The Trump Administration Is Trying Again to Get Data on Every American Voter

The first request from Trump’s voting commission vice chair was rebuffed by the states.

Kris Kobach attends the first meeting of the Trump election commission at the White House on July 19.Chris Kleponis/ZUMA

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

On June 28, when theĀ vice chair of PresidentĀ Donald Trumpā€™sĀ election integrity commission sent a letter to all 50 states requesting sweeping voter data, he triggered aĀ bipartisan rebellion, with not a single state providing all the data he was seeking. Now he’s trying again.Ā 

The initial request fromĀ Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a national crusader for tighter restrictions on voting,Ā asked states to turn over voters’ personal information that included theirĀ Social Security numbers, party affiliation, military history, and criminal records.Ā Twenty-one states refused to provide any data to the commission, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. The rest pledged to share only limited publicly available data. Not even Kobachā€™s home stateĀ provided all the data he wanted.Ā 

Seven federal lawsuits were filed against Kobach and the commission for violating privacy and ethics laws. But the mere threat of the Trump administration collecting such data led thousands of scared voters to remove themselves from the voter rolls in swing states like Colorado. Of the nearly 3,800 people who de-registered in Colorado, 85 percent were Democratic or unaffiliated voters.Ā 

Earlier this week, a federal court ruled that Kobach could proceed with his request for voter data because Trumpā€™s commission was not an ā€œagencyā€ of the federal government and was exempt from undertaking a privacy impact assessment before collecting such data. On Wednesday, Kobach sent a second letter to all 50 states, once again asking them to turn over voter informationĀ to Trumpā€™s commission.Ā 

Kobach wrote that ā€œstatistical conclusions [will be] drawn from the data,ā€ promptingĀ concern among voting rights advocates,Ā given that the statistics Kobach uses to claim that voter fraud is widespread are almost always wrong.Ā 

Kobach is one of the only elected officials in the country who defends Trumpā€™s debunked claim that millions voted illegally in the 2016 election. When asked by MSNBCā€™s Katy Tur following the first meeting of Trumpā€™s commission if he believed Hillary Clinton won the popular vote, Kobach responded, ā€œWe may never know the answer to that.ā€Ā Kobach has also claimed that up to 18,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in Kansas, although there is no evidence to support that claim.

Kobach administers a program calledĀ Interstate Crosscheck System to search for double voting. He calls it a model for the nation, but it has been found to produce false matches 99 percent of the time. Academics from Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania who studied Crosscheck found that ā€œ200 legitimate voters may be impeded from voting for every double vote stopped.ā€Ā 

Despite Kobach’s contention that ā€œthe Commission will approach all of its work without preconceived conclusions or prejudgments,ā€Ā the unprecedented request for voter data and the track records of Kobach and other members of the commission have led to fears that Trumpā€™s commission will make false claims about voter fraud in order to build support for policies like strict voter ID laws, voter purges, and new hurdles to voter registration. (Just this week, a federal court imposed sanctions on Kobach for ā€œa patternā€ of ā€œmisleading the Court about the facts and record.ā€)Ā A day after the election, Kobach wrote to Trumpā€™s transition team and said he was preparing legislation to amend the National Voter Registration Act to permit states to require documentary proof of citizenship for voter registration.Ā In Kansas, that requirement has blocked 1 in 7 new voters from registering since 2013.Ā Ā 

Kobach’s request for voter data has raised privacy concerns. Politico called the creation of a centralized government database of American votersĀ a ā€œgold mine for hackers.”Ā When the commission received thousands of angry emails about Kobach’s request, it posted the letters on its websiteĀ without redacting private information like emails, addresses, and phone numbers.

There are also concerns about what the Trump administration plans to do with the data. A spokesperson for Vice President Mike Pence, the commission’s chair,Ā said the commission plans to run the voter data ā€œthrough a number of different databases, looking for the possibility for areas where voter rolls could be strengthened.ā€ But these government databases are not designed for that purpose, and the tools favored by Kobach, like Crosscheck, are notoriously unreliable.

SeveralĀ election officials have already restated their opposition to Kobachā€™s new request. Kentucky Secretary of State Alison GrimesĀ said in a statement, ā€œThe answer is again noā€¦the compilation of every American voter’s information would build a national voter registration database, which is unnecessary to improving our elections, opposite our Constitution and state’s rights, and puts voters’ privacy and personal data at risk.” California Secretary of State Alex Padilla said in a statement, ā€œThe commissionā€™s new request does nothing to address the fundamental problems with the commissionā€™s illegitimate origins, questionable mission or the preconceived and harmful views on voting rights that many of its commissioners have advanced.ā€Ā 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate