Foreign Minister Adrian Fontes testified on Monday that immediately releasing the names of some 218,000 or more voters who may not have shown proof of citizenship would lead to threats and intimidation against those on the list.

And that’s assuming there is such a list, which he insisted there isn’t—at least not a complete list.

Fontes told Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Scott Blaney about the threats he has personally faced from those who have accused him of not running the state election system fairly. That has included people posting his home address on the Internet and even “swatting,” where someone falsely tells police there’s a dangerous incident at that address and they show up with several officers, some armed with rifles.

He also said he normally wears a bulletproof vest, although he did not on Monday due to courthouse security.

His lawyers presented evidence from a University of Chicago professor, an expert on election threats, who said the people on the list could be at risk if others decide they could be the difference between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris winning the presidential election — especially since Trump lost Arizona to four years ago with just 10,475 votes.

Fontes said he fears for those voters.

“They can’t all walk around with a bodyguard and have 24/7 security officers outside their house to protect them from harassment,” he said. And Fontes said security experts “have given me enough information that I should be very concerned about releasing more information about any of these people who activists and agitators have labeled as non-citizen voters or illegal alien voters.”

Fontes admitted he has no evidence that the Strong Communities Foundation, which does voter outreach and filed a lawsuit seeking the information, has been involved in any voter harassment.

“But I don’t know that it matters,” he said.

And the secretary acknowledged that the complete voter registration database is a public record and can be used to contact registered voters and conduct voter outreach.

Merissa Hamilton, who chairs the Strong Communities Foundation – also known as EZAZ – said there is no intention to widely disseminate the information she is seeking. Instead, she testified, she wants to give it to county recorders so they can run their own checks to see if any of those people, who have been granted permission by the Arizona Supreme Court to vote a full ballot this year, really aren’t citizens.

But Hamilton also said she wants to share the slate with at least four Republicans: Senate President Warren Petersen, House Speaker Ben Toma, Sen. Wendy Rogers, who chairs the Senate Select Committee, and Rep. Jackie Parker, who is her counterpart in the House. That did not satisfy Fontes.

“I know that various members of the Legislature have lied, have continued to lie,” he said, though he did not name any names.

But Petersen was involved in the now aborted “audit” of the 2020 presidential election.

Rogers has repeatedly claimed fraud in both the 2020 and 2022 elections that were lost by Republicans. And she and Parker have used their committees to host presentations from election conspiracy theorists.

“And I don’t see any of them stopping many of these lies and helping many of the people who are fueling the division that we have in our society for their own personal or political gain,” Fontes said. “So, yeah, I’m going to fight like hell to keep a lot of these people from having these lists.”

Blaney said if he orders the names released, he could probably limit who Hamilton can give them to. But the judge said he’s not sure if he can limit what those who receive them — especially lawmakers — can do with the list.

“I’m certainly not going to put a cap on the Legislature,” he said.

However, Fontes told the judge that he cannot stress how important it is to keep those names secret, at least while the election is going on and there are threats from some quarters to hang people for tyranny.

“I don’t want blood on my hands,” he said.

Apart from fear of injury, there is something else. Fontes said that, with the exception of an initial list of 98,000, there is nothing more to give up.

Fontes made a statement last month that there are about 218,000 people for whom the statutory proof of citizenship does not exist.

These are people who obtained a driver’s license before October 1996, before there was a mandate to prove legal presence in order to obtain a driver’s license.

All of this became a problem when voters approved a measure in 2004 requiring “documentary proof of citizenship” to register. But that law, from a practical standpoint, said it didn’t apply to anyone who had one of those licenses before 1996.

What went wrong is that the Motor Vehicle Division said some people had licenses after 1996 when they really didn’t.

It occurred when MVD issued a duplicate license or change of address. And it was the later date reported to election officials that shows there is proof of citizenship on record when there isn’t.

As the election neared, Fontes got the Arizona Supreme Court to rule that anyone on that list — meaning anyone who had an Arizona license since at least 1996 but may not have submitted proof of citizenship — can vote in any race in this election.

The alternative was to let them vote only for presidential and congressional candidates, since federal law does not require proof of citizenship. But the justices said that, given the short amount of time left before the election, they wanted to err on the side of not removing people who in many or most cases are probably citizens.

Fixing the problem, the court said, can wait.

It is that list of those who were given the all-clear to vote in all races that Stronger Communities wants someone to check to see if they actually have the legal right to vote. And it’s that fear of people going door-to-door checking that Fontes said could lead to intimidation — or worse, if those doing the checking operate on the premise that those on the list are not citizens.

And there is something else.

Fontes insisted on Monday that there is no “list”, just an estimate. In fact, Fontes testified that there is actually another “list” that suggests about 349,000 — close to 8% of all registered voters — may have the same problem with proof of citizenship, albeit for different reasons.

“We can’t trust any of this information because of the quicksand,” he said.

More to the point, Fontes said that even if he wanted to comply with the public records request — and he’s made it clear he doesn’t — he doesn’t actually have the names.

Instead, he told Blaney, who lacks the necessary proof, is actually with MVD. And Fontes said the agency said it would take eight employees working full-time for 50 days to actually create a clean list.

However, Fontes said he is not the record keeper.

“They’re suing the wrong people,” he said.

But Fontes later admitted that he received an initial list of about 98,000 from MVD. However, he said he cannot turn over that information to stronger communities because of a federal law that makes driver’s license information confidential.

The bottom line for the judge may be due to the fact that, after all is said and done, this is a simple public records access case.

Arizona law has a presumption that records in the hands of public officials are available for inspection and copying. There are exceptions for privacy interests, which are not relevant here because the entire voting archive is public.

But there is an exception for what has been defined as “the best of the state.” And that’s the provision Fontes is trying to use to deny entry, at least for now, based on what he said is the fear that those on the list could be targeted.

The secretary said he believes the government “should be as transparent as possible.”

“But if we weigh the competing interests of having a radical pursuit of my constituents versus meeting the public sentiment against disclosure, I would prefer public safety given all the circumstances that we’ve talked about here, given everything we’ve discussed .” he said.

And then there’s the fact that Arizona is the only state in the country that requires proof of citizenship to vote. Fontes said that sets the stage for those who would go out to challenge them to assume that “these people are illegal aliens who deserve to be strung up along with election officials who let them vote.”

Blaney said he will try to speed up a sentencing but did not give a date.