Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s secretary of state, said Monday that his office had handed over the names of hundreds of thousands of voters to lawyers for a right-wing activist group as ordered by a court, adding that he regretted having to do so and worried about the potential consequences.
“I tried to stop this,” he told reporters in a news conference in Phoenix. “I have fought as hard as I could to keep your names and your personal identifying information away from the folks who I don’t trust — and I have good reason not to trust them with that specific information.”
The legal fight originated with an obscure technical issue in a state database that left Arizona without a record of proof of citizenship for 218,000 voters. Arizona requires such proof to vote in state elections.
A judge had ruled that the voters on the list would be allowed to vote the full ballot in Tuesday’s election despite the error. But last month lawyers for America First Legal, an organization founded by the former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, sued for the release of the names of the affected voters on behalf of a right-wing group in Phoenix, the Strong Communities Foundation of Arizona.
Mr. Fontes, a Democrat, argued that doing so would expose the people on the list to harassment and potentially violence at a time when former President Donald J. Trump and others are stoking fears of noncitizen voting in Tuesday’s elections. During the 2022 midterms in Arizona, armed right-wing activists, inspired by conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, took it upon themselves to monitor voting.
“I don’t want blood on my hands,” Mr. Fontes said in a court hearing last month.
The court order imposes strict conditions on the release of the voter list, which will be made available only to certain county election officials and a handful of state legislators, who are prohibited from distributing it further. Opponents of the release noted that those groups include several figures who have been prominent voices in the state’s election-denial movement since the 2020 election.
In Thursday’s ruling, a Superior Court judge found that Mr. Fontes had not demonstrated that the Strong Communities Foundation, which is led by Merissa Hamilton, a local activist who is also a former Republican mayoral candidate, specifically posed a threat to the people on the list.
In an email, Ms. Hamilton confirmed that Mr. Fontes’s office had given the data to her lawyers, who “have provided it to the election officials who agreed to the court’s stipulations so they can do their jobs and ensure the voters that their vote matters and will count.”
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