The murder of Minnesota House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband and the shootings of Sen. John Hoffman and his wife in their homes are raising questions about whether to restrict access to the home addresses of elected officials.

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“I’m still in shock,” says DFL Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, himself a former state lawmaker. “And listening to the details about how it wasn’t just two, but four elected officials targeted it just makes your blood run cold.”

Simon took proactive steps in the hours after the lawmaker shooting to restrict access to two public databases controlled by his office that include address information.

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One website has candidate registration information, and the other is the digital version of the so-called “Blue Book” Legislative Manual. Both include the home addresses voluntarily submitted by lawmakers as well as information about their businesses and occupations.

“Even now that the gunman has been apprehended, we are thinking through our next steps,” Simon said of the move to temporarily take the websites down while they review state law. “Just how accessible do we need this personal address information to be? The address information that candidates give when they voluntarily file for office is public, but as we navigate through these legal issues, we’re determining now that just because it’s public doesn’t mean we need to put it on a website.”

Simon says he realizes the “genie is out of the bottle” when it comes to protecting all of the personal information of public officials because it’s so readily available through so many private online sources. In fact, federal investigators say Vance Boelter used several private websites to find out information about his potential targets.

“When you say I don’t think anybody oughta know where I live, well, you know, there are literally hundreds, perhaps thousands of computer systems that know where we all live,” says public information advocate Don Gemberling of Minnesotans for Open Government.

Gemberling is certain that lawmakers will try to pass legislation to further restrict public information on government websites, but he cautions them to proceed carefully.

Public watchdog groups that verify that candidates actually live in their districts and lobbyists who rely on public websites to tell them about the backgrounds and occupations of lawmakers will be put at a disadvantage in influencing public policy.

Gemberling is also concerned about a growing trend toward less transparency in state government and efforts to “shut down” public access.

“Everybody talks about transparency, but when it comes to having, for example, open hearings at the legislature, open meetings, that kind of thing, there’s less and less of that,” he says. And so unless the ‘good government’ people show up and say we really have to think about the other side of this, then I think we’re going to see a lot of shutdowns.”

The legislature doesn’t reconvene in regular session until Feb. 17, 2026.