Eaton County FOIA response unacceptable - and wrong!
By Kristine Christlieb, MFEI News & Commentary Editor
February 24, 2025
A volunteer data analyst is celebrating a victory in his battle for Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)-requested election information.
On February 14, following a 26-minute, closed-door session, the Eaton County Ways and Means Committee unanimously approved a settlement agreement with Timothy Mauro-Vetter. Officials agreed to provide, without charge, the 2024 election data Mauro-Vetter requested.
In a lawsuit filed January 15, Vetter claimed Eaton County charged an excessive fee of $854.16 to fulfill a FOIA request for electronic election data.
The lawsuit also claimed the county “wrongly demanded full payment prior to providing records” to Mauro-Vetter, “arbitrarily and capriciously violated FOIA,” and “intentionally violated FOIA or has otherwise acted in bad faith.”
FOIA requests tied to November general election
In December 2024, Mauro-Vetter conducted his regularly scheduled, monthly download of election information from Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s office. Eager to begin analyzing data from the November general election, Mauro-Vetter fully expected the December download would include data from the prior month of November and the general election, but it didn’t.
When an explanation was sought, the Secretary of State’s Board of Elections blamed the county clerks, claiming all Michigan counties had not yet uploaded their final information to the state system, and that’s why it wasn’t included.
According to Vetter, “This statement by the Board of Elections was unprecedented. Never in the past did they ever hold up publishing the voter rolls based on missing data. They’ve always published with data missing — this was nothing new — so their reason for holding it up didn’t make sense.”
Not willing to wait another month for the state’s next data download, Mauro-Vetter sent a FOIA request to each Michigan county, individually requesting information from the November general election.
“The sooner data problems are spotted the better,” explained Mauro-Vetter. “From the 2020 election, we learned the hard way we were too slow to react. I didn’t want to be nearly sixty days out from the November election before uncovering a problem, so I decided to take the lead and gather the information myself from each county.”
Vetter and his team of analysts kept meticulous records of how each county responded to their FOIA requests. Even though citizens are legally entitled to have access to election data, some counties outright refused to provide it, others ignored or somehow overlooked the request (even after multiple follow-up attempts), some charged for the data, and some fulfilled the FOIA data request quickly and at no charge.
Eaton, one of fifteen counties to charge a fee for fulfilling the data request, had, by far, the highest fulfillment fee.
*Original fee of $854.16 was reduced on appeal to $655.15.
Thomas J. Lambert, the Michigan lawyer who represented Mauro-Vetter and whose legal expertise is FOIA litigation, says, “There is a lot of wrong that happens [in FOIA requests], but I don’t want to attribute malice to every wrong.”
In the lawsuit with Eaton County, Lambert detailed the ways officials went wrong. He pointed out they hadn’t created FOIA procedures and guidelines or made them public on the county’s website; they had “wrongly calculated fees for physical media for digital records;” they wrongly demanded full payment prior to providing records to Plaintiff [Mauro-Vetter].”
“No one wants to file a lawsuit, but sometimes it is the only way to get compliance with the law,” said Patrice Johnson, founder and chair of Michigan Fair Elections Institute (MFEI). “In the coming months, MFEI will be watching for legislation designed to weaken FOIA laws. We can’t let that happen. FOIA laws are powerful tools citizens can use to track government actions.”
Kristine Christlieb serves as senior correspondent on MFEI's communications team. She publishes Trust but Verify on Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/trustbutverifyreport/p/voter-registration-blitzkrieg?r=2haa2x&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
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