Newark — Only 18 months after New Jerseyans lived with a governor who shirked his official duties to campaign for the presidency, residents are now saddled with a lieutenant governor siding with voter suppression and privacy invasion efforts while similarly ignoring the job she currently is paid with $141,000 in taxpayer money to do to run for higher office.

Guadagno is regularly holding campaign events during the day, when she should be attending to official state business.  The Murphy campaign has filed OPRA requests so taxpayers can learn how often, or how little, Guadagno has been working.

Murphy campaign spokesperson Derek Roseman pointed out, “Taxpayers got stiffed when Chris Christie put his personal ambition ahead of his job, now Lt. Governor Guadagno is taking a page out of the Christie playbook. Instead of protecting the personal information of millions of New Jerseyans, Ms. Guadagno is out campaigning on the taxpayers’ time.”

That refusal to do her official duties was exemplified recently in Guadagno’s oft-repeated claim that her recusal from election matters meant she could not weigh in on a request for state voter data by the Trump administration panel being run by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has a history of voter suppression. But in a January 25 letter, Guadagno clearly recused herself only “from all matters involving the 2017 Primary and General elections.”

Protecting the voting rights of New Jerseyans is not a partisan election-year job, and Guadagno’s claim that her recusal prevented her from ruling on the matter is disingenuous.

Under state law (N.J.S.A. 19:31-18.1), release of voter lists is statutorily limited to requests made by New Jersey voters. Had Guadagno not disassociated herself from her duties as New Jersey Secretary of State, she could have protected voters from having their information summarily handed over by the state to the Trump administration, setting a precedent for allowing partisan federal panels to sidestep state law to access residents’ information.