J. Christian Adams
There is a movement to chill and even fine speech about problems and errors in our elections.
Stopping free and open discussion about election shortcomings is a new tool of the far left. They have allies in government. State officials have badgered private companies to censor speech about any defects or problems in American elections. In Maine, they actually passed a law to impose financial penalties if you talk about public information with unauthorized people.
Passed with the direct involvement of the Maine Democratic Party, the Legislature enacted penalties for talking with anyone about Maine’s competence in conducting election administration. In particular, if you look at the public voter roll and discover errors or duplicates, you aren’t allowed to talk about it, period. Worse, citizens may not use this public information to evaluate whether someone is registered in more than one state or has died.
In other words, Maine has enacted a law that penalizes you for criticizing the government when it doesn’t do a good job. It is the most brazen restriction on free speech that any state has adopted in decades.
It is also a restriction that every newspaper and media outlet should oppose, not just a single conservative charity like the Public Interest Legal Foundation.
Remember when some media outlets discovered that former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows had voter registrations in his former state of residence as well as his new state? The old state had not yet removed the old registration. Under Maine’s speech restrictions, talking about this discovery subjected one to fines and penalties.
This law penalizes free discussion critical of government officials. Maine has given the government the power to sanction those who discover that officials aren’t doing an effective job in running elections. Even the failures of government officials to follow federal election law would be protected from criticism.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation, of which I am president, has fought and defeated this law in federal court.
The court ruled that the NVRA prohibits states from chilling speech about election administration by imposing fines and use restrictions on government documents.
But the case didn’t stop there. Maine has appealed the ruling to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
Maine officials continue to fight against transparency and damper our right to free speech.
At the heart of the First Amendment is the right to criticize the government. Whether or not Maine has a program to keep voter rolls up to date is an important public issue. There is no way for the public or press to assess that question without actual access to the voter rolls. With that access, we can tell if registrants are registered in more than one state.
Maine’s law would prevent the public from assisting election officials across the country by alerting them to those registered in multiple states. It would also penalize any speech that discusses poor election administration, like those we have found across the nation, including dead registrants.
Americans should not face fines or lawsuits for speaking about failures in election administration. The only people who benefit from Maine’s speech restrictions are the government officials who are protected from critics. Bureaucrats who administer elections enjoy the ability to impose fines and penalties on those who violate Maine’s speech restrictions when they use data to demonstrate those same bureaucrats could do a better job.
This sounds like the practice of some authoritarian regime in history, not something in Maine.
J. Christian Adams is the President of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a former Justice Department attorney, and current commissioner on the United States Commission for Civil Rights.
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