At least 13 states have rejected a request for personal information about voters from a presidential commission on vote fraud, of which Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach is vice chairman.
Kobach sent letters to each state and the District of Columbia asking for voters’ personal information. The request asked for names, addresses, voting history and the last four digits of voters’ Social Security numbers.
The commission was set up to look into voter fraud after President Donald Trump claimed that he lost the popular vote in 2016 because millions of people voted illegally — a claim that numerous state election officials from both parties and outside experts have dismissed as groundless.
As of Friday afternoon, 13 states had outright rejected the request from the Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity. Officials in several other states said they either would not supply all the information or needed more information before deciding.
New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner, a member of the commission, defended the request for voter roll information and said he will provide the state’s publicly available information.
In New Hampshire, the public database consists of names, addresses, party affiliations and voting history, including whether people voted in a general election and which party’s primary they voted in. It does not include Social Security numbers or birthdates.
Gardner got numerous complaints Friday about the request, but said the information is already public and is in fact routinely sold to outside groups.
Vermont Secretary of State Jim Condos, a Democrat, said his office is bound by law to provide publicly available voter information to the commission, but his office will not provide voters’ birth dates, Social Security numbers and driver’s license numbers to the panel.
Condos on Friday said that there is no evidence of the kind of voter fraud alleged by Trump.
“I believe these unproven claims are an effort to set the stage to weaken our democratic process through a systematic national effort of voter suppression and intimidation,” he said.
He also alluded to concerns about Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
“This commission is a waste of taxpayer money unless it focuses on the real issue of election integrity — the attempts by foreign entities to influence our elections,” Condos said in a statement. He said the commission also would have to submit an affidavit, per state law, affirming the voter data would not be used for commercial purposes.
Some officials did not mince words in their “no’s.”
“They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico, and Mississippi is a great state to launch from,” Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann wrote in a statement.
California Secretary of State Alex Padilla said in a statement that strongly criticized Kobach that he would “continue to defend the rights of all eligible voters to cast their ballots free from discrimination, intimidation or unnecessary roadblocks.”
As a Kansas official, Kobach has been a leading backer of immigration restrictions and of measures to put new requirements on who is allowed to vote. His opponents note that he was fined last week for misleading a federal court in a voting rights case.
Democratic elected officials in several states criticized the commission itself, not just the information request.
“The president created his election commission based on the false notion that ‘voter fraud’ is a widespread issue — it is not,” Kentucky Secretary of State Allison Grimes wrote.
In an odd contradiction, Kobach said that Kansas, like some other states, will partially reject at least one aspect of the request.
“In Kansas, the Social Security number is not publicly available. … Every state receives the same letter, but we’re not asking for it if it’s not publicly available,” he told the Kansas City Star.
The states that have fully rejected the request are California, Connecticut, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, North Dakota, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, and Mississippi.
Others, including Nevada, Ohio, Oklahoma and Kansas, will turn over some of the requested information. And Wisconsin has suggested that the commission could purchase the publicly available information, just as political campaigns do. Officials in Washington state said they were reviewing the request.
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.