How Many States are Still Withholding Voter Data from the Public?

A key court decision in New Mexico means a dozen more states must soon surrender their voter rolls to the American people, improving access and transparency

In August, the elections watchdog group Voter Reference Foundation (VRF) won a key lawsuit against New Mexico Democrats’ attempt to criminalize public access to the state’s voter rolls. “We will continue to promote transparency, increasing public confidence and participation in our election process,” VRF executive director Gina Swoboda told Restoration News at the time.

She wasn’t kidding—that major victory for free speech and democratic elections was just the start.

Now another 12 states, each subject to the same National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) laws as New Mexico, must allow their voter data to be published by VRF and other watchdog groups under the federal court’s decision in August. That will eventually bring VRF’s total list of searchable voter files to 44 states and the District of Columbia. (Five states are currently exempt from NVRA requirements.)

Those 12 states—California, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and Virginia—together represent roughly 61 million registered voters, or a little over one-third of the 155 million ballots cast in the 2020 presidential election.

By making those voter lists accessible, Americans can use VRF’s powerful VoteRef.com website to verify their accuracy—searching for double registrations, deceased voters, etc. The website allows users to search by name and age, party affiliation (where applicable), legislative and congressional district, county, and even precinct.

But that’s “perpetuating misinformation,” according to a partisan spokesman for New Mexico Secretary of State Amy Oliver Toulouse, who tried to block VRF from publishing New Mexico’s rolls. Restoration News has traced Toulouse’s deep ties to the radical Left and wild-eyed statements labeling conservatives “brainwashed” “election deniers” working to “dismantle our democracy” by safeguarding elections.

She’s hardly alone in trying to keep Americans in the dark. Yet this court victory is more evidence that the Left is losing that fight for good.

(READ MORE: The Left Tried to Suppress Voter Roll Transparency. They Just Lost—Hard.)