States fight Trump commission's effort to gather voters' personal data
An effort to gather voters’ details to prevent alleged fraud has been met with a furious backlash, as states fear an attempt at mass voter suppression
An attempt by Donald Trump’s newly convened commission on election integrity to gather detailed information on the country’s voting population prompted a furious backlash on Friday, as at least 24 states either resisted the request on privacy protection grounds or flat-out rejected it as a backdoor effort at mass voter suppression.
...
Another 11 states raised questions, in many cases because they are concerned their laws maintaining confidentiality and privacy could become moot once their lists were in the hands of the federal government. Bizarrely, even Kansas – with Kobach as elections chief – said it could not fully comply with the request, because state law did not permit release of even partial social security numbers.
Although the strongest opposition came from Democrats, the resistance to Kobach’s request crossed party lines. Many state-level Republicans such as Ohio secretary of state Jon Husted insisted they ran clean and fair elections and did not have issues with fraud.
Election experts do not dispute there is room for improvement in many aspects of the US electoral system, including the streamlining of its voter registration records. But they say this commission is blatantly partisan – Pence, Kobach, and fellow member Kenneth Blackwell, are all Republicans with track records of championing vote suppression mechanisms, and seemingly uninterested in adopting meaningful solutions to real problems.
“If they were serious about improving integrity in our elections, they would be talking about providing resources so our voting machines and voter registration databases are safe from hacking,” said Myrna Perez, director of the voting rights and elections project center at New York University’s Brennan Center. “They would be talking about an automatic voter registration system that was expansive and thoughtfully designed.”.
Kobach’s letter coincided with a separate request sent out by the justice department asking states to demonstrate their compliance with the voter purge aspects of a 1994 voter registration law. Many voting rights activists suspect Kobach is in favor of amending or scrapping the 1994 law, based on a document captured by a photographer last November when Kobach met then-president elect Trump at his New Jersey golf club. When a judge discovered that Kobach had denied the document’s existence in court filings, he fined Kobach $1,000 and upbraided him for his “deceptive conduct and lack of candor”...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/201 ... ris-kobach