By Rachel Leingang | Arizona Capitol Times
People on both sides of the political aisle applauded Secretary of State Michele Reagan’s decision to deny a request from the Trump administration to turn over voter data.
But First Amendment experts say the legal reasoning behind the denial is dubious and could leave the state vulnerable to a lawsuit.
Reagan’s office received a request on July 3 from Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the vice chair of Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, asking for various types of “publicly available” voter information.
President Donald Trump set up the commission by executive order as a way to investigate his repeated, unsupported claims of rampant voter fraud during the 2016 election.
Critics of the request for voter data claim it was an effort aimed at voter suppression, something Democrats say Kobach is known for.
Reagan denied the request on Monday, saying turning over the voter rolls wouldn’t be in the “best interests of the state,” an exemption to public records statutes set up by case law in Arizona.
She said she couldn’t see how the information would help the commission achieve its purpose and that the request would create a major cybersecurity risk by centralizing the nation’s voter data into one location.
And she had heard from about 1,000 people over the weekend who called or sent emails saying they were concerned about their voter information being sent to Trump. That’s in addition to the many tweets and Facebook posts deriding the records request and calling on Reagan to refuse it.
At first, before Reagan received the letter but after the news about its contents become known, she said she would turn over any information that’s ordinarily available to the public.
But by Monday, when she actually got the request, she had changed course.
Multiple Arizona Supreme Court cases upheld an agency’s ability to deny the release of public records if releasing the information “would have an important and harmful effect on the duties of the officials or agency in question,” according to the Arizona Ombudsman’s public records guide.
(Paywall)
