Appeals court orders stay in Wisconsin voter registration case

The legal back-and-forth over 200,000 Wisconsin voters is on hold. 

An appeals court Tuesday issued a stay against the order from an Ozaukee County judge that would have had the identified voters all re-register because of questions about their addresses. 

The stay does not erase the Ozaukee County judge's order. Rather, it pauses the case until the appeals court can decide whether 209,000 people should be removed from the state's voter rolls. 

The order came as the Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC) was meeting to decide how to handle the Ozaukee County judge’s order. 

That order, issued in December, came after a lawsuit from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty. WILL challenged the WEC for not removing voters who have moved. State law requires election managers to act within 30 days of an addresses change. The Election Commission wanted to wait until after the November election to act. 

WILL President Rick Essenberg said on Twitter Tuesday that he still expects the Election Commission to follow that law. 

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"What is true yesterday is true today. The Wisconsin Elections Commission isn’t following state law and we look forward to making that case in the Court of Appeals," Essenberg said. 

The appeals court also put a hold on the contempt fines that election commissioners were facing. The Ozaukee County judge fined the Commission $50 a day, and fined its three Democratic members $250 a day until they complied with his original order.