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Madison - Convictions of voter fraud in Wisconsin in recent years have not kept pace with Republican claims of its prevalence in the state.

Each year between 12 and 20 people are convicted of voter fraud in Wisconsin - a state with 3.4 million registered voters, said Reid Magney, a spokesman for the state Government Accountability Board. Typically, those convictions are for felons who voted while on probation or parole before they had regained the right to do so, Magney said.

Put another way, the convictions are of voters who improperly voted on their own, not for any kind of ballot-stuffing or an organized ring committing large-scale fraud, Magney said. Local, state and federal authorities and prosecutors have examined the issue without unearthing widespread fraud here.

But in Wisconsin, a battleground state where elections are sometimes decided by close margins, the debate on voter fraud has remained lively, with Republicans arguing that more needs to be done to safeguard elections and Democrats responding that overzealous efforts disenfranchise voters.

In July, Sen. Mary Lazich (R-New Berlin) asked the accountability board to remove noncitizens from Wisconsin's voter registration system by matching voters' names against those in a federal database. Magney said the agency was carefully studying that request and what it would entail.

Citing concerns of voter fraud, lawmakers and Gov. Scott Walker passed a law last year requiring voters to show photo IDs at the polls, but that law has since been struck down by two Dane County judges as unconstitutional. One of the judges said the law substantially impaired the right to vote guaranteed by the state constitution.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court has been asked by Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen to review those rulings and do so in time for the November presidential election.

The state's highest court has already declined once this year to intervene and overturn rulings by the two circuit court judges at an earlier stage in the cases. The Supreme Court is expected to eventually take these cases, but it is unclear if it will do so before an appeals court has ruled on them, or in time for the November election.

Critics of the law charge that there are no documented cases of significant voter fraud that could be prevented by the measure. Supporters say that the law didn't produce major problems in the one election this spring where it's been used.

Further complicating the issue, two federal lawsuits against the law are on hold while the cases in state court resolve themselves. If the law is reinstated in state court, those two cases would be revived.