Fontes is fighting the release of the voter citizenship list because of security concerns

Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said Monday that the immediate release of the names of some 218,000 or more voters who may not have provided proof of citizenship would lead to threats and intimidation of those on the list.

And this is assuming that such a list exists, and he insisted that there is not – at least not a complete list.

Fontes told Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney about the threats he personally faced from those who accused him of rigging the state’s election system. This included people posting his home address online and even “crashing” when someone falsely reported to the police that there had been a dangerous incident at that address and they showed up with multiple police officers, some armed with rifles.

He also said he usually wears a bulletproof vest, although he did not have one on Monday due to a security check at the courthouse.

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

Fontes said he fears for those voters.

“They can’t all walk around with security and have 24/7 security around their house to protect them from harassment,” he said. And Fontes said security experts “have given me enough information that I should be very concerned about releasing any more information about any of these people who activists and campaigners have called non-citizen voters or illegal aliens.”

Fontes acknowledged that he had no evidence that the Strong Communities Foundation, which works with voters and has sued public archives to obtain information, was involved in any voter harassment efforts.

“But I don’t know if that matters,” he said.

And the Secretary acknowledged that the complete voter registration database is publicly available and can be used to contact and work with registered voters.

Marissa Hamilton, who heads the Strong Communities Foundation — also known as EZAZ — said she has no intention of widely disseminating the information she is seeking. Instead, she testified, she wants to turn it over to county recorders so they can verify for themselves whether any of the people the Arizona Supreme Court allowed to vote by full ballot this year are indeed non-citizens.

But Hamilton also said she wants to share the list with at least four Republicans: Senate President Warren Petersen, House Speaker Ben Toma, Sen. Wendy Rogers, who chairs the Senate Select Committee, and Congresswoman Jackie Parker, who is her counterpart in the House. This did not satisfy Fontes.

“I know that various members of the legislature have lied, have continued to lie,” he said, though he did not name names.

But Petersen participated in the debunked “audit” of the 2020 presidential election.

Rogers has repeatedly claimed fraud in the 2020 and 2022 elections, which the Republicans lost. And he and Parker used their committees to stage presentations by election conspiracy theorists.

“And I don’t see any of them stopping a lot of these lies and helping a lot of people who are fomenting division 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 these people off these lists.”

Blaney said if he ordered the names released, he would likely be able to limit who Hamilton could provide them to. But the judge said he wasn’t sure whether he could limit what those who receive them — including lawmakers — can do with the list.

“I’m certainly not going to impose prior restraints on the legislature,” he said.

Fontes, however, told the judge that he could not stress enough how important it is to keep those names secret, at least with elections pending and threats from some quarters to hang people for tyranny.

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

In addition to the fear of harm, there is something else. Fontes said that other than the initial list of 98,000 people, there is nothing more to give away.

Last month, Fontes did issue a statement saying that some 218,000 people do not have proof of citizenship, which is required by law.

These are people who got their driver’s license before October 1996, before there was a requirement to prove legal presence to get a license.

All of this became a problem when voters approved a measure in 2004 requiring “documentary proof of citizenship” for registration. But that law, as a practical matter, said it didn’t apply to anyone who had one of those licenses before 1996.

What went wrong was that the motor vehicle department said some people had licenses after 1996, when in fact they didn’t.

This happened when issuing a duplicate license of the Ministry of Internal Affairs or changing the address. And it was this later date that was reported to election officials as proof that there was proof of citizenship on file, even though there is none.

With the election looming, Fontes got the Arizona Supreme Court to rule that anyone on that list — meaning anyone who has had an Arizona license since at least 1996 but may not have provided proof of citizenship — can vote for any race in this election.

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

The court said the resolution could wait.

It is this list of those who have been granted the go-ahead to vote in all races that Stronger Communities wants to allow someone to check to see if they are, in fact, legally eligible to vote. And it’s that fear of people going door-to-door checking, Fontes said, that can lead to intimidation — or worse, if those checking are guided by the assumption that those on the list are not citizens .

And there is something else.

Fontes insisted Monday that there was no “list,” just an assessment. In fact, Fontes testified that there is actually another “list” that suggests that about 349,000 — about 8 percent of all registered voters — may have the same problem with proof of citizenship, albeit for different reasons.

“We can’t rely on any of that information because of these quicksands,” he said.

What’s more, Fontes said that even if he wanted to grant the public records request — and he’s made it clear he doesn’t — he doesn’t really have the names.

Instead, he told Blaney, who lacks the necessary proof, who actually works for the MIA. And Fontes said the agency said it would take eight full-time employees for 50 days to create a clean slate.

Anyway, Fontes said he’s not the keeper of the records.

“They are suing the wrong people,” he said.

But Fontes later admitted that he had received an initial list of approximately 98,000 people from the Interior Ministry. However, he said he could not release that information to Stronger Communities because of federal law that makes driver’s license information confidential.

The bottom line for the judge may come down to this being, in the end, a simple case of access to public records.

Under Arizona law, records in the hands of public officials are available for inspection and copying. There are exceptions to confidentiality that are not discussed here because the entire voter record is public.

But there is an exception for what has been defined as “the best interests of the state.” And that’s the provision Fontes is trying to use to block access, at least for now, based on what he said is a fear that those on the list could be targeted.

The minister said he believed the government “should be as transparent as possible”.

“But in weighing the competing interests between radical hounding of my constituents and going against the general sentiment about disclosure, I would prioritize public safety, given all the circumstances we’ve talked about here, given everything we’ve discussed,” he said.

Then there’s the fact that Arizona is the only state in the country that requires proof of citizenship to vote. Fontes said that sets the stage for those who go to challenge them to believe that “these people are illegal aliens who deserve to be put with the election officials who allowed them to vote.”

Blaney said he would try to expedite a decision, but did not give a date.