Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 24. Sunrise is 7:10 and sunset is 5:06 for 9 hours 56 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 97.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1865, the House of Representatives passes the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, abolishing slavery, and submits it to the states for ratification. (The Senate had previously passed the amendment on April 8, 1864.)
There are elections ahead in 2026, and if there’s an election ahead, then there’s an opportunity for conspiracy theorists to spread false claims about those elections. Convicted federal felon Peter Bernegger (for fraud, fittingly) is back with new lies about Wisconsin’s voter rolls:
A misleading claim that Wisconsin has more registered voters than people eligible to vote is gaining traction on social media, including in posts shared this week by President Donald Trump.
[…]The posts circulating this week cite a video asserting that Wisconsin’s voter rolls contain more than 7 million names — far more than the state’s voting age population — and are overlaid with text reading, “This Is Not a Glitch — This Is Election Fraud Waiting To Happen.”
The video features Peter Bernegger, an entrepreneur who has been convicted of mail fraud and bank fraud. Bernegger has repeatedly promoted false theories about the 2020 election in Wisconsin legislative hearings and repeatedly filed unsuccessful lawsuits against election officials in search of proof for his claims.
But his claim conflates two datasets in Wisconsin’s voter registration system: the Wisconsin voter list and active registered voters.
[…]As of July 2025, the state had about 8.3 million names on its list — in line with the number Bernegger cites. But of them, only 3.7 million were active registered voters. The remaining roughly 4.6 million are inactive voters. Inactive records include people who previously registered to vote but later moved out of state, died, lost eligibility because of a felony conviction, or were ruled incompetent to vote by a court. Those individuals haven’t been removed from the voter list, but because of their inactive status, they cannot vote unless they re-register, which requires proof of residency and a photo ID.
(Emphasis added.) See Alexander Shur, No, Mr. President. Wisconsin’s voter roll figures aren’t a sign of ‘fraud waiting to happen’ (‘People on Wisconsin’s inactive list aren’t eligible to vote, but their records stay on file indefinitely — a practice that actually helps reduce the likelihood of fraud, election officials say’), Wisconsin Watch, January 30, 2026.
A successful conspiracy theory requires a suspicious claim (why are the voter rolls so big?) but deceptively conceals a sensible explanation (some of those names are marked as inactive and cannot vote). Bernegger is not a federal felon because he tried to steal a loaf of bread — he’s a federal felon because he’s a defrauding liar.
Some men stay in the same lane their entire lives.