The Wisconsin Elections Commission wasn’t planning on removing all of the 232,579 names outright. It had intended to wait six elections, the last one being scheduled for April 2021.

If anyone on the list didn’t vote in any of those six elections, then their names would actually be removed. If they did show up to vote in any of those elections, then their name would be fully reactivated in the voter roll — no harm, no foul.

At the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018, when the WEC did a similar purge for the first time using ERIC, more than 6,000 voters were removed statewide who later turned up to vote, surprised to find out they were no longer registered since they never actually changed their address, Magney said.

“People started showing up on polling places in February (2018) who hadn’t moved,” Magney recalled. “We immediately realized the problem … We realized there were some inherent problems with the data.”

The problem was that a number of people who had ended up on the DMV and USPS lists had not actually moved. That’s why this time around the WEC was going to wait to remove this next round of names until after six elections have passed.