the state voter registration list expanding to nearly twice the size of Wisconsin’s voting aged population. The accuracy of Wisconsin’s voter registration list will be ensured by maintaining it solely in-state as described in step 3.

 

3. The lists of eligible voters used for Wisconsin’s elections will be maintained locally, within each municipality, by the clerks. Those lists will be available for inspection by citizens free of charge and used by the state legislators to build and maintain the official list of registered voters as required by law. The cumulative total of eligible voters maintained by local municipalities will equal the number of eligible voters on the legislators’ list. This will make it impossible for unverifiable illegal ballots to be cast, because every vote will be tied to a locally verifiable, eligible voter.

Currently, the WEC maintains a voter registration list with more than 8.2 million names in a state with only 4.6 million voting aged citizens. That list includes more than 4 million ineligible names. To receive a copy of the list costs $12,500.00. The size and cost of the list make it easy for unverifiable fraudulent ballots to be cast and impossible to inspect.

    

4. The voter IDs used when registering to vote will be tied to a verifiable, eligible Wisconsin voter. There are currently more than 250,000 people living legally in Wisconsin who are ineligible to vote, but who have been issued Driver’s Licenses that are identical to those of Wisconsin residents who are eligible to vote. Because a Driver’s License is all you need to register in Wisconsin, the ineligible people with the licenses can easily vote. To correct this, all Wisconsin Driver’s Licenses issued to people who are here legally but ineligible to vote will be clearly marked “Not for Voting”.

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5. Paper ballots will be used, filled out manually, and counted locally using simple counters that cannot be connected to the internet. Those ballots will be kept for recounts, and to cross check with the local lists of eligible voters. After the polls close each clerk will report the results from their municipality directly to the legislators, eliminating central count. This will make any discrepancies in the vote count after elections easily found and verified locally.

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6. Absentee Voting will be limited to those who are unable to make it to the polls on Election Day, and all voting by mail will end. According to a report that was released in September of 2005 by the Commission on Federal Election Reform, Co-Chaired by Democrat Jimmy Carter and Republican James Baker, voting by mail increases the risk of fraud and absentee or “convenience voting” detracts from the collective expression of citizenship that takes place on Election Day.

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7. The 28-day residency rule, which allows out-of-state students to vote in Wisconsin’s elections, will end. Out-of-state students have no vested interest in Wisconsin and a responsibility to vote in their home states. In addition, the University of Wisconsin system will be required to verify the citizenship of students before issuing a voting ID. Currently there is no requirement, even though there are more than 8000 non-citizen students, from 100 countries, at UW Madison alone.

 

All Eyes on Tom Tiffany

President Trump cleared the field for Tom Tiffany with his endorsement in Wisconsin’s gubernatorial race. Tiffany is now the only Republican candidate. Republican state legislators have shown themselves to be useless in the fight for election verifiability. We collectively turn now to Tom Tiffany, and whoever emerges as Republican candidates for Lieutenant Governor, with the expectation that they make this a top priority and communicate clearly, with appropriate specificity, what they are going to do to make Wisconsin elections verifiable.

 

It is going to be up to the voters to secure verifiable elections for Wisconsin. We must keep the pressure on Tiffany and other Republican candidates to resolve this problem and remain undeterred by those who are trying to tell us our election system is just fine the way it is.  We will use the truth as a weapon against their lies because yes, in fact, the Wisconsin election system is a fraud waiting to happen. It most likely already has.