Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
White House aims to keep voter data on its computers
Group asks judge to block requests for elections info
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration announced plans to keep voter roll data it has requested from all 50 states and the District of Columbia on White House computers under the direction of a member of Vice President Mike Pence’s staff, it told a federal judge Thursday.
The disclosure of the White House role came in a government filing required in a lawsuit by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, a watchdog organization that has asked a federal judge in Washington to block a presidential advisory commission’s requests for voter data until the impact on Americans’ privacy can be fully assessed.
A decision on the request for a temporary restraining order by U.S. District Judge Colleen KollarKotelly is expected as early as Friday.
The panel’s request for voting information has caused a nationwide uproar. The states that won’t provide all of their voter data grew to at least 44 by Wednesday, including some that said they would provide nothing. Others said that they will provide what information they can but that state laws control what can be made public.
The vice president’s office said the commission’s letter asked only for publicly available data under state laws, stating that 20 states have agreed to share at least some data and 16 more are reviewing the request.
President Kobach Donald Trump has said that widespread voter fraud cost him the popular vote in November, although critics say the claim is unsubstantiated and is a pretext for voter suppression.
In a court filing, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, vice chairman of the Trump panel and a leading conservative voice on concerns about voter fraud, said the data would be stored through the White House.
The executive order in May creating the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity stated that the panel would be funded and staffed through the General Services Administration, a federal agency subject to privacy requirements.
But that arrangement has shifted, according to Kobach’s filing. “At this time, there are no plans for the General Services Administration to collect or store any voter registration or other elections-related data for the Commission,” Kobach said in response to questions from the court.
“Commission staff will download the files . . . onto White House computers,” he wrote, adding that an employee of the vice president’s office will be responsible with White House information technology staff for collecting and storing any data.
Kollar-Kotelly, a 1997 Clinton appointee, had pressed for details about committee membership and operations after the government asked her to toss out the EPIC lawsuit. The government defended its request for voter details, saying the data were “publicly available” and that the commission planned to “de-identify” sensitive data before releasing documents. It also said the commission was a presidential advisory panel not subject to federal privacy review requirements.
In its response, EPIC President Marc Rotenberg called the privacy implications of the demand for voter roll data “staggering” and said the commission had no authority “to gather hundreds of millions of voter records from the states or to create a secret database stored in the White House.”