claim: “The Wisconsin voter roll has over 120,000 active voters who have been registered to vote for over 100 years.”
evidence: Wisconsin municipalities kept their own registration records — and the smallest municipalities weren’t required to keep records at all — until a 2002 federal law required a statewide database and a standard format. When a municipality’s system didn’t track a voter’s date of birth or initial date of registration, a default date was entered into the statewide system: 1/1/1900 for date of birth and 1/1/1918 for date of registration. Such placeholders for missing information have been used by other states as well. As of the fall of 2021 in Wisconsin, there were still about 3,700 active voter records that contain default information for date of birth and about 120,000 records exist in the system with a default date of voter registration.