Wisconsin Court Seen Unlikely to Rule on Voter Purge by Nov. 3

(Bloomberg) -- The Wisconsin Supreme Court probably won’t decide before Election Day whether the swing state must purge more than 200,000 names from voter rolls, according to Gillian Drummond, a spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Justice Department.

On Tuesday, the state’s top court heard oral arguments in a lawsuit by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty seeking to overturn a decision last year by the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which delayed removing voters who might have moved or didn’t respond within two years to notices asking if they were still living at their registered address.

Lawyers with the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The group won its initial suit when a trial judge ordered the Wisconsin elections commission to purge the voters who hadn’t responded to its inquiries whether they had moved. But an appeals court overturned that decision.

The state Justice Department has argued that under Wisconsin’s election law, local entities, not the elections commission, must determine whether a particular voter has moved within or outside of a municipality for voting purposes. That means only local entities are empowered to deactivate a voter’s registration, according to the state.

While President Donald Trump won Wisconsin in 2016 by 1 percentage point over Hilary Clinton, this year’s Democratic challenger Joe Biden holds a 10-point edge over Trump in Wisconsin, 54% to 44%, according to a recent NBC News/Marist poll. The election is Nov. 3.

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