A North Carolina court on Tuesday struck down state legislative maps drawn by Thomas B. Hofeller—a Republican gerrymandering guru who died last year—and now GOP lawyers want to destroy his digital files, which were used as evidence in the case. Republican politicos are trying to keep information from Hofeller’s computer backups private, and have filed to seal or destroy more than 75,000 files, which covered his work in every state and included data central to the legal battle over adding a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. Kathay Feng, the national redistricting director for Common Cause North Carolina, said in an interview with The New York Times that “the Hofeller files are important because they’re the only thing that will allow the American people to know the truth behind the efforts to rig redistricting and elections,” she added. “They have to be made public.”

Lawyer Dalton L. Oldham, who was a consultancy partner with Hofeller, argued that Hofeller’s information was covered by lawyer-client privilege because it contained trade secrets and confidential work for clients like the Republican National Committee. A brief submitted by Oldham stated that “disclosure of these documents would reveal a major political party’s internal, proprietary and highly confidential communications and strategy.”