Prior to 2005, voter registration in municipalities with less than 5,000 individuals was not required in Wisconsin. In more populous municipalities, election officials tracked their own voter registration information through various databases and spreadsheets.
The Help America Vote Act of 2002 required the state to maintain a database of all voters, a project which was implemented a few years later.
When a municipality’s system didn’t track a voter’s date of birth or initial date of registration, a default date was entered into the statewide system: 1/1/1900 for date of birth and 1/1/1918 for date of registration.
"Default dates of birth and voter registration dates in the WisVote database is not a newly discovered issue or an indication of voter fraud," the state wrote in 2020. The older dates are a result of the state migrating over hundreds of municipal records into a state system.
Since 2006, many of these default dates have gone away, as voters move or update their names. The voter’s former record with the default dates would then be merged with the new record with updated information.
As of the fall of 2021,
there were still about 3,700 active voter records that contain default information for date of birth and about 120,000 records exist in the system with a default date of voter registration.
The practice of using a default date in a registration database when a voter’s record lacks the information has also been used in Ohio and North Carolina.
Hecker told PolitiFact in an email that "I never called this issue fraud. Voter roll anomalies often appear to be due to laziness — lack of voter roll maintenance. Lack of maintenance can open the door for fraud. That's why this matters."
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2022/jan/14/facebook-posts/false-claim-100...