Wisconsin Assembly elections chair says he should get access to noncitizen ID data

Rep. Scott Krug (R-Nekoosa), the chair of the Assembly’s committee on campaigns and elections, says he’s making progress in his effort to find whether or not noncitizens are voting in large numbers in Wisconsin.

In May, Krug said during a joint hearing of both legislative chambers’ elections committees that it would be his “mission” this summer to find a way to get state agencies to share data that would help ensure noncitizens aren’t voting.

The state Department of Transportation (DOT) maintains a database of all the non-U.S. citizens in Wisconsin who are here legally and have obtained driver’s licenses. Separately, the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) maintains the statewide voter registration list.

For years, Republicans have raised the prospect that noncitizen voting is a threat to the U.S. election system. This spring, the Wisconsin Legislature and U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil began working on ways to prevent noncitizen voting — a phenomenon reviews in other states have found to be extremely rare.

At the hearing in May, DOT Deputy Secretary Kristina Boardman said Wisconsin has seen 23 instances in the last decade in which someone illegally requested an ID to be used for voting purposes when they weren’t allowed to vote. Only nine of those people received the documents that would have allowed them to register to vote.

Concern about noncitizen voting has become especially intense since the 2020 presidential election when former President Donald Trump and his supporters began spreading false claims that the election was stolen from Trump due to fraud, including by undocumented immigrants who cast illegal votes.

During the May hearing, Boardman said that federal law prevents the department from sharing its database of 90,000 noncitizens who have driver’s licenses or other forms of ID with WEC.

The federal Driver Privacy Protection Act limits when state departments of transportation can share personal information. State agencies are also often wary about sharing personal identifying information unless it’s explicitly required by statute.

Krug says it should be easy to definitively answer the question of noncitizen voting by comparing the voting and driver’s license databases, telling the Wisconsin Examiner he doesn’t care what the answer is, just that answering it will help improve the state’s elections.

“My whole goal is if there’s something there I want to show it,” he says. “If there’s not something there I want to show it. Some people say it’s not an issue, I always tell people, what does it hurt to take all the data and say if it did happen or didn’t happen? It is equally as valuable to me to disprove something as it is to prove something.”

To make the comparison, Krug says he wants to obtain the data and with the help of his staff, the Legislative Technology Services Bureau and perhaps the Legislative Audit Bureau, compare the lists to find any noncitizens who are registered to vote. He questions why the DOT wouldn’t be able to share its database since it already shares driver’s license and other identification data with the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC). ERIC is a nonprofit organization that helps 24 states and Washington D.C. update their voter lists by tracking when voters die or move to other states.

State governments have no way of immediately knowing when a resident leaves the state. ERIC uses statewide voter registration lists and Department of Motor Vehicle identification data to track that information and inform member states. So if a voter moves from Wisconsin to Illinois, gets a new driver’s license and registers to vote from a new address, ERIC would tell WEC that person is no longer a Wisconsin resident.

Krug says this means the data he’s looking for is already being shared with an outside nonprofit, so he questions why it shouldn’t be shared with an elected official.

“The Wisconsin Department of Transportation feels like it may be problematic to share this info on permanent resident noncitizens with us as the oversight committee,” he says. “If you’re so worried about the privacy concern, why are we able to share it with a nonprofit, ERIC, who does the comparison already? All I’m doing here is, you’re already sharing it, all you need to do is push send one more time.”

But ERIC doesn’t just get access to driver’s license data from each state along with the personal identifying information within those databases. Instead, people’s names, addresses and birth dates are encoded. ERIC receives the encoded information while the actual personal information remains private, under the control of the original state agency.

Experts also say that comparing the two databases might not give Krug a definitive answer because simply matching names isn’t enough. There might be more than one person with the same first and last name in a municipality. Without more information, it’s impossible to determine if they’re legitimate voters or noncitizens who have illegally registered to vote.

DOT did not provide answers to questions about data sharing with Krug by press time. This story will be updated with any response the agency provides.

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