FARGO, N.D. (Valley News Live) – At the North Dakota State Capitol, lawmakers from both sides are trying to find answers to keep themselves and their colleagues safe.
“It’s an important topic of conversation that we’re having in the legislature,” said House Minority Leader, Zac Ista.
House Minority Leader Zac Ista says this discussion began after Minnesota State Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were killed and State Senator John Hoffman and his wife were injured. Officials called the incidents politically motivated attacks.
Shortly after the shootings, the addresses of North Dakota lawmakers were removed from the legislative website citing safety concerns.
At Tuesday’s Legislative Procedure and Arrangements committee meeting, home address was a topic of discussion.
“How do we reconcile requirements in state law that require candidates and office holders to have their home address posted on official forms and documents and then that address can obviously be found quite readily on the internet,” said Ista.
Currently, if you run in an election, you fill out an affidavit of candidacy, which has both a residential and mail-in address which becomes public information and can be found through a public records request.
Part of the conversation Tuesday was if those documents should be redactable.
“I think we have to balance. There probably doesn’t need to be an expectation that constituents can just knock on your front door and have a meeting at any time. We can have meetings in public spaces and in the Capitol we all have phone numbers and email addresses to contact us,” said Ista.
During the meeting, the Deputy Secretary of State suggested changing the open records law to keep lawmakers’ addresses private or having them get P.O. boxes to keep their home addresses out of the public eye.
There are a few entities throughout the state that currently have protections. These include: law enforcement officers, prosecutors, justices of the Supreme Court, and workers within correctional facilities.
