Thursday, May. 9, 2024
Did 20,000 people in Wisconsin with the same phone number vote in the 2020 presidential election?
Records for more than 20,000 people listed with the same phone number in the Wisconsin Election Commission system are for inactive voters who were given a default number.
Mike Lindell claimed May 7, 2024, on talk radio in Green Bay, Wisconsin, that in the 2020 election, Wisconsin “had 20-some thousand people that voted from the same phone number.”
Lindell, the MyPillow company founder, is prominent in the election conspiracy movement. He has falsely claimed that voting machines were manipulated to steal the 2020 presidential election.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission said in 2021 after similar claims emerged that nearly all the 20,000 records were for voters in Racine who had been inactive for many years.
Prior to the 2006 merging of local voter registration records into the statewide system, some municipalities assigned a default phone number to voters who didn’t list a phone number when registering. A phone number is not required to register.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
Sources
- omny.fm RJS - 5/7/24 - Segment 7 - The Regular Joe Show
- Wisconsin Elections Commission Why are there thousands of voters with the same phone number listed in the statewide voter registration database?
- Reuters Claims about 23,000 Wisconsin voters with the same phone number and 4,000 voters registered on 1/1/1918 missing context
- VERIFY No, there weren’t 23,203 registered voters in Wisconsin with the same phone number during the 2020 election
- Associated Press Posts on Wisconsin voter registration data lack context
About fact briefs
Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by Gigafact contributor publications.
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Wisconsin Watch, the news arm of the nonpartisan, nonprofit Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, increases the quality and quantity of investigative reporting in Wisconsin, while training current and future investigative journalists. Its work fosters an informed citizenry and strengthens democracy.
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