The chairman of the Wisconsin Elections Commission responded to a Department of Justice warning letter this week by affirming that noncitizens cannot legally vote in the state, then promptly disclaimed any responsibility for making sure they don't. Don Millis, who leads the WEC, told federal officials in writing that his commission lacks authority to remove ineligible voters from Wisconsin's Statewide Voter Registration List and has no role in accepting ballots at polling places.
The exchange captures a pattern that has frustrated election-integrity advocates for years: the people who run the system keep insisting that someone else is in charge of keeping it clean.
The DOJ letter, sent to all 50 states, warned that election managers who "knowingly" retain noncitizens on voter lists or help noncitizens cast ballots "could be subject to criminal liability," Just the News reported. The department also characterized intentional vote dilution as a potential federal conspiracy charge, citing a statute that makes it unlawful for two or more people to conspire to injure any person's constitutional rights.
Millis's reply stopped well short of promising full cooperation with the Trump Administration. Instead, the WEC chairman pointed to Wisconsin's legal framework, which places the burden of checking IDs and policing eligibility on roughly 1,850 municipal clerks scattered across the state.
In his letter to the DOJ, Millis wrote:
"Other than in very limited circumstances, WEC has no authority to remove voters from Wisconsin's Statewide Voter Registration List of active voters. Nevertheless, WEC is committed to assisting municipal clerks with identifying possible ineligible voters so that clerks can determine whether those voters should be removed from Wisconsin's Statewide Voter Registration List of active voters."
Read that again. The statewide elections commission, the body that maintains the master voter list, says it cannot remove names from that list. It can only "assist" the local clerks who can. And it offered no specifics about what that assistance looks like, how often it happens, or what tools clerks have to verify citizenship status.
Wisconsin voters tried to settle this question at the ballot box. In 2024, they approved a constitutional amendment officially banning noncitizens from voting in the state. But a ban on paper means nothing without a mechanism for enforcement. And Millis's letter suggests the enforcement mechanism is diffused across hundreds of small-town clerk offices with no centralized accountability.
The DOJ's warning to all 50 states made the stakes explicit. The department encouraged every state to "contact us to discuss what steps your state should take to maintain clean voter lists as required by law." That language was measured, but the underlying message was not subtle: get your house in order, or face potential prosecution.
The WEC's claim that it has limited authority looks even more troubling in light of a separate finding by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. WILL uncovered more than 41,000 voter registrations in Wisconsin that do not match Department of Transportation records, nearly double the number from 2020, the Washington Examiner reported. The discrepancies include 11,174 registrations without a driver's license number and 24,733 cases where a name does not fully match state DOT records.
WILL's deputy counsel, Lucas Vebber, was careful to note that the group is "not in any way saying that these 40,000 votes were fraudulent votes. We don't know that." But he added: "What are they doing to ensure the integrity of our voter registration list? That's a really good question for WEC."
It is a good question. And the WEC's answer to the DOJ suggests the commission would rather redirect it to someone else.
A Waukesha County judge has already weighed in on the matter. As AP News reported, Judge Michael Maxwell ruled that the Wisconsin Elections Commission "is failing in the most basic task of ensuring that only lawful voters make it to the voter roll from where lawful votes are cast." He ordered the commission to verify the citizenship of all 3.6 million registered voters. Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, representing the WEC, sought to pause the order, arguing it would "require a massive overhaul of Wisconsin's voter registration system." A stay was placed on the ruling pending further proceedings.
So a judge says the system is failing. The state's own watchdog group finds tens of thousands of mismatched records. And the commission's response to the federal government is: we don't have the authority.
Wisconsin's framework has another gap that Millis's letter did not address. State law may allow immigrants and other temporary visitors to use non-citizen IDs as voter identification. Those IDs do not indicate non-citizen status or flag the holder as ineligible to vote. In other words, a municipal clerk checking IDs at the polls could examine a lawful piece of identification and have no way of knowing the person presenting it is not a citizen.
That gap matters. If the only line of defense is a clerk checking IDs, and the IDs themselves don't distinguish citizens from noncitizens, the system is built to miss the very problem it claims to prevent.
A federal judge recently rejected Democrats' bid to block Trump-era voter citizenship checks, signaling that courts are increasingly willing to let verification efforts proceed. But Wisconsin's state-level leadership appears content to treat the existing framework, with its known blind spots, as adequate.
The one documented case of noncitizen voting in Wisconsin that a recent review identified involved a single ballot cast in Chippewa Falls in 2016. Defenders of the current system point to that lone case as evidence that the problem is negligible. But one confirmed case found through a review of unknown scope and methodology does not prove the system catches noncitizen voters. It may prove the opposite, that the system barely looks.
Wisconsin is not the only state where noncitizens have turned up on voter rolls. In Michigan, the House Oversight Committee launched a formal investigation after 239 noncitizens were found in Macomb County's jury pool over a four-month period. Of those, 14 had been registered to vote at some point, and at least one appeared to have voted multiple times, Fox News reported. Macomb County Clerk Anthony Forlini noted that one noncitizen "appears to have voted several times, all of which could result in felony charges."
In New Jersey, a Slovakian national was accused by DHS of illegally voting in the 2022 midterm elections before even applying for U.S. citizenship, Breitbart reported.
These cases share a common thread: they were discovered almost by accident, through jury-pool cross-referencing, watchdog audits, or immigration proceedings. None were caught by the election systems themselves. The question is not whether noncitizen voting happens. It does. The question is whether state election officials are serious about finding it.
The broader debate over voter ID requirements has divided even Republicans in Congress, but the principle at stake is not complicated. Citizens vote. Noncitizens don't. And the systems charged with enforcing that distinction should be designed to actually work.
The DOJ's letter puts the question squarely to state officials: if noncitizens remain on your voter rolls, who bears responsibility? Millis's answer, not us, ask the municipal clerks, may be legally accurate under Wisconsin's current statutory framework. But it is not a serious answer to a serious problem.
A statewide elections commission that maintains the master voter list but claims it cannot clean that list is a commission designed for plausible deniability, not election integrity. The municipal clerks, meanwhile, are left holding the bag, tasked with catching ineligible voters using IDs that don't flag ineligibility, with no centralized system backing them up.
Wisconsin voters already spoke on this issue when they passed the 2024 constitutional amendment. They said noncitizens should not vote. The WEC's job is to make that real, not to write letters explaining why it can't.
Elsewhere, courts have struck down state citizenship-proof requirements, making the enforcement landscape even more uncertain. But uncertainty is not an excuse for inaction. If the current legal framework genuinely prevents the WEC from removing ineligible voters, then the framework needs to change, and the people running the commission should be the first ones saying so.
When the federal government asks who is keeping noncitizens off the voter rolls, "not me" is not an answer. It's an indictment.
