Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes says he will go to jail before he turns over voter data to the Department of Justice. And now, the DOJ is suing him for it.
Fontes’ response has been abrupt. He posted a video on social media this week directed at the DOJ civil rights attorney, Jesus Osete.
“We will see you, apparently, in court,” Fontes said. “And since you’ve chosen to use Twitter here as the means of communication, we will do that. But since you’re not reading the letters and the refusals that we’ve already sent you, I will say it to you directly, Mr. Jesus Osete at the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. Again, sir, pound sand.”
The DOJ is trying to get what looks like all 50 states to turn over their voter rolls — the government says to make sure federal voting laws are being followed. But according to Eileen O'Connor, senior counsel in the voting rights group at the Brennan Center for Justice, it’s part of a concerted strategy by the Trump administration to undermine the next election.
The Show spoke with her more about the DOJ’s efforts and just what the federal government is trying to get.
Full conversation
EILEEN O’CONNOR: The key here is that what the government is asking for is not only names, addresses, which are included in the publicly available versions of voter registration lists, but they’re also asking for driver’s license numbers and Social Security numbers, which are not publicly available.
GILGER: OK, so this is more information than the government already has about voters. I think a lot of people might assume, like, doesn’t the government already know who I am?
O’CONNOR: So key distinction here between the federal government and the state government. State governments run elections. They’re the ones who register voters. So they collect the information from voters, which includes driver’s license or last four of Social Security number. The federal government does not maintain a list of voters, does not have this information, and instead, here they’re asking for all of the information that the state has in its voter registration list. So names, addresses, full date of birth, Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers.
GILGER: OK. And that you say is unprecedented. Like, the DOJ might request some information about voting systems from states at some point, but never like this.
O’CONNOR: That is correct. In each additional request that has come from the Department of Justice in this regard has just underscored how unprecedented and how unfounded these requests are. In the past, the Department of Justice, if there was reason to believe that a state was violating a certain statute, may have asked for information related to the voter rolls.
Even then, it was very rare for the Department of Justice to ask for Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers, for that very sensitive information. But here they have asked for this information from, I think it’s at least 47 states and the District of Columbia confirmed, and probably even more. That’s just based on public reporting.
GILGER: So our secretary of state here in Arizona, Adrian Fontes, has refused to turn over this data. He’s being sued now, among other states, by the DOJ for this data.
And he says he can’t turn it over even if he wanted to. He says it’s a violation of state and federal law to do so. It has to do with privacy. Is that the case?
O’CONNOR: I haven’t looked exactly at what the secretary of state in Arizona has said in response to this lawsuit, but I can tell you that there are state laws in many states that address this and that provide privacy protections. But the key here is that the Department of Justice, the United States here, does not have the authority to ask for this information.
It is claiming authority under the Civil Rights Act in most of these cases that it has filed, and it does not have the authority under the Civil Rights Act to sweep up the voter rolls from every state in the nation to go looking for things that it thinks are wrong or to use those voter rolls for some sort of other purposes to undermine our elections.
GILGER: Right. And that’s kind of the rub, right? Like, what do you think the DOJ is trying to get at here by obtaining this information? Like, do you think this is about undermining a future election?
O’CONNOR: That is a great question. And it is hard to know exactly what the plan is. There are a lot of very scary options. As most folks know, a lot of the leadership and staff in the Department of Justice in the Civil Rights Division and the voting section in particular, are people who spent a lot of time and energy trying to deny the results of the 2020 election.
That’s the environment that we’re working in. And in terms of the dangers of what they might do, one clue we got to that is there is a memorandum of understanding that the Department of Justice has been asking states to sign, which lays out some of their plans for using these voter rolls. And these memorandums say we are going to conduct our own analysis of your voter rolls, and then we’re going to send you a list of people you should remove from those voter rolls, and in 45 days, you have to remove them.
GILGER: So you say this is part of, like, a concerted effort, it sounds like, by the federal government to sort of almost take over or be able to control those voter rolls?
O’CONNOR: Yes. The idea that the federal government would send a list of voters to remove is just out of left field. That is what the states do. The states have procedures. They have processes in place to maintain their voter rolls, and they have the expertise to do it. They have the databases that they check their voter rolls against. They have specific processes laid out in, most states have statutes and regulations that lay these out.
And they do those under the guardrails of the National Voter Registration Act, which is a federal law. The federal government doesn’t have the tools, the expertise. But most importantly, they don’t have the authority to tell states who they should remove from their voter rolls. It just turns upside down the structure that’s laid out in our Constitution and that is bolstered by federal and state law.
GILGER: It sounds like this, though, is not happening for the most part. Like, most states have not turned over this data, right?
O’CONNOR: There are a handful of states that have turned over the data: the state of Texas, and there are maybe seven or eight other states that have confirmed that they have turned over their full voter rolls. Remains to be seen what will happen in those states. But there are a handful of states.
Most states have resisted this request, and 24 of them have now been sued. Well, 23, plus the District of Columbia. But there are a handful that have handed over this information. And we don’t know yet what will happen there.
GILGER: Yeah, still watching that. Let me ask you lastly, though, about the idea of election fraud, voter fraud in general, which has been — as you outlined there — such a topic in the last several election cycles. President Trump has talked about this and claimed that there was massive voter fraud in the 2020 election. None of that has ever been proven.
But I wonder, are there other implications? Does even the allegation of voter fraud make it harder for some people to vote? Would the possession of these voter rolls from the federal government have a chilling effect on certain people and their right to vote?
O’CONNOR: I think the handing over of these voter rolls may have a chilling effect on people’s willingness to participate in the process. One of the pieces of information that is in a lot of these voter registration rolls — not all of them, but some of them — is voting history, by which I mean just the dates of the elections in which one participated.
Not, of course, anything about who you voted for, but voting history would include, did you vote in a Democratic or a Republican primary? Some states, these roles would include the method of voting. So did you vote by mail? Did you vote early in person?
And knowing that certain ways of voting are under attack by this administration and that certain viewpoints are also under attack by this administration, knowing that information about one’s participation in elections could be shared may have a chilling effect on the willingness of U.S. citizens to participate in our democracy.
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