Nov
In various places Wednesday, people took to social media to allege that Wisconsin saw more votes cast than people who were registered to vote.
PolitiFact National rated a claim in this vein Pants on Fire.
One tweet claimed that the state recorded 101% voter turnout. Another, which has since been deleted, argued that more than 110,000 extra votes were cast beyond the number of registered voters. That one garnered tens of thousands of retweets within an hour, and made the jump to Facebook, where it has been shared hundreds of times. An Instagram post liked thousands of times laid out the same allegation.
This is impossible — residents who are not registered to vote cannot cast a ballot.
What’s more, Wisconsin is one of 19 states (along with the District of Columbia) that allow same-day voter registration. That means the correct comparison is eligible voters, not registered ones.
The number of people turning out across the state topped 3.2 million, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported — the most votes ever cast in a Wisconsin election, with at least 71% of the state’s voting-age adults casting ballots. (Not quite the highest percentage-wise).
The Wisconsin Elections Commission weighed in on Twitter later in the morning, explaining that registration numbers reported by counties can be off because of same-day voter registration.
“There are never more ballots than registered voters,” the commission tweeted.
