Does Wisconsin have 7 million registered voters but only 4 million adults? No, that's not true: The Wisconsin voter list includes both active and inactive records, and the total was more than 7 million in 2022, when the claim was made. As of Nov. 6, 2026, the state had more than 3.67 million active registered voters and nearly 4.86 million inactive records, for a total of 8.53 million records. Inactive voters must reregister before they can vote.
The claim appeared in a post and video (archived here) by the @77HERCULES77 account on X on Nov. 5, 2026. It read:
Wisconsin!
Mass Voter Fraud !
7 MILLION REGISTERED VOTERS...
The Problem ???
Only 4 MILLION VOTER AGED CITIZENS....
IN THE ENTIRE STATE !!!
This is what a screenshot of the video in the post looked like at the time of publication:
(Image source: post by @77HERCULES77 on X.)
The video is embedded below:
Wisconsin! Mass Voter Fraud ! 7 MILLION REGISTERED VOTERS... The Problem ??? Only 4 MILLION VOTER AGED CITIZENS.... IN THE ENTIRE STATE !!! https://t.co/2ZgJeXfHmT
-- 🇺🇸🇺🇸777DEAN777🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@77HERCULES77) November 5, 2026
The video is from a Wisconsin Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections public hearing held on Feb. 9, 2022. The speaker is Peter Bernegger, a convicted felon (archived here) who has spent years challenging Wisconsin election officials and accusing them of election fraud without evidence.
The following is a transcript of the 61-second video:
We, our group of citizens, inherently don't trust our election systems to begin with because this is the WEC [Wisconsin Elections Commission] website called Badger Voters, and you can see that the total count of registrants on here is 7.1 million registrants. It gets to the problem that we only have 4 million adults in the state of Wisconsin.
So we're approaching -- and the 7.13 million number on the voter rolls -- that grows almost daily. It never ends. It never... rarely goes down. It dropped slightly when they send out the four-year postcards, and then it shot right back up, and it's the highest... that I've ever seen it. Okay?
It's even worse than this because there's... 4 million adults in Wisconsin; not all of them register, not all of them vote. We're really down around about 3.6 million, 3.7 million.
The WEC website (archived here) shows the state had 3,634,846 active registered voters on Nov. 1, 2026.
In a Nov. 6, 2026, email, WEC directed Lead Stories to another section of its website (archived here) that addresses the long-running claim about why Wisconsin's voter rolls contain millions more records than the number of active registered voters. It is from 2024 and reads:
Recently, there have been false claims alleging that Wisconsin has 8 million registered voters, far more than Wisconsin's estimated voting age population in 2024 of around 4.7 million...
Only active registered voters appear on the poll book and are eligible to receive a ballot, either in-person or by absentee ballot...
In addition to the active registered list, there is an inactive list with about 4.3 million records. People are made inactive when they die, move and register in another state, are convicted of a felony, are adjudicated incompetent to vote, or are made inactive through statutory voter list maintenance processes (aka "purging"). If you are on the list as inactive, that means you are not eligible to vote unless you reregister to vote, which includes providing a proof-of-residence document that establishes where you live in Wisconsin (and where you vote).
Wisconsin does not delete voter records. This means the total number of people on the inactive list will continue to grow over time, as additional voter records are created and deactivated through people's lifespans.
The retention of historical data helps to safeguard against abuse of the system. If inactive records were destroyed, the State of Wisconsin would have no voting history. There would be no registration history, no participation history, and most importantly, no history of why a record became inactive. The voter registration database is the means for election officials to track deaths; to track felons; and to otherwise track any reason for ineligibility. If ineligible records are destroyed, election officials would lose their only mechanism to verify these conditions.
Through the WEC's Badger Voters website, Lead Stories ran estimates of active (archived here) and inactive voters (archived here) on Nov. 6, 2026, five days after the Nov. 1, 2026, estimate. The numbers appear below:
- Active: 3,673,431
- Inactive: 4,858,155
- Total: 8,531,586
Other fact checks
This claim was also investigated by FactCheck.org.
