States resist unjust ploy
Kris Kobach, the vice chairman of a new White House commission examining voter fraud, sent an unusual letter to all 50 states last Wednesday. The letter requested all state election officials to send the following from their voter-roll data to the White House by July 14: the names, addresses, birth dates and registered political parties for every registered voter in the country, the last four digits of every voter’s Social Security number, and, finally, which elections each voter has participated in since 2006.
Kobach is the current secretary of state for Kansas. In Kansas, he drew criticism (and lawsuits) for his aggressive actions, including instituting a law that required people to show a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals issued a unanimous ruling that he had engaged in “mass denial of a fundamental right” by blocking 18,000 voting applicants.
There’s little reason to believe Kobach has learned from the avalanche of studies showing no evidence of widespread voter fraud in any state of this union.
Yet he seems to believe he has the right to request sensitive personal information about America’s voters with little justification at all. For many of these states, releasing this kind of sensitive information would violate their own state constitutions.
In California, details such as home addresses, phone numbers and email addresses are considered confidential — though exceptions can be made for political campaigns, scholarly research and journalistic pursuits. Nevertheless, the law prohibits the posting such sensitive information on the Internet or other places where it could be available for open viewing.
Kobach didn’t say how the commission plans to use this data, only that it intends to “fully analyze vulnerabilities and issues related to voter registration and voting” — and he has pledged to make the data he collects available to the public.
On Thursday, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla released a statement saying he wouldn’t be providing the information “to a commission that has already inaccurately passed judgment that millions of Californians voted illegally.”
New York and Kentucky have refused to participate. In Georgia, Wisconsin, Vermont, Oklahoma and many other states, officials have said they won’t release any information that isn’t already public.
If Kobach were really interested in our election integrity, he would be scrutinizing our outdated voter technology, suppressive voter laws and Russian interference.