Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon said Thursday that he's "troubled" by a sweeping request from President Donald Trump's Election Integrity Commission for detailed information about every voter in all 50 states, and he made no guarantee he will comply with it.
Minnesota election chief skeptical of Trump panel's voter information request
July 1, 2017 at 12:43AM
Simon said in an interview that his office is reviewing legal issues raised by the request for full voter roll data, including the name, address, party affiliation, last four digits of Social Security numbers and voting history back to 2006 of potentially every voter in every state.
"They're asking for a lot of stuff, and it's a lot of personal stuff, on literally millions of people in Minnesota," Simon said.
A DFLer, Simon said he's concerned that the Republican officials overseeing the commission, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Vice President Mike Pence, have been what he called "loud and proud" in their support of Trump's sensational claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2016 election.
"This has the look and feel to me of a sort of precooked, predetermined outcome," Simon said.
In the request, Kobach said that "any documents that are submitted to the full Commission will also be made available to the public."
Under federal law, each state must maintain a central file of registered voters. States collect different amounts of information on voters. While the files are technically public record, states usually charge fees to individuals or entities who want to access them. The most frequent purchasers are political parties, which use the data to compile voter lists.
In May, Trump created a commission to investigate alleged acts of voter fraud after he claimed, without evidence, that 3 million to 5 million illegal immigrants voted in the 2016 election.
The commission's request is already bringing objections from several states, with Virginia and Kentucky both saying they will refuse to participate. In Connecticut, Secretary of State Denise Merrill said in a statement that Kobach "has a lengthy record of illegally disenfranchising eligible voters in Kansas. … Given Secretary Kobach's history we find it very difficult to have confidence in the work of this Commission."
Earlier this month a federal judge fined Kobach $1,000 for "presenting misleading arguments in a voting-related lawsuit," according to Politico.
"The concern is that this is going to be used to justify regressive and disenfranchising federal law," said Myrna Pérez, deputy director of the Democracy Program at NYU Law School's Brennan Center.
Vanita Gupta, CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and former head of the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, said on Twitter that the letter is "laying the groundwork for voter suppression, plain & simple."
The White House press office did not return a request for comment, nor did the commission respond to an e-mail request.
Trump and his allies have said the commission's work is necessary to prevent what they contend are widespread instances of voter fraud. Evidence for that claim is exceedingly thin. Kobach has made it a central issue of his tenure and has achieved a total of nine voter fraud convictions. Most of the people convicted were older Republican voters, and at least one claims he was targeted for an "honest mistake."
Academics who have studied the issue for decades say voter fraud — particularly of the type that strict ID laws championed by Kobach and others are intended to combat — is vanishingly rare, and that voter ID requirements are a burdensome solution. A federal judge ruled that some of Kobach's proposed ID requirements constituted a "mass denial of a fundamental constitutional right."
While civil liberties advocates are concerned with what Kobach might do after assembling what amounts to a nationwide voter file, privacy advocates worry about the implications of making such data available to the public, as the commission says it intends to do. It hasn't specified how it would make the data available.
Simon expects the request will be a major topic of conversation at the annual conference of the National Association of Secretaries of State next week in Indianapolis.
"It will be an opportunity to compare notes and have some real candid conversations about this," he said.
This report contains information from the Washington Post.
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