Florida fails to stand for its voters.
A few weeks after Donald Trump was elected president in November with almost 2.9 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton, he tweeted, “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” It was a baseless claim, debunked by factchecking organizations, state elections officials from both parties and academic experts. It was pointless, too; Trump’s Electoral College majority was never in doubt. Other Republican leaders, including Speaker Paul Ryan, distanced themselves from the new president’s conceit.
Yet in May, Trump appointed a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity with marching orders to identify “vulnerabilities” in elections that could allow “fraudulent voter registrations and fraudulent voting.” And last month, the commission’s vice chairman — and lead fisherman — Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach asked states to turn over “publicly available voter roll data,” which could include the names of registered voters, their addresses, their dates of birth, their party registrations, their voting history, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers and other information.
At least a dozen states, both blue and red, aren’t going along with this effort to legitimize the president’s conspiracy theory about last year’s election. They flatly refused the commission’s request for their voter information. Regrettably, Florida is not joining them.
Gov. Rick Scott, a political ally of the president’s, passed the request like a hot potato to his chief elections official, Secretary of State Ken Detzner. On Thursday, Detzner announced that Florida would provide the commission with publicly available voter information, but leave out Social Security numbers and other pieces of information exempt from disclosure under the state’s public records laws.
Like so many other issues, this one is being viewed through a partisan prism in Florida. The Democratic Party, its candidates for governor, several of its U.S. House members and its state senators called for Florida to reject the commission’s request. Meanwhile, Republicans who normally complain about federal interference in state affairs lost their voices.
Some GOP leaders in other states didn’t put loyalty to their party ahead of loyalty to their citizens. Last week Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann said of the commission’s request: “They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great state to launch from.”
Hosemann added that Mississippi has the right “to protect the privacy of our citizens by conducting our own electoral processes.” His rebuke is a timely reminder that states, not the federal government, run elections in this country.
While the commission didn’t ask states for anything that isn’t publicly available, a centralized repository of information on voters from across the country could prove especially tempting to hackers. It could be one-stop shopping for any enemy intent on meddling in U.S. elections.
States that cooperate with the commission also could lend credibility and political momentum to any federal proposals to make it harder to cast ballots in future elections. Kobach has been one of the nation’s leading advocates of stricter requirements for registration and voting. While Florida law doesn’t allow the state to withhold public information, Detzner could have made clear to the commission that its request would not be given any preference or priority.
It’s too bad Detzner didn’t push back harder against the commission’s request. After all, Florida also happens to be a pretty good place for jumping into the Gulf of Mexico.