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Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s list of felons believed to have had their political rights restored cannot be kept secret under the legal exemption cited by the governor’s office, according to an opinion released Tuesday by the state’s advisory council on open records.

In an opinion issued this week, the Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council said the list of roughly 206,000 felons believed to meet the criteria of McAuliffe’s sweeping rights restoration order does not qualify as an executive working paper.

The FOIA council’s opinions are nonbinding and cannot compel release of a contested government record.

Even if the list was prepared for “personal and deliberative use” in the governor’s office, the council wrote, the exemption would no longer apply if the list was distributed to the Virginia Department of Elections for voter registration purposes. The department has used the list, shown to have glaring errors, to remove felons’ names from a list of prohibited voters within the voter registration system.

In the same opinion, the council said the elections department can withhold the same list under protections for voter registration data, because state law makes no distinction between information on registered voters and the list of prohibited voters within the same system.