State Rep. Rebecca Dow (R-Truth or Consequences), a Republican candidate for governor, is voicing her support of a federal lawsuit brought by a voter integrity group seeking permission to show the public the state’s voter rolls.
Dow said that under Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, the rolls are accessible only to those willing and able to pay a costly fee to gain access, even though taxpayers cover the cost of maintaining the rolls.
"Voter rolls in New Mexico have only been accessible to elite politicians and special interest groups who can afford to pay $5,400 to access them,” Dow, whose name recognition quickly shot up from three percent to over 70 percent after she announced her candidacy last July, told the New Mexico Sun. “But the public is shut out of the process that their tax dollars fund. Secretary Toulouse Oliver should not discriminate against New Mexicans who should have access to the voting records they pay for."
The lawsuit filed a week ago by the Voter Reference Foundation (VRF) in U.S. District Court in Albuquerque names Oliver, and Attorney General Hector Balderas, both Democrats, as defendants. Citing the First Amendment, VRF is asking the court to give the group immediate permission to make the rolls public.
In the complaint, VRF is charging that Oliver falsely characterized VRF’s publication of the voter rolls as illegal after the group posted the rolls on its website, VoteRef.com.
The group has removed the data from its site while the lawsuit is pending.
The complaint also alleges that Oliver has a history of bias when dealing with public records requested by those she disagrees with politically.
“The taxpayers of New Mexico pay for election administration, and they have an absolute right to view the records that are produced,” Doug Truax, Founder and President of Restoration Action, which created VRF, said a press release announcing the lawsuit. “Confidence in American elections is at a low ebb and one reason is a lack of transparency.”
Truax noted that several other states have approved legislation banning publication of voter rolls. Court battles are likely in those states as well, he said.
Lawsuits seeking transparency in voter rolls have been successful in other states. Recently, a federal court in Illinois ruled that the state’s failure to provide a national public interest law firm with its voter rolls violated the National Voter Registration Act. The US District Court for the Central District of Illinois ruled that the state must make its voter rolls available for public inspection and for photocopying at a reasonable cost.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation, which filed the lawsuit, has discovered hundreds of thousands of duplicate voter registrations, deceased registrations and even non-citizen registrations in state voting rolls.
Dow says she believes the fight over the voter rolls is also about getting big government, and its embrace of secrecy, out of the way.
“Transparency is the best tool we can use to secure our elections,” she said. “Leaving New Mexicans in the dark only serves to cast an even bigger shadow of doubt on our election integrity. More trust in our electoral system means greater voter participation, something that should be appealing to our Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver. Her pushback to election transparency calls into question the practices her office is using to run our elections. What is she trying to hide?”
Primary election day is June 7.
The VRF has published the voter rolls in 22 states and the District of Columbia, representing about half the population of the United States. The site gives citizens the ability to view who is eligible to vote, when they voted, and other basic election data. Popular tech and economic writer Jeffrey Carter characterized the effort as a “killer election reform,’’allowing the public to “crowd source” the lists to make them more accurate.