Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity
One thing that rankles President Donald Trump is that he was not the most popular candidate in the 2016 Presidential election. In fact, he lost the popular vote to Hilary Clinton by approximately 3,000,000 votes, 2.1% of the total votes cast for President. Trump’s explanation is that Clinton’s vote total was the result of widespread voter fraud. In a tweet on November 27, 2016, Trump asserted “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Although he has produced no evidence of fraudulent voting, Trump has continued to make this claim and threatened an investigation. The truth is that voter fraud is exceedingly rare.
On May 11, 2017, the President issued Executive Order 13799, which created the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. The ostensible purpose of this Commission is to study the registration and voting processes used in Federal elections. Vice President Pence chairs the Commission and has appointed as Vice Chair Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. An early supporter of President Trump, Kobach has been a key architect of anti-immigrant policies and voter suppression rules around the country. In one of his first Commission duties, Kobach issued a letter to all state Secretaries of State requesting the production of sensitive voter registration and voting history information.
The letter requested only publicly available information and suggested that the responsive information could be submitted electronically. Here is the specific information requested:
The publicly available voter roll data for [your state], including, if publicly available under the laws of your state, the full first and last names of all registrants, middle names or initials if available, addresses, dates of birth, political party (if recorded in your state), last four digits of social security number if available, voter history (elections voted in) from 2006 onward, active/inactive status, cancelled status, information regarding any felony convictions, information regarding voter registration in another state, information regarding military status, and overseas citizen information.
As of this writing 44 states have declined to provide some or all the information requested, often because some of it is deemed unavailable to the public or is not collected by the state. But some states such as California and Virginia refuse to cooperate in any way. West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner has not yet responded.
It may be unnecessary for West Virginia to decide how to respond. On July 3, 2017, the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed an Emergency Motion for Temporary Restraining Order in U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia alleging that the Commission had begun collecting and aggregating sensitive personal information of voters without any procedures in place to protect voter privacy or the security of the state voter data. In particular, EPIC alleged that the Commission failed to comply with the Privacy Impact Assessment requirements of the federal E-Government Act of 2002. A hearing on the motion will be held on Friday, July 7.
Assuming that collection of state voter information is not enjoined, what response can we expect from the West Virginia Secretary of State? State law already permits the Secretary of State to sell state voter lists and data files containing some of the information the Commission has requested. WV Code 3-2-30. However, this information may not contain the voter’s telephone number, email address, Social Security number or driver’s license number. In addition, no lists or voter data files may be used for commercial or charitable solicitations, sold or reproduced for resale. The Secretary of State is authorized to share data files across state lines with state or local election officials, but there is no express authority to share data with federal officials.
The Commission’s request for voter data is troubling for a number of reasons. The data will reside in the White House with no legal restriction on how it can be used. It is not clear how the Commission will use it in the first place, because each state collects and stores its information in unique ways making state to state comparisons difficult. There is no structure for ensuring that the information, aggregated for the first time on a national basis, would be secure from hackers. And as the plaintiffs in the EPIC lawsuit argued,
It does not matter that a particular state might disclose its voter data to some other requester under some other circumstances: this requester — the Commission — is barred by law from gathering this data without sufficient constitutional and statutory privacy safeguards.
The safest thing for Secretary of State Warner to do is to respond with questions of his own about how the information will be used and how it will be safeguarded. The Commission has no subpoena power, and Warner should not rush to comply with some artificial deadline before he is certain that our voter information will be safe and properly used. Second, he should not disclose the last four digits of a West Virginia voter’s Social Security number under any circumstances. That is prohibited by state law. Third, if he decides to provide the information he should sell it to the Commission on the same terms as he would sell it to research groups and political parties. State law does not authorize him to release the data for free to anyone. And no doubt there are provisions in the form contract of sale used by the Secretary of State’s office when this type of data is sold that bind the purchaser not to use the data for commercial purposes.
But here is an even better strategy. Responding to requests for voter information from federal officials is not among the statutorily enumerated powers of the Secretary of State. WV Code 3-1A-6. This suggests that the decision whether to provide the information belongs to the Governor, who holds the state’s executive power. Governor Justice should simply direct Warner to decline the request to provide voter information, or respond in that fashion himself. Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe took this approach, saying “I have no intention of honoring this request. Virginia conducts fair, honest, and democratic elections, and there is no evidence of significant voter fraud in Virginia. . . 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.”
