Journalists Favor Secrecy When it Comes to Elections

Celebrating a victory for free speech and good journalism

When it comes to transparency of elections, liberal journalists are definitely opposed.

Tumbling off the JournoList assembly line like flammable EVs nobody wants are stories critical of conservative organizations that seek election transparency. Organizations like the Voter Reference Foundation, a groundbreaking group of ours making voter registration lists easily accessible to the public for the first time ever.

That transparency was vindicated again in federal court late last week when a New Mexico judge ruled that taxpayers who pay for those voter lists have an absolute right to view them “broadly.” VRF publishes voter roll information from 32 states and the District of Columbia on VoteRef.com.

In other words, a victory for allowing sunlight to seep into often opaque voting systems.

You’d think journalists would applaud the transparency trend, which also includes a similar ruling in Maine earlier this year. But no, they are too busy attacking the groups trying to give Americans access to records they pay for and are vital to ensure election integrity.

Politico, the Associated Press, NPR, ProPublica are among the liberal media outlets who have published stories in recent weeks deeply concerned about making voter rolls public – even though the National Voter Registration Act, enacted in 1993, requires public disclosure of voter registration records to ensure states are maintaining accurate lists.

Wait, aren’t journalists supposed to be in favor of transparency? It says so right in the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) code of ethics:

Journalists should recognize a special obligation to serve as watchdogs over public affairs and government. Seek to ensure that the public’s business is conducted in the open, and that public records are open to all.

VRF continues to field a steady stream of liberal media inquiries that essentially say, “Aren’t you worried that disclosing public records might be dangerous to the public?” Those same outlets have not made inquiries to the minority of states that severely restrict or outlaw public access to the voter rolls in apparent violation of federal law. Go figure.

Those journalists widely quote Democratic election officials and liberal political operatives who fret that privacy concerns should outweigh the public’s statutory right to inspect election records. They often fail to state that VRF and other groups protect privacy by only publishing information that is publicly available from election offices – not including voter information on restricted groups such as stalking victims and judges.

Sloppy and inaccurate voter rolls are incubators for vote fraud, election experts have long said. The lists are particularly important in blue states where mail ballots are mass-mailed to citizens who didn’t request them and might have died or moved somewhere else.

Publishing the voter lists gives citizens a chance to scrutinize whether illegal ballots are being cast by checking voting histories.

Restoration of America, the umbrella group over VRF, remains committed to publishing voter rolls in all 50 states and is seeking legal and legislative solutions in states that are keeping election records from the public.

Liberal journalists, meanwhile, apparently will continue advocating for secrecy and a low-level of election integrity in lockstep with their Democratic handlers.

Dan Curry is chief strategy officer for Restoration of America, which publishes Restoration News, and a veteran reporter