Photo by Victoria Pickering.
President Donald Trump’s commission on voter fraud requested voter information from every state and D.C., and the District, Virginia, and Maryland are all saying “Hell no.”
Last week, Kris Kobach, vice chair of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, asked the states to provide the panel with voter registration data, including sensitive information like their addresses, voter history from 2006 onward, political party, the last four digits of their social security number, and more.
Virginia was one of the first jurisdictions to fire back.
“I have no intention of honoring this request,” said Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe in a statement last Thursday. “At best this commission was set up as a pretext to validate Donald Trump’s alternative election facts, and at worst is a tool to commit large-scale voter suppression.”
D.C. too said it would not be providing the commission with any information.
“The best thing I can do to instill confidence among D.C. residents in our elections is to protect their personal identifiable information from the Commission on Election Integrity,” said Mayor Muriel Bowser in a statement on Friday. “Its request for voter information, such as social security numbers, serves no legitimate purpose and only raises questions on its intent.”
The District may even go a step further. Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen is proposing emergency legislation to make sure the D.C. Board of Elections is not required to give the president’s commission any voter data.
“If the so-called Election Integrity Commission wants to talk about real ways to ensure more Americans’ votes are counted, we would be happy to share our work in passing automatic voter registration legislation with Secretary Kobach,” Allen said in a statement.
Maryland waited until Monday to announce that the state would join the growing ranks of states that are rejecting the request.
The response came from Democratic Attorney General Brian Frosh, rather than Governor Larry Hogan, a Republican.
“The assistant attorneys general representing the State Board of Elections have considered the request to the Board for the personal information of millions of voters and have determined that the requested disclosure is prohibited by law,” Frosh said in a statement, calling the request “repugnant” and urging Hogan to “speak out against this effort and to reject any further attempt to intimidate voters and obtain their personal information.”
Indeed, even Kobach, who also serves as the Kansas Secretary of State, cannot fully comply with his own request, because Kansas doesn’t make social security numbers publicly available.
The commission is the result of an executive order signed by Trump in May, with Vice President Mike Pence as chairman and Kobach, a controversial politician who has overseen the implementation of some of the nation’s harshest voting laws.
Kobach, who won’t publicly say whether he believes Trump’s false claim that 3 million people illegally voted in the 2016 election, was sanctioned by the courts in June for “deceptive conduct.” He’s also running for governor.
Trump attacked the majority of states denying the panel’s request over the weekend. “Numerous states are refusing to give information to the very distinguished VOTER FRAUD PANEL. What are they trying to hide?” he tweeted.
Rachel Kurzius