Republican officials have called for state and federal investigations of Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs after learning her office on Jan. 7, 2021, asked Twitter to review two tweets about the state’s voter registration database that it deemed to be election misinformation. Twitter subsequently removed the tweets.

Republicans claim Hobbs — a Democrat who was recently elected to become the state’s next governor — used her government office to censor free speech and benefit her election effort. But there’s less here than meets the eye.

The email asking for a review of the tweets was sent nearly five months before either Hobbs or her Republican opponent, Kari Lake, even declared their candidacies for governor. The subject of the tweets, a company that helped facilitate the state’s new voter registration database, was hired by Hobbs’ Republican predecessor, and the database has nothing to do with the state’s voter tabulation system.

On Jan. 7, 2021, the day after an attack on the U.S. Capitol that was the culmination of months of false claims about election fraud, C. Murphy Hebert, communications director for the Arizona secretary of state’s office, sent an email to the nonprofit Center for Internet Security asking for a review of two tweets that she said, “falsely assert that the Voter Registration System is owned and therefore operated by foreign actors.”

“This is an attempt to further undermine confidence in the election institution in Arizona,” Hebert wrote.

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