Thread by @weareoversight

Arizona is now a hotspot of anti-voting actions. We obtained records of communications between the Arizona attorney general’s office and voting-restriction activists regarding the Brnovich v. DNC U.S. Supreme Court case. #FoiaFriday

In 2016, the Arizona legislature limited who could provide ballot-collection assistance to people voting by mail. Arizona also had a policy of entirely rejecting ballots cast in the wrong precinct. The policy disproportionately impacted Native American and Latinx Arizonans.

The DNC sued Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, arguing that the 2016 law violated a provision of the Voting Rights Act. In a blow for voting-rights advocates, the Supreme Court ruled in Brnovich’s favor this July.
nytimes.com/2021/07/01/us/…

We obtained emails between the Arizona attorney general’s office and voting-restriction groups regarding the case.
americanoversight.org/document/arizo…

On Dec. 4, 2020, J. Christian Adams — who is head of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative legal group that pushes for aggressive voter-roll purges — emailed PILF’s amicus brief in the case to Brnovich’s executive assistant.

Ryan Anderson, the attorney general’s office communications director, emailed Hans von Spakovsky — who worked in the Bush Justice Department and is now with the Heritage Foundation — to ask if “there was anything else” the office could do related to the case.

Also in December, an official from the attorney general’s office told von Spakovsky that the office was “excited to call attention to [Heritage’s report on the Brnovich case] on twitter today.”

We recently obtained more than 80,000 pages of records related to the Arizona Senate’s partisan election “audit” — learn more here: americanoversight.org/arizona-senate…