The Indiana Attorney General’s Office has denied a public records request for access to the list of nearly 600,000 Hoosier voters whose citizenship the state’s top lawyer and the secretary of state are questioning, but an Indiana University journalism professor maintains the elected officials are obligated to be more transparent about the contents of the document.
The publisher of The Indiana Citizen also believes the two elected officials are wrong in not permitting access to the list.
In October, Attorney General Todd Rokita and Secretary of State Diego Morales jointly announced they had sent a list of 585,774 names, drawn from Indiana’s voter rolls and divided into three categories, to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, asking the federal agency to verify the citizenship status of each individual. At the time, Morales said none of the voters would have their registration status changed as a result of the inquiry to USCIS.
The state officials released the letter they sent to the USCIS, but they have not publicly released the list of names.
Rokita’s office cited Indiana statute when denying the request from The Indiana Citizen. On behalf of the attorney general, William H. Anthony, chief counsel of the advisory division, noted the media may request a “complete compilation” of Indiana voter rolls, but he pointed to a provision of Indiana law that he says prohibits the secretary of state from providing “any part” of the registered voters list. Although Anthony noted the statute does allow excerpts of the voter rolls to be provided “in certain limited situations,” he said those exceptions do not apply in this case.
“The requested records are merely a part of the compilation of the voter registration information contained in the election division’s computerized list,” Anthony wrote in the denial letter. “As such, the election division (of the secretary of state’s office) is prohibited from providing the records under Indiana Code section 3-7-26.4-2. Thus, the responsive records are not being disclosed because they are declared confidential by state statute….”
Calling the attorney general’s letter a “rather antiseptic denial,” Gerry Lanosga, interim associate dean for academic affairs at the Indiana University Media School and board member of the Indiana Coalition for Open Government, believes Rokita and Morales could give more details about the contents of the list and still comply with the law. The officials should be as transparent as possible, providing some details about how they compiled the document sent to USCIS and the criteria used to identify the individuals whose citizenship they question, he said, so the public can be sure the voter rolls are not being abused or misused by state leaders.
“Going back to an old political saying, ‘Trust but verify,’ I think that the public, through the news media, would like to verify that public officials are doing the right thing here,” Lanosga said. “It’s very possible that they could be filtering the list for certain attributes that will be discriminatory, perhaps, and that’s something that the public ought to be able to see.”
In their letter to USCIS, Rokita and Morales said they wanted the citizenship status confirmed for each person on the list in order to prevent voter fraud and ensure the “integrity of Indiana’s voter rolls” so Hoosiers know “only eligible voters will be participating in our elections.” The names, according to the letter, were divided into three categories, which included Indiana voters who registered without providing a driver’s license number or Social Security number or who were living overseas.
“Under current law, there is no single method for verifying to a reasonable degree of certainty the citizenship of all Indiana voters,” Rokita and Morales wrote in their letter, while noting that Indiana state law and the Indiana Constitution prohibit non-citizens from voting. “We therefore seek to utilize all tools at our disposal to verify voters’ citizenship and help ensure the integrity of our state’s voter registration system.”
The Indiana Citizen tried to get access to the entire list before the Nov. 5 election, filing an Access to Public Records Act request in October and a subsequent complaint with the Indiana public access counselor.
In the Dec. 11 letter, the attorney general’s office said it was denying the request for access to the list. “We are required by APRA to except these records from disclosure,” the letter stated.
Bill Moreau, publisher of The Indiana Citizen and a retired lawyer, said the attorney general’s office got it wrong and he is considering the next steps, which include going back to the public access counselor.
“It makes sense the General Assembly would want to shield the secretary of state from responding to innumerable external requests for subsets of registered voters,” Moreau said, “but it makes no sense that provision could be used to conceal subsets the secretary of state intentionally created and he and the Attorney General widely publicized in advance of the election.”
Lanosga said this is an area of the law the legislature might revisit since the statute is perplexing in allowing the state to release the entire voter rolls but cannot release portions of it. The USCIS list will be redacted of identifiers like birth dates which, he said, “kind of takes the wind out of the sails of any concern” about releasing part of the rolls.
“This is a rather antiseptic denial that goes by the letter of the statute and clearly (Rokita and Morales) have a requirement of the statute, but they certainly could come out and be a little more forthcoming about things,” Lanosga said. “I would also hope that lawmakers would look at this and demand those sorts of explanations in the absence of a full release of these records.”