Federal judge orders Arizona to release voter roll records 

PHOENIX (CN) — A federal judge on Friday ordered Arizona’s secretary of state to produce voter records a political group says will reveal huge discrepancies in the state’s voter rolls.

Florida-based group Citizen AG claims there are more than one million people on Arizona’s voter registration list that should have been removed as early as two years ago for inactivity, claiming violations of the National Voting Rights Act of 1993 in a complaint filed Wednesday. It requested that U.S. District Judge Steven Logan order Secretary of State Adrian Fontes to remove ineligible voters before election day and release voter records the group was denied in an early October public records request.

The Barack Obama appointee obliged to the plaintiff’s second request.

“Beyond various issues raised regarding Plaintiffs’ Article III standing, their claims that the Arizona secretary of state has failed to maintain accurate voter registration records in violation of the NVRA is simply without any real evidentiary support,” Logan wrote in a Friday evening order. “Nonetheless, Citizen AG is correct that the NVRA at least entitles them to inspect the relevant records for themselves.”

He ordered the secretary’s office to release the documents to the plaintiffs by Dec. 2.

Citizen AG, self-described as a nonpartisan advocate for voting rights, is involved in litigation in Georgia and Pennsylvania, two other swing states, to make cuts to those voter rolls as well. Its current mission, according to its website, is to ensure the 25 most influential counties in seven swing states remove ineligible voters by Election Day.

Attorney Nicole Pearson told Logan in a Friday hearing that the group struggled to find a local attorney to take the “very controversial lawsuit,” but found Alexander Kolodin of Davillier Law Group — also a Republican in the state’s House of Representatives.

“It is obviously difficult to prove a claim when the secretary has been withholding just those records which reveal the depths of his incompetence and malfeasance,” Kolodin said in a text. “We are pleased that the court ordered the records the secretary has been unlawfully withholding released so that Citizen AG will have the documents it needs to ensure that Arizona’s voter rolls are cleaned up.”

Citizen AG relied on 2022 election data that indicates 1,222,367 people whose registrations should have been canceled after that election are still on the rolls. But defense attorney Karen Hartman-Tellez successfully argued to Logan that the estimate from two years ago doesn’t take into account the list maintenance the state has done since then.

“Without a single shred of evidence — beyond hypothetical calculations based on two-year-old data — to prove that defendant has failed to maintain accurate voter rolls, plaintiffs have no likelihood of success on the merits of this claim,” Logan wrote.

He also found the plaintiffs lack standing to claim failure to clean the voter rolls, lacking any nonhypothetical injury. Citizen AG argued that the counting of invalid votes will dilute valid votes, but without a disproportionate weight to some votes over others, Logan wrote, that claim fails.

“The crux of a vote dilution claim is inequality of voting power — not diminishment of voting power per se,” he wrote.

Citizen AG submitted a public records request to the secretary of state’s office on Oct. 6 asking for specific records required by the NVRA to be kept that would reveal whether their 1.2 million number is accurate, but were told that the office doesn’t have any records relevant to the request.

Kolodin said in Friday’s hearing that the denial of the records’ existence implies that the voter rolls haven’t been cleaned.

“Plaintiffs’ would-be smoking gun is barely smoldering,” Logan retorted in the order. “It is unclear whether it is true that the office doesn’t have the relevant records — and we don’t have a single shred of evidence, besides that cursory email, to suggest they don’t. That single response is far from an ‘admission’ that the records do not exist.”

Hartman-Tellez said she didn’t have a chance to speak with Fontes before Friday’s rushed hearing, but guessed that some records exist, and the request was denied because of a “miscommunication” over what exactly was requested.

Logan agreed that the secretary’s office violated the NVRA by denying the request.

“The plain text of the NVRA clearly establishes a right to public inspection of ‘all records concerning the implementation of programs and activities conducted for the purpose of ensuring the accuracy and currency of official lists of eligible voters,’” Logan wrote.

Because of the voluminous nature of the documents requested, Logan gave the secretary’s office 30 days to comply.

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