If Corporate Giants Get Hacked, Why Won’t Wisconsin’s Election Leaders Even Check the Voter Rolls?

Election Leaders Refuse to Verify Voter Rolls

For years, Americans were told our election infrastructure was secure. Electronic voting machines, ballot-counting systems, and voter registration databases were supposedly locked down tight. That narrative has now collapsed under the weight of previously classified U.S. Intelligence Community assessments spanning January 2020 to June 2026.

These documents, released by the President, confirm what many suspected: U.S. adversaries, including Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, and non-state actors, possess the capability to compromise American election infrastructure. Centralized repositories such as voter registration databases, electronic poll books, and official election websites are judged most vulnerable. The assessments warn that adversaries could use access to these systems to disrupt election processes. One particularly chilling disclosure details a CIA-obtained plot by Venezuela’s Maduro regime to digitally alter vote totals in ways that would evade even thorough audits.

According to declassified intelligence materials released by the White House in mid-July 2026, China’s largest-known acquisition of American election data involved the illicit collection of approximately 220 million U.S. voter files over several years beginning in the 2020 cycle. These files included names, addresses, phone numbers, party preferences, and other sensitive information. The materials indicate that China assigned a dedicated data-exploitation unit to the project and that U.S. intelligence agencies learned of the compromise of tens of millions of records across 18 states as early as 2020, yet the information was allegedly suppressed and downplayed.

Ann Jacobs, Wisconsin Elections Commissioner and former Chair, stated that China purchased the Wisconsin voter rolls, and is more concerned about people who bet on elections being barred from voting than she is about China acquiring our voter rolls, whether they bought them or stole them, and she refuses to take meaningful action to ensure only eligible citizens are actually voting.

These are not abstract threats. Major American corporations, companies that invest hundreds of millions or billions annually in cybersecurity, routinely suffer devastating breaches. If well-funded private-sector giants with elite security teams and vast resources can be compromised, what does that say about Wisconsin’s election systems? The state’s Division of Enterprise Technology and local election offices operate on budgets that are a tiny fraction of what Fortune 500 companies spend. Yet some Wisconsin Elections Commission leaders continue to treat serious concerns about system vulnerability as fringe theories.

In fact, such an incident has occurred in Wisconsin, and the vulnerabilities in Wisconsin’s election infrastructure are not limited to the WisVote voter registration database. In late November 2023, the state’s Campaign Finance Information System (CFIS), managed by the Wisconsin Ethics Commission, was compromised when unauthorized actors exploited a “backdoor” into the 15-year-old website server. According to contemporaneous accounts from commission staff, the intruders used the server to stream videos for several days before the Division of Enterprise Technology shut the system down. While officials maintained that the underlying campaign-finance database itself was not accessed, the incident required outside (including national-level) assistance, left the public-facing system offline for roughly a week over the Thanksgiving holiday, and was never fully explained on the record by Ethics Commission leadership. This episode serves as evidence that state agencies handling sensitive election-related data have failed to provide timely notification of security breaches, raising the same fundamental questions of transparency, contractor oversight, and systemic risk that surround access to WisVote itself.

The MacIver Institute has rightly called for immediate action to strengthen election integrity. Our press release underscores a simple truth: American citizens, and only US citizens, should decide American elections. The proposed SAVE America Act would require valid photo ID for voter registration in federal elections, proof of citizenship, and sensible limits on mail-in ballots (except for illness, disability, military service, or travel). It would also direct states to remove non-citizens from the rolls.

A Department of Homeland Security review has already identified approximately 278,000 non-citizens registered to vote in federal elections. Because several Democrat-led states refused to share their voter files, the true number is almost certainly higher. In Wisconsin, where self-attestation remains the primary citizenship check, the refusal to conduct systematic data matching is indefensible.

This brings us to a pointed question for Wisconsin Elections Commission Chair Don Millis and Commissioner Ann Jacobs: Why won’t you at least look? Why resist thorough cross-checks of Wisconsin’s voter rolls against DMV, DOT, and other state databases that contain citizenship indicators? Why downplay or dismiss the possibility that our systems, like those of major corporations, could be vulnerable?

The President’s disclosures also include buried evidence of large-scale voter registration fraud, such as the 2020 Michigan case involving a Democrat get-out-the-vote operation in Muskegon. Canvassers allegedly signed forms in other people’s names, submitted fake registrations, and received gift cards based on volume. FBI agents believed crimes occurred, yet the matter was slow walked for years.

Wisconsin cannot afford complacency. Our state has strong paper-trail requirements and post-election audits, but those safeguards are only as good as the integrity of the underlying registration lists and the security of the systems that maintain them. When foreign adversaries hold hundreds of millions of American voter files and intelligence assessments confirm machines and databases are exposed, refusing even basic citizenship verification is not prudence; it is negligence.

As we previously reported, “…one illegal vote cancels out the voice of one legal voter. Multiply that by dozens or hundreds across close races and you’ve undermined the entire system. Wisconsin voters understood this concept when they overwhelmingly passed a constitutional amendment in 2024 explicitly banning noncitizen voting.” MacIver will continue to state that the law must be enforced by our election officials.

The SAVE America Act is common-sense reform. Requiring ID and proof of citizenship is standard practice in countries from India and Brazil to Germany and Canada. Limiting no-excuse mass mail-in voting is the norm in Denmark and Sweden. Late-arriving ballots do not count elsewhere. America should not lag.

Don Millis, Ann Jacobs, and the entire Wisconsin Elections Commission have a duty to protect the franchise for eligible citizens. That duty begins with acknowledging the documented vulnerabilities, examining the rolls for non-citizens, and supporting practical reforms that restore public confidence. Anything less fails the people of Wisconsin and the principle that only US citizens should decide American elections.