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Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita and Secretary of State Diego Morales say they are working to ensure the integrity of Indiana’s elections.
That sounds straightforward enough.
But actions surrounding their call for a federal review of a list of roughly 600,000 Hoosier voters show a troubling lack of transparency.
The two Republican statewide officeholders have compiled a list of more than 585,000 Hoosiers—roughly 12% of the state’s registered voters—that they say needs to be scrutinized to determine if any of them are ineligible to vote because they are not American citizens.
They say the list is made up of those who registered to vote without a driver’s license number or a social security number or who live overseas.
It should be noted that there are plenty of reasons not to have an Indiana driver’s license or state-issued ID. Perhaps the voters don’t have a car or are disabled. Or maybe they serve in military.
It seems perfectly reasonable to want to take steps to make sure all those registered voters are indeed eligible to cast a ballot. But the refusal by Rokita and Morales to release the list is what makes the whole exercise suspect.
The Indiana Citizen, a nonprofit news outlet operated by the Indiana Citizen Education Foundation Inc., has been trying for months to get access to the list.
Reporter Marilyn Odendahl first requested the list in October 2024 and was officially denied access in a letter from Rokita in December. Odendahl then took the case to then-Indiana Public Access Counselor Luke Britt, who ruled in February that the denial was improper based on the state’s Access to Public Records Act.
Last week, the Indiana Citizen Education Foundation filed a lawsuit seeking access to the list. The lawsuit says that in March Rokita and Morales offered The Citizen an opportunity to personally inspect the list but declined to provide any copies.
Later, Rokita and Morales withdrew their offer and asked new Public Access Counselor Jennifer Ruby (appointed by conservative Republican Gov. Mike Braun) to review the case, according to the lawsuit.
The Republican duo also has been fighting on another legal front to get the federal government to allow it use federal data to verify citizenship.
They initially asked the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to verify the list of Indiana voters last October under the Democratic administration of President Joe Biden. When the request wasn’t fulfilled by April under the new administration of President Donald Trump, they sued the USCIS’ parent Department of Homeland Security.
Then in July, Morales announced that his office had entered into an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security that allows the state access to a database that could help identify noncitizens.
But the litigation is ongoing because Rokita’s office notes that the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database (known as SAVE) could not adequately verify all 585,774 Hoosier voters in question.
“The SAVE system which the Secretary of State’s MOA relies on does not provide an adequate means for processing the request we submitted to USCIS in October, which USCIS is obligated by law to satisfy,” the attorney general’s office said in a statement to The Citizen in July. “The Secretary of State’s MOA thus doesn’t come close to creating the arrangements the state needs to have in place for USCIS to process the October request.”
The whole effort by Rokita and Morales has taken more political turns than a sizzling hot dog on a grill. But without transparency and sincerity on both ends of the political spectrum, it’s the public that gets burned.
Democrats are right to question the pair’s motives and their rush to create a system that probably won’t be able to adequately check the citizenship of voters. Their maneuvers can certainly be dismissed as an effort to merely cast doubt on the electoral process and give Trump more ammunition to dismiss election results.
But, in the true interest of election integrity, it’s hard to argue against working toward a system that can truly validate the citizenship of registered voters.
That, of course, would take time and require bipartisan cooperation on an issue so barbed in politics it can never be sincerely and purely resolved.
So, for now, all we can hope for is the release of this list so voters can know if they’re on it and prepare for a legal fight, if necessary. And so the press can truth-test the list to make sure it was crafted in the way Morales and Rokita have described and doesn’t unfairly target naturalized citizens, minority communities or anyone else.
If Morales and Rokita truly believe their work strengthens confidence in elections, they should let the people see it for themselves.•
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Greg Weaver is editor of The Indiana Lawyer. Reach him at [email protected].
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