Blog: Kris Kobach and every American’s voter data

Kris Kobach and the presidential advisory commission studying election integrity want every registered voter’s data going back 11 years.

Which should give us all the image of a fox in the hen house.

Kobach, Kansas’ secretary of state, is vice chairman of President Donald Trump’s commission. Remember, Trump has said millions of illegal votes were cast for Hillary Clinton last November, though he has offered no proof.

That’s the commission’s job, and Kobach has asked secretaries of state in the other 49 states to send the commission the data: Names, birthdates, addresses, Social Security information, voting history and more.

The goal, Kobach says, is to have the best data possible, including the last four digits of Social Security numbers, to conduct research. Critics pounced Thursday, saying it’s the first step to getting some voters off their states’ rolls. Not the first time Kobach has been accused of the practice.

“(Vice President Mike) Pence and Kobach are laying the groundwork for voter suppression, plain & simple,” tweeted Vanita Gupta, chief of the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department under President Barack Obama.

Democratic secretaries of state in California and Connecticut said they would release only publicly available information. Others are concerned with how the data will be transmitted and if databases could be hacked.

Kobach, a Republican candidate for Kansas governor in 2018, has a history of tightening voting laws, some of which have been met with lawsuits. While Trump’s commission should have access to all voting public records, secretaries of state are wise to be wary about revealing private information to a commission created from a voter-fraud claim that has no basis in fact.

This story was originally published June 30, 2017 at 1:43 PM with the headline "Blog: Kris Kobach and every American’s voter data."