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Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes lost his appeal to block a court order to release the names of thousands of voters who are improperly registered to vote due to a data “glitch,” and his office has provided those names to a conservative advocacy group represented by a Trumpworld luminary.
Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona, a nonprofit led by conservative activist Merissa Hamilton, filed the public records lawsuit after Fontes initially refused to turn over the list of voter names until after the Nov. 5 election. It was represented by America First Legal, led by Stephen Miller, a senior advisor to Trump and the architect of the former president’s anti-immigration policies.
According to the lawsuit, after learning about a glitch in the state’s driver’s license database that resulted in improper voter registration for more than 200,000 Arizonans — all of whom had been residents of the state for decades, and many registered for just as long — Hamilton’s group filed a public records request seeking “a subset of the Statewide Voter Registration Database that contains only those registered (active and inactive) voters that” were part of the data glitch.
A few days later, the Secretary of State’s Office responded, saying that the records “will be made available for inspection at the soonest available time and to the extent the law allows access. But no access will occur before the 2024 General Election.”
A trial court last week ruled that Fontes couldn’t defend his claim that releasing the data could lead to voter intimidation or harassment of voters who appear on the list. Maricopa Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney ruled that Fontes claims had no evidence and ordered a list of the initial 98,000 voters that were first discovered as part of the data glitch to be released to Hamilton by noon on Nov. 4.
Fontes swiftly appealed, and the appellate court responded in kind by wasting no time in rejecting his attempt to stall releasing the names.
“Petitioners have not established that the superior court committed legal or factual error,” Arizona Court of Appeals Judge Michael S. Catlett wrote in a Nov. 1 order.
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The glitch, which was first discovered late September, meant that some Arizonans who received a driver’s license prior to 1996 were inaccurately labeled as having provided proof of citizenship, a requirement to register to vote in the Grand Canyon State beginning in 2005.
The error in the database used by the state’s Motor Vehicles Division affects people with pre-1996 licenses who have since received replacements. The voters affected have been registered to vote for decades, but were never required to prove their citizenship because of the “data coding oversight” in the system, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.
The office has said the affected voters include 79,000 Republicans, 61,000 Democrats and 76,000 who aren’t a member of either party.
Arizonans who cannot provide proof of U.S. citizenship are only permitted to vote in federal races, after voters in 2004 approved a ballot measure requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote.
Arizona is the only state that requires proof of citizenship to register to vote. Voting by undocumented immigrants is incredibly rare.
The list will be shared with county recorders as well as Republican leadership at the Arizona legislature, along with the leaders of the House and Senate Elections committees.
The Arizona Legislature has been a breeding ground for conspiracy theories surrounding elections, going back to 2020 when some state lawmakers held a news conference where they made spurious accusations of election fraud. They held the event at a Phoenix hotel because then-House Speaker Rusty Bowers would not allow it at the Capitol.
Months later, GOP leaders of the Arizona Senate hired conspiracy theorists with no experience in auditing or election administration to conduct a partisan hand-count of the 2020 election — based on the premise that the election had been stolen from Trump — only to find more votes for President Joe Biden than the original count, and no evidence of fraud.
And the Legislature’s two election committees have often amplified known election deniers and other conspiracy theorists.
Former and current members of the Legislature have also encouraged people to watch drop boxes for evidence of voter fraud to back up false claims that have been spread since 2020.
“Judge ruled AZSOS must release 218k names that he had refused to disclose. This morning I authorized receipt of those names,” Senate President Warren Petersen, R-Gilbert, said on X, formerly Twitter. “We will do everything we can to make sure our elections are run with integrity.”
In court last week, Hamilton would not answer a question by Fontes’ attorney asking if she could guarantee that the list would not fall into the hands of a third party via legislative leaders.
Hamilton is closely allied with people who have pushed evidence-free claims about election fraud.
Hamilton told the court that she does not engage with any groups or people who promote violence or harassment. But she was closely tied to a group that, in 2022, collaborated with militia groups to monitor ballot drop boxes in Arizona.
The Arizona Mirror confirmed that Hamilton was an administrator of a group chat for America First Polling Project. Leaked AFPP chat logs, made available to reporters by the group Distributed Denial of Secrets, show how the organization worked with those militias and how election misinformation led members of the group to make violent threats.
Fontes was backed in his appeal by two former high-ranking law enforcement officials. Former Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone and former Tucson Police Chief Roberto Villasenor both filed amicus briefs in support of Fontes.
“Through their collective decades of experience in law enforcement, they are intimately familiar with risks citizens face during heightened threat environments, such as elections,” the two men said in their brief to the court. “They are aware of and/or have had to respond to threats and harassment of individuals and are versed in what factors and measures can exacerbate or mitigate such behavior.”
In their brief, they argued that releasing the names prior to Election Day and then making the list available widely after Election Day could lead to voter intimidation and harassment due to the heightened emotions that will come with a candidates defeat or win.
The two former lawmen also pointed to instances in the past, such as canvassers pretending to be with the Yavapai Sheriff’s Office or armed men appearing at drop box locations fueled by election fraud conspiracy theories as proof of possible future harm.
Included in the document was a number of recent social media posts calling for violence and even the death of election officials for non-existent widespread voter fraud claims directly related to the list of impacted voters.
“Yes finally we might get revenge for 2020,” one user wrote. “Jail all the corrupt Pos (sic) hang the heads for treason!!!!”
The court however, was not swayed.
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