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By Marilyn Odendahl
The Indiana Citizen
November 20, 2024

Under questioning from state Democratic lawmakers, Indiana Deputy Secretary of State Jerry Bonnet disputed the contention that nearly 600,000 Hoosiers included on a list sent to the federal government less than a month before the Nov. 5 election were suspected of being noncitizens and registering to vote illegally.

Bonnet appeared before the Indiana State Budget Committee last week to present the secretary of state’s funding request for the 2026-27 biennial budget. Secretary of State Diego Morales was not at the hearing.

After Bonnet’s presentation, Rep. Ed DeLaney, D-Indianapolis, quizzed him about the Oct. 11 letter and list of 585,774 names Morales and Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita sent to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The state officials requested the federal agency assist in verifying the citizenship status of the names on the list.

DeLaney asked Bonnet if the list contained the names of Hoosiers who were registered to vote but may not be citizens.

Bonnet replied DeLaney’s description was incorrect. He said there were half a million individuals who had registered to vote over the past year who did not have the Indiana REAL ID and a Social Security number.

“There was an intention to check that list to identify if there were individuals on that list that did not match up to citizens,” Bonnet told DeLaney. “Having this list of individuals … and checking that list to see if there were noncitizens on that list is not saying that there was a belief that they were not citizens.”

Morales and Rokita stated in their letter that they wanted to prevent voter fraud and ensure Hoosiers’ confidence in the integrity of the electoral process. A chief way to accomplish those goals, they wrote, was to confirm that every person registered to vote in the state is a U.S. citizen.

“Under current law, there is no single method for verifying to a reasonable degree of certainty the citizenship of all Indiana voters,” Morales and Rokita wrote. “We therefore seek to utilize all tools at our disposal to verify voters’ citizenship and help ensure the integrity of our state’s voter registration system.”

DeLaney pressed Bonnet about the registration process. The representative noted that instead of saying Hoosiers on the list had registered without showing their REAL ID, the secretary of state’s office was saying it did not have any record of those individuals presenting IDs when registering to vote.

Then DeLaney pointed out that people on the list who had voted in the 2024 general election would have had to show their driver’s license with a REAL ID when they arrived at the polling place. He asked Bonnet if the secretary of state’s office had, essentially, cross checked the names on the lists with the poll books to see whether individuals had the proper ID and, therefore, could be removed from the citizenship verification list.

“I don’t have that,” Bonnet replied. “I’m not sure all that data is brought up today yet in the (Indiana Statewide Voter Registration System), because that’s part of a workflow over about the next 20 to 30 days.”

Finally, DeLaney asked Bonnet if the secretary of state’s office was going to continue to verify the citizenship of Indiana voters when President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

“I think it’s still open,” Bonnet said. “I think the office is still waiting for a response from the federal agency.”

In their letter, Morales and Rokita noted federal and Indiana law prohibit noncitizens from registering to vote. Violating either the federal or state law is a crime and could result in the noncitizen serving a prison sentence, they wrote.

 Sen. Fady Qaddoura, D-Indianapolis, asked Bonnet if anyone was being prosecuted for voting illegally in Indiana during the 2024 general election.  Bonnet replied he was not aware of any prosecutions.

Pushing to publicly release the list

Since announcing they had requested the USCIS to verify the citizenship of nearly 600,000 Hoosiers, Morales and Rokita have refused to release the list of names. Their letter stated they had provided the name and date of birth for each individual on the list, which, they said, is “sufficient to allow USCIS to verify these individuals’ citizenship status through the use of USCIS’s Person Centric Query Service.”

Asked by DeLaney whether the secretary of state’s office was going to release the list publicly, Bonnet was uncertain.

“The attorney general’s assessing that because it’s not really clear whether that list is a public list,” Bonnet replied.

As part of its request to the USCIS, the secretary of state and attorney general divided the nearly 600,000 names into three separate lists depending on the information that was missing from the voter registrations.

The Indiana Citizen and Common Cause Indiana, joined by the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and other groups, have each filed Access to Public Records Act requests regarding the list of names.

Julia Vaughn, executive director of Common Cause Indiana, said Common Cause and CLCCR did not ask for the list itself. Instead, they have asked the secretary of state for a breakdown of the total number of individuals on the list from each county. Also, she said, they requested copies of any communication between the attorney general, secretary of state and any political party or political campaign.

The Citizen asked for the entire list of names. After the attorney general’s office responded it was reviewing the records and would make all “responsive and disclosable records” available within a “reasonable time period,” The Citizen filed a complaint with the Indiana public access counselor, seeking to force the two state offices to release the three lists.

In the complaint to the access counselor, Bill Moreau, president of the Indiana Citizen Education Foundation and publisher of The Indiana Citizen, wrote that “every person on those lists has the right to know whether they are on one.”

Moreau had asked Britt to accelerate the deadline for a response from the state agencies to Nov. 1, so that the people on the verification lists would know before the election. However, the public access counselor followed his standard protocol and gave the attorney general and secretary of state three weeks – until Nov. 21 – to respond to the complaint.

 “I just think it was a stunt,” Vaughn said of the letter from Morales and Rokita. “I think they achieved what they wanted to do, which was to scare a bunch of people and put this idea out there that you can be challenged” when you go to vote.

Dwight Adams, an editor and writer based in Indianapolis, edited this article. He is a former content editor, copy editor and digital producer at The Indianapolis Star and IndyStar.com, and worked as a planner for other newspapers, including the Louisville Courier Journal.

The Indiana Citizen is a nonpartisan, nonprofit platform dedicated to increasing the number of informed and engaged Hoosier citizens. We are operated by the Indiana Citizen Education Foundation, Inc., a 501(c)(3) public charity. For questions about the story, contact Marilyn Odendahl at marilyn.odendahl@indianacitizen.org.