A committee of the state Legislature is considering a plan to pull the window shades on government records again.

The Government Operations Interim Committee is meeting this morning to discuss whether to classify birth dates on voter registration rolls as private records. The birth dates are now part of the public record.

The proposal purports to fight identity thieves on the rationale that removing a birth date from the public domain will make a significant difference.

Unfortunately removing birth dates will not stop serious identity thieves. But it will help to make Utah government even less transparent to everyone else. If one wants to find an easy way to close public records, the bugaboo of identity theft has evolved into a near-perfect tool. It boils down to horror stories that sound ... well, horrible, about lives reduced to shambles. Such stories strike an emotional chord, but public policy should not be based on them.

Reducing publicly available information is not going to solve the problem. There is little, if any, evidence that identity thieves use open records laws -- ever -- to acquire information. Making a formal request leaves a paper trail about the requester.

Identity thieves have easier ways to get what they want, from sifting through garbage to stealing mail. Some engage in "phising" trips, impersonating a bank or online shopping site and asking people to "resubmit" their personal data.

The current proposal, floated by the state elections office, won't stop identity thieves. However, taking the birth dates off the voter records makes it harder for independent observers to detect voter fraud.

In Washington state, reporters and the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, a free-enterprise think tank, requested voter records after the state's hotly contested 2004 gubernatorial race to look for possible fraud. The independent surveys found cases of felons illegally voting, people voting multiple times and even a couple of instances in which people voted in the name of a dead person.

The revelations were made possible by using birth dates to fully identify the individuals involved. If birth dates had been withheld from the records, as Utah wants to do, it would have been a lot harder to ferret out the fraudulent votes. There would have been no way to know if the same person managed to get on the voter rolls multiple times or if it was truly a case of different people sharing a common name. Without birth dates, moreover, it would have made it impossible to cross reference the rolls with death and criminal records.

This is just one example of how birth dates in public records provide a public service. There are many more.

The Citizens Access Project at the University of Florida ranks Utah as one of the most secretive states when it comes to post-election data. It usually takes a court order to pry out public information. Closing down even further by eliminating birth dates from voter rolls -- which are already public documents -- is just a bad idea.

Rather than closing off information to stop an imaginary threat, the state should be looking at making government more transparent to the people to whom it must report.