WINNING: Voter Reference Foundation Awarded $800k in Legal Fees After New Mexico Dems Tried to Suppress Voter Roll Transparency
A failed effort to block the election watchdog from publishing the state's voter rolls backfired… spectacularly.
In a major blow to New Mexico's oppressive regime, a federal district court has awarded more than $800,000 in legal fees to the Voter Reference Foundation after ruling the state violated the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and engaged in partisan discrimination against the election transparency watchdog last year by refusing to provide a copy of the state’s voter list.
"I wonder how taxpayers of New Mexico feel about losing nearly $1 million of their money in legal fees because partisan Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver and Attorney General Raúl Torrez didn’t want them to have access to public election records they are entitled to see," Restoration of America founder and President Doug Truax observed (full statement below).
"We are resolute in our commitment to make public voter registration data transparent in all 50 states. We will not flinch when hyper-partisans like Oliver and Torrez try to hide the data and make elections purposely opaque."
Suppressing the Truth in Unrighteousness
The Voter Reference Foundation (VRF), a Restoration of America affiliate, publishes searchable voter rolls in 35 states and the District of Columbia, with the goal of eventually providing access in all 50 states. This data is often purchased by VRF at great expense. And in all instances it’s made public in compliance with the NVRA and used strictly to promote accurate voter lists and secure elections.
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.
Voter Reference Foundation's published voter roll data, as of September 2025
That effectiveness put VRF in the Left's crosshairs.
As Restoration News has detailed, in early 2022 the left-wing fake news site ProPublica launched an offensive that smeared VRF as an "echo chamber" for "far-right conservatives" using "discredited techniques" to "hunt for voter fraud." The partisan journalist behind that article, Megan O'Matz, enlisted New Mexico's extreme Democrat leadership—who accuse "brainwashed" conservatives of spreading "misinformation" to "dismantle our democracy"—to target VRF, leading to a two year litigation battle that saw the state repeatedly change its legal theory in an attempt to thwart VRF. Emails obtained via open records request reveal New Mexico officials accusing VRF of "misleading the public about New Mexico's voter rolls" and "perpetuating misinformation . . . to cast doubt on the 2020 elections" in a statement to ProPublica.
(RELATED: ProPublica—the Attack Arm of the Democratic Party)
Alarmingly, the Secretary of State's office claimed publishing voter rolls was illegal in New Mexico. Yet at the time, But the federal court agreed with VRF: Nothing in state law prohibited VRF from publishing the voter roll. So Democrats changed the law.
Prompted by VRF’s lawsuit and ProPublica's bogus "investigation," the New Mexico legislature criminalized "the transfer or publication of voter data online" in March 2023.
In his decision, U.S. District Judge James Browning held that New Mexico’s attempts to shield its rolls from public scrutiny were preempted by the NVRA. Following a bench trial, he excoriated the Secretary and Attorney General for engaging in viewpoint discrimination by punishing VRF for daring to share its opinion about how New Mexico could improve its list maintenance and recordkeeping.
Judge Browning even called VRF's mission "regarding the transparency of elections [a] boon to the public [that] furthers the objectives of federal law." VRF's New Mexico data went back online that very same day—and one year later, the state was ordered to pay VRF over $800,000 in legal fees, money that will be used to continue its valuable work.
They've Only Just Begun to Fight
That massive victory for election transparency will have a knock-on effect in another 11 states with similarly restrictive laws as New Mexico's. One of them, Kentucky, has already complied and given VRF access to its voter roll data.
As Restoration News has revealed, those remaining states—California, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and Virginia—together represent roughly 48 million registered voters, or one-third of the 152 million ballots cast in the 2020 presidential election.
That will take time to manifest, but it will eventually take VRF's total list of searchable voter files to 44 states and D.C (though five states remain exempt from federal voting list requirements.) But it will mean our children grow up in a country that doesn't hide its voter rolls from the public—and it can't happen fast enough.
(READ MORE: 68 Million Voters Could Be Affected in Fallout from New Postal Service Mail-In Ballot Rule Change)
