Judge declines to bar voter- data work
WASHINGTON — A federal judge on Tuesday declined to temporarily bar President Donald Trump’s voting commission from collecting voter data from states and the District of Columbia, saying a federal appeals court likely will decide the legality of the request.
U. S. District Judge Royce Lamberth of the District of Columbia denied an emergency motion by Common Cause, a nonprofit advocacy group. The group said the request for voting history and political party affiliation by the Trump administration violates a Watergateera law that prohibits the government from gathering information about how Americans exercise their First Amendment rights.
Lamberth advised the group to flesh out its claims by documenting the commission’s activity from its July 19 meeting while the lawsuit continues.
“I’m just a way station [ to an appeals] judge who will get to decide” the matter, Lamberth said, urging the parties to build a fuller record for higher courts.
The decision came in the latest attempt by opponents to block the commission’s request for information on more than 150 million registered voters.
Commission officials have said 30 states have agreed to share at least some data, adding that the commission requested only publicly available data and would anonymize any information it released.
Trump formed the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity in May after repeatedly suggesting that millions of illegal voters cost him the popular vote against Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Studies and state officials of both major parties have found no evidence of widespread voting fraud.
Some state leaders objected to the commission’s request, saying the effort could reveal personal information, suppress voter participation and encroach on states’ oversight of voting laws. Privacy experts warned that registered voters would face increased risks, potentially identifying home addresses of military families, partial Social Security numbers used as passwords for commercial services, and individuals’ felony records.
Another federal judge in Washington, U. S. District Judge Colleen Kollar- Kotelly, ruled last month that the commission is a White House advisory panel and thus exempt from requirements to conduct a privacy impact review before it gathers the data. That decision has been appealed.
Common Cause argued that the commission’s request is substantively unlawful, not merely procedurally flawed.
The suit argues that the commission — led by Vice President Mike Pence with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican, as vice chairman — recently described new actions that make it a federal agency under the law.
Kobach, for example, at the July 19 meeting compared the commission’s work to an Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck program under which 30 states pool data to identify, purge and potentially prosecute voters registered in two states.
The Common Cause suit claims Kobach also directed staff to collect “whatever data there is” within the federal government that “might be helpful” to the investigation, including information kept by the departments of Justice and Homeland Security and the U. S. Census Bureau.
ORDER APPEALED
In a separate case, on voting rights, Kobach late Monday filed a notice saying he is appealing to the 10th U. S. Circuit Court of Appeals an order to submit to a deposition by the American Civil Liberties Union. The closed deposition is scheduled for Thursday.
The ACLU said Tuesday that Kobach’s appeal of the deposition order to the 10th Circuit is “bizarre.”
Two federal judges in Kansas have each twice ruled that Kobach misled the court about the contents of documents he was photographed taking into a November meeting with Trump, then the president- elect, as well as a separate draft amendment to the National Voter Registration Act.
Kobach was holding the document at his side with the print facing out so photographs made it possible to read part of what was written on it.
The court fined Kobach $ 1,000 and ordered him to testify about the documents.
The photographs prompted the ACLU to seek to obtain the documents and any related materials on his proposed changes to federal voting law. Kobach essentially told the court and the ACLU that he didn’t have any such documents — the misrepresentation the court cited in imposing sanctions against him.
The ACLU’s lawsuit challenges a Kansas voter registration law that requires people to submit citizenship documents such as a birth certificate, naturalization papers or U. S. passport. An email cited in the case shows Kobach wants to amend federal law to make clear such proof- of- citizenship requirements are permitted.
In May, the court forced Kobach to turn over the documents to ACLU lawyers as part of the discovery process of gathering evidence. Now they are arguing whether the sealed documents should be made public.
Kobach did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent to his spokesman.
Information for this article was contributed by Spencer S. Hsu of The Washington Post and by Roxana Hegeman of The Associated Press.