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Did 20,000 in Wisconsin with same phone number vote in 2020? [1]

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Date: 2024-05-09 19:44:46+00:00

Wisconsin Watch partners with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. Read our methodology to learn how we check claims.

No.

Records for more than 20,000 people listed with the same phone number in the Wisconsin Elections Commission system are for inactive voters.

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

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[1] Url: https://wisconsinwatch.org/2024/05/wisconsin-election-voters-phone-number-lindell-fact-brief/

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