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Oct 30, 2024

AZ election official testifies he wears bullet-proof vest

Get your morning recap of today's local news and read the full stories here: tucne.ws/morning PHOENIX — Secretary of State Adrian Fontes testified Monday that immediately releasing the names of at

Get your morning recap of today's local news and read the full stories here: tucne.ws/morning

PHOENIX — Secretary of State Adrian Fontes testified Monday that immediately releasing the names of at least 218,000 voters who may not have provided proof of citizenship would lead to threats and intimidation of those on the list.

And that’s assuming there is such a list, which he insisted there is not — at least not a full list.

Fontes told a judge about the threats he personally faced from critics who accused him of not running the state election system in a fair manner. Those included people putting his home address on the internet, and “swatting,’’ where someone falsely tells police there is a dangerous incident at that address and they show up with multiple officers, some armed with rifles.

He also said he normally wears a bulletproof vest, though he did not have it on Monday because of security screening in the Maricopa County courthouse.

His attorneys presented evidence from a University of Chicago professor, an expert in election threats, who said the people on the list could be at risk if others decide they may be the difference between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris winning the presidential race — particularly since Trump lost Arizona four years ago by just 10,475 votes.

Fontes said he fears for those voters.

“They can’t all walk around with a bodyguard and have 24/7 security officers outside of their house to protect them from harassment,’’ he said. He said security experts “have given me sufficient information that I should be very concerned with the release of any more information on any of these folks who activists and agitators have labeled as non-citizen voters or illegal alien voters.’’

Fontes admitted he has no evidence that Strong Communities Foundation, which does voter outreach and filed a public records lawsuit to get the information, has been involved in any voter harassment efforts. “But I don’t know that it matters,’’ he said.

He also acknowledged that the full voter registration database is a public record and can be used to contact registered voters and conduct voter outreach.

Concerns about election-related violence has prompted Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes to wear a bulletproof vest, an attorney for Fontes said at a hearing Monday. The hearing was about whether to immediately release information about 218K voters in the state who did not submit proof of citizenship when registering to vote.

Merissa Hamilton, who chairs Strong Communities Foundation (also known as EZAZ) said there’s no intent to spread the information she seeks widely. Instead, she testified she wants to give it to county recorders so they can run their own checks to see if any of these people, who have been given permission by the Arizona Supreme Court to vote a full ballot this year, are really not citizens.

But Hamilton also said she wants to share the list with at least four Republicans: Senate President Warren Petersen, House Speaker Ben Toma, state Sen. Wendy Rogers who chairs the Senate Elections Committee, and state Rep. Jackie Parker who is her House counterpart.

That did not satisfy Fontes. “I know that various members of the Legislature have lied, have continued to lie,’’ the Democrat said, though he did not name names.

Petersen was involved in the Arizona Senate’s now-debunked “audit’’ of the 2020 presidential election. Rogers has repeatedly claimed fraud in 2020 and 2022 elections lost by Republicans. She and Parker have used their committees to host presentations from election conspiracy theorists.

“And I don’t see any of them stopping a lot of these lies and assisting a lot of the folks who are fomenting the divisiveness that we have in our society for their own personal or political gain,’’ Fontes said. “So, yeah, I’m going to fight like hell to keep a lot of those folks from having these lists.’’

Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney said if he orders the names released, he probably can limit the people Hamilton is authorized to give them to. But he said he’s not sure if he can restrict what those who get them — notably lawmakers — can do with the list.

“I certainly am not going to put a prior restraint on the Legislature,’’ Blaney said.

Fontes told the judge he cannot stress enough how important he believes it is to keep the names secret, at least while the Nov. 5 election is pending and there are threats from some quarters to hang people for tyranny.

“I don’t want blood on my hands,’’ he said.

Fears of harm aside, there’s something else. Fontes said that, with the exception of an initial list of 98,000, there is nothing more he could surrender.

Fontes issued a statement last month that there are about 218,000 registered voters for whom there is not the legally required proof of citizenship on file.

They are individuals who got a driver’s license prior to October 1996, before there was a mandate to prove legal presence to get a license.

Voters then approved a measure in 2004 requiring “documented proof of citizenship’’ to register. But that law, from a practical standpoint, said it did not apply to anyone who had one of the pre-1996 licenses.

What went wrong is that the Motor Vehicle Division said some people had post-1996 licenses when they really did not.

That occurred when MVD issued a duplicate license or change of address. And it was that later date that was reported to election officials as showing there is proof of citizenship on file when there is not. The problem was only recently discovered, election officials have said.

With the election approaching, Fontes got the Arizona Supreme Court to rule that anyone on that list — meaning anyone who had an Arizona license since at least 1996 but may not have submitted proof of citizenship — can vote on all races in this election.

The alternative was to allow them to vote only for presidential and congressional candidates, as federal law does not require proof of citizenship. But the justices said that, given the short time remaining before the election, they wanted to err on the side of not disenfranchising people who, in many or most cases, probably are citizens.

Fixing the problem, the court said, can wait.

It is that list of those who were given the go-ahead to vote on all races that Stronger Communities wants, in order to allow someone to check whether they are, in fact, legally entitled to vote.

Fontes said he fears having people going door-to-door and checking could result in intimidation — or worse if those doing the checking are operating on the premise that those on the list are not citizens.

The secretary of state insisted Monday there is no “list,’’ but simply an estimate. In fact, Fontes testified there’s another “list’’ that suggests about 349,000 — close to 8% of all registered Arizona voters — may have the same citizenship proof problem, albeit for different reasons.

“We cannot depend on any of this information because of those shifting sands,’’ Fontes said.

More to the point, he said that even if he wanted to comply with the public records request — and he has made it clear he does not — he doesn’t actually have the names.

Instead, he told Blaney, the information on who lacks the required proof is with MVD. That agency said it would take eight staffers working full time for 50 days to produce a clean list, Fontes said.

Anyway, Fontes said, he is not the keeper of the records. “They’re suing the wrong people,’’ he said.

But he later admitted he did get an initial list of about 98,000 from MVD. He said he cannot surrender that information to Stronger Communities, however, because of a federal law making driver’s license information confidential.

The bottom line for the judge may come down to the fact that, after all is said and done, this is a simple case of access to public records.

Arizona law has a presumption that records in the hands of public officials are available for inspection and to be copied. There are exceptions for privacy interests, not at issue here because the entire voter file is public.

But there is an exception for what has been defined as “the best interest of the state.’’ And it is that provision Fontes seeks to use to deny access, at least for the time being, based on what he said is the fear that those on the list could be targeted.

The secretary said he believes government “should be as transparent as possible.’’

“But weighing the competing interests between having some radical hunting my voters versus running up against the general mood toward disclosure, I would prefer the public safety given all of the circumstances that we’ve talked about here, given everything we’ve discussed,’’ Fontes said.

Arizona is the only state in the nation that requires proof of citizenship. Fontes said that sets the stage for those who would go out to challenge them to presume “these folks are illegal aliens who deserve to be strung up along with the elections officials who let them vote.’’

Blaney said he will try to expedite a ruling but gave no date.

Howard Fischer is a veteran journalist who has been reporting since 1970 and covering state politics and the Legislature since 1982. Follow him on X, formerly known as Twitter, and Threads at @azcapmedia or email [email protected].

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Get your morning recap of today's local news and read the full stories here: tucne.ws/morning

PHOENIX — Secretary of State Adrian Fontes’ attorney told a judge Tuesday that if he makes public the names of 218,000 voters who may not have…