Wisconsin Does Not Have More Votes Than Registered Voters

Disinformation was rife on November 4 2020, including a high-engagement tweet by Mike Coudrey (@MichaelCoudrey) falsely asserting that there were more votes counted in Wisconsin than there were registered voters. It looked like this:

Coudrey said:

BREAKING: Wisconsin has more votes than people who are registered to vote.

Total number of registered voters: 3,129,000

Total number of votes cast: 3,239,920

This is direct evidence of fraud.

We have already mentioned Coudrey, a repeat offender, in prior fact checks; once during a spate of disinformation about Jeffrey Epstein, and once when he was pushing medical disinformation. Since Coudrey’s tweet about “direct evidence of fraud” involving “more votes than people who are registered to vote” in Wisconsin was deleted, the source for the attached content was unclear.

However, a similar tweet (replacing “cast” with “fast”) also circulated (archived):

Unsurprisingly, similar claims proliferated on 4Chan’s /pol/ (archived). Those claims were more focused on overall turnout in Wisconsin, without citing the figures in the tweets.

Coudrey claimed that there were 3,129,000 registered voters in Wisconsin, and that 3,239,920 votes were counted. This was extremely easy to fact-check. Per the state of Wisconsin’s records:

The State of Wisconsin had 3,684,726 active registered voters on November 1, 2020.

On November 3 2020, we saw a claim from Sean Hannity which misled social media users about states with same-day registration — in that case, in Minnesota. As it happens, the state of Wisconsin also allowed for same-day registration:

Wisconsin had counted 3,684,726 active registered voters as of November 1 2020, not 3,129,000. It was safe to assume voters were aware they could register and vote on Election Day, making the number of active registered voters even higher than the 3,684,726 number provided by officials.

Coudrey’s deleted tweet falsely claimed that there were 3,239,920 votes counted in Wisconsin, but only 3,129,000. Although the claim was easily proved false based on Wisconsin’s records (themselves not reflecting same-day registrations), it proliferated alongside baseless claims that it was “direct evidence of fraud.”

Update, 1:03 PM, 11/04/2020: Figures cited in the post — primarily the 3,129,000 figure — may have come from this post on 4Chan’s /pol/ (archived).