With just days before the Nov. 5 election, the Indiana Citizen Education Foundation, parent of The Indiana Citizen, is continuing to push the Indiana attorney general and the Indiana secretary of state to release the lists of nearly 600,000 Hoosiers whose citizenship they are questioning.
The Citizen filed a complaint Oct. 31 with the Indiana public access counselor, seeking to force the two state offices to release the lists.
“Every person on those lists has the right to know whether they are on one,” Bill Moreau, president of the Indiana Citizen Education Foundation and publisher of The Indiana Citizen, wrote in the complaint. “Those who are not on the lists will breathe a sigh of relief and vote without concern. Citizens who are on one of the lists may choose to take steps to prove their citizenship. Non-citizens who are on one of those lists may make the rational choice to remove their names from the voter rolls and not vote.”
However, Luke Britt, public access counselor, has given the attorney general and secretary of state until Nov. 21 to respond to the Citizen’s complaint. Britt is following standard procedure to give agencies three weeks to respond to a complaint.
In an attempt to force the release of the lists prior to the Nov. 5 election, Moreau has asked Britt to accelerate the deadline for a response to Nov. 1.
The Republic also filed a request for the list from Morales and Rokita, and received a response that the list was being examine to determine what needed to be redacted as non-public information. The newspaper also has not received a copy of the list from the two public officials but has not filed the public access counselor complaint as it has not been “denied” officially by the two public officials.
The controversy was started when Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita and Indiana Secretary of State Diego Morales announced Oct. 17 that they had sent a letter to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on Oct. 11 requesting that the agency verify the citizenship of 585,774 individuals on the state’s voter roll. Rokita and Morales said the names had been divided into three lists that included registered Indiana voters who did not provide a driver’s license number or Social Security number when registering and registered voters who are currently living overseas.
Morales and Rokita released the letter sent to USCIS but have resisted calls to release the lists of names to the public. On Oct. 21, the attorney general’s office told The Citizen to file an Access to Public Records Act letter.
The Citizen submitted an APRA letter asking for the lists that day.
After the attorney general’s office acknowledged receipt of the letter on Oct. 22, The Citizen asked for a deadline as to when the lists would be released or for an explanation as to why the names were not being publicized. The attorney general’s office did not answer either question, but, instead, replied that the office processes APRA requests in the order they are received.
“We will email you any disclosable records when our search is complete,” the office replied.
Moreau urged the public access counselor to press for a quicker response from the attorney general and secretary of state.
“The two agencies have provided no rationale for their refusal to release the public records, beyond the patently ludicrous assertion that they cannot find them,” Moreau wrote in an email to Britt. “Certainly, the State’s Chief Legal Officer and Chief Elections Officer must have determined weeks ago a good-faith, well-reasoned legal analysis that supports their withholding of the documents. If they have not, their actions to this point can fairly be characterized as arbitrary and capricious.”
In another statement issued this week, Morales cited to unfounded allegations about election fraud as the reason for the state seeking to verify the citizenship of registered Hoosier voters. He also did not address why the lists were not being released to the public.
“Indiana has been a model for election laws, and frankly, I don’t anticipate learning that many non-citizens have landed on our voter registration rolls,” Morales asserted. “Still, voter concerns about non-citizens (having) unfettered access to registration and voting exists (sic), and even looms large for the important upcoming election. I’m not about to dismiss Hoosier’s (sic) concerns without first inquiring into the facts.”
Indiana is among more than a dozen states with Republican elected officials that have made similar requests for citizenship verification to the USCIS this election, according to Kate Huddleston, senior legal counsel for the Campaign Legal Center. Pointing out that Indiana and other states waited until fewer than 90 days before the election, when federal law prohibits any kind of voter roll maintenance, to submit their requests, she said the effort is a “coordinated campaign” only meant to raise unfounded fears of voter fraud.
“There is a widespread manufactured conspiracy theory about the voter rolls that these letters really play into, and what the letters are doing is sowing doubt and distrust ahead of the 2024 general election,” Huddleston said.
Florida, Texas and Ohio each filed lawsuits in October in the federal courts against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the USCIS. The states argue the department is violating federal law by not providing timely responses to requests from state governments.
Just publicizing the requests for verification has a “chilling effect” on naturalized citizens and harms all voters, Huddleston said.
Naturalized citizens, she said, are worrying something could go wrong when they try to vote. Also, they are concerned about the rhetoric that has raised the false claims of noncitizens voting, which is creating the potential for scapegoating, she said.
“The false narrative that is taking root is really found in long-standing racist and anti-immigrant conspiracy theories,” Huddleston said. “It’s incredibly troubling on every level.”
More broadly, all voters are harmed, Huddleston said, because not only are they having to take the time to check and re-check their registration status but also the electoral process is being destabilized.
Moreover, Huddleston said, the requests to USCIS are flawed. In particular, verifying the citizenship status would be an “incredibly time intensive” task because Indiana and the other states have sent lists containing hundreds of thousands of names and verification requires that each name be inputted individually into the database, she said.
Also, the states have just provided the names and birth dates for the individuals on their lists, which may not be enough information to correctly identify a person or verify a voter.
“Political scientists, data scientists, will tell you that’s a really flawed exercise, because given the millions of people in the United States, you end up with a lot of false positives,” Huddleston said. “There are a lot of people who share names and dates of birth.”
This article was published by TheStatehouseFile.com through a partnership with The Indiana Citizen (indianacitizen.org), a nonpartisan, nonprofit platform dedicated to increasing the number of informed, engaged Hoosier citizens.
Marilyn Odendahl has spent her journalism career writing for newspapers and magazines in Indiana and Kentucky. She has focused her reporting on business, the law and poverty issues.
