Secretary of State Paul Pate announced today that he will not share “personal voter information” with the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Rather, his office will provide voter list data that are public records “if a request is made that complies with Iowa law.”

President Donald Trump created the commission by executive order last month, charging the body with investigating “those vulnerabilities in voting systems and practices […] that could lead to improper voter registrations and improper voting, including fraudulent voter registrations and fraudulent voting.” Jamelle Bouie wrote at Slate,

In isolation, this sounds unobjectionable. There’s nothing inherently wrong with creating a commission to address problems in our election system. The trouble is who is leading that commission: Vice President Mike Pence and, more importantly, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Far from a neutral figure, Kobach is a fierce advocate for harsh, restrictive voting laws. By itself, his presence is a sign that this commission is a sham, and that the drive for “confidence” is actually a push to raise the barriers to voting and participation.

Election law expert Rick Hasen noted that a commission designed to improve election integrity in a fair manner

would have bipartisan elder statesmen heads (like earlier voting commissions); it would have professional staff and rely on people with experience in running and analyzing elections; it would look for areas of bipartisan consensus.

Trump’s commission is none of these things. There is no professional staff, a B-list of token Democrats to give the commission a bipartisan veneer, and the work is being done out of the Executive Office of the President. (Given that Trump is an announced candidate for the next presidential election, he’s hardly a person who can be counted on for a fair and impartial review.)

Most importantly, the commission includes a rogue’s gallery of the country’s worst voter suppressors. Not just Kobach, but former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, who was notorious for rejecting Ohio voter registration forms because they were not printed on heavy enough paper. And on Thursday, Trump added Hans von Spakovsky, one of the original leaders of what I termed the Fraudulent Fraud Squad.

On June 28, Kobach wrote to every secretary of state, asking for information including

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.

Justin Levitt of the legal blog Take Care outlined some of the obvious privacy concerns raised by Kobach’s “massively irresponsible” and possibly illegal request.

Vanita Gupta, former head of the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, declared that the letter “confirms: Pence and Kobach are laying the groundwork for voter suppression, plain & simple.” As Hasen explained,

It is quite easy to imagine someone in the Executive Office of the President—who is apparently doing the data analysis, rather than relying upon folks who have experience working with voter rolls and who are not working for a declared candidate for presidential reelection—messing with this data and showing what we already know: there’s a lot of bloat on the rolls, dead voters not removed etc—and then using this as a pretext to make it harder to register and vote. Seems like this whole exercises of the sham voter fraud commission is designed to provide a pretext for Congress to amend the National Voter Registration Act to make it harder to register to vote (including by allowing states to require documentary proof of citizenship when registering in federal elections). No one should trust the likely shoddy data analysis of this commission headed by people with a track record for not being accurate about the prevalence of voter fraud, working for a President who has made wildly unsupported allegations of voter fraud.

Several Democratic governors and secretaries of state announced yesterday that they would not comply with Kobach’s request, so as not to help perpetuate a “myth” of widespread voter fraud.

But Iowa’s Secretary of State Paul Pate is a Republican who just spent months pushing for a bogus “election integrity” law that creates new barriers for thousands of eligible voters to cast ballots (for the gory details, see here and here). Pate also has a history of releasing data on “election irregularities” that were mostly mistakes, not examples of fraudulent voting. CORRECTION: The Secretary of State’s Office did not plan to publish these numbers, but were responding to a reporter’s request. See second update below.

So I wondered, would Iowa’s top elections official go along with the effort to create a “national file with hundreds of millions of records,” including “the name, address, political party affiliation (why is this relevant?), and voting history of virtually every voter in America”?

Pate’s communications director Kevin Hall released a statement on behalf of the secretary of state this morning.

“My office received a letter from the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity late Wednesday and has not yet responded to it. There is a formal process for requesting a list of registered voters, as specified in Iowa Code. We will follow that process if a request is made that complies with Iowa law. The official list request form is available on the Iowa Secretary of State’s website, sos.iowa.gov. Some voter registration information is a matter of public record. However, providing personal voter information, such as Social Security numbers, is forbidden under Iowa Code. We will only share information that is publicly available and complies with Iowa Code. I am attending a national meeting of Secretaries of State next week, where the Commission’s letter will likely be discussed.”

Expect fireworks at next week’s meeting, which will probably get more media attention than all previous national gatherings of secretaries of state combined.

I’m reassured to know that Pate doesn’t intend to bypass Iowa law in order to hand over sensitive data. The Republican secretary of state from Mississippi, Delbert Hosemann, wins the prize for most entertaining response, however.

They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great state to launch from,” Hosemann said in a statement on Friday. “Mississippi residents should celebrate Independence Day and our state’s right to protect the privacy of our citizens by conducting our own electoral processes.”

Turns out Kobach himself won’t give Kansans’ Social Security information to his own commission, Bryan Lowry reported for the Kansas City Star today. But stay tuned:

“If the commission decides that they would like to receive Social Security numbers to a secure site in order to remove false positives, then we would have to double check and make sure Kansas law permits,” Kobach said.

“I know for a fact that this information would be secured and maintained confidentially,” he added in response to security concerns.

Kobach has said that personal information provided by states will not be disclosed, but many readers, including other election officials, have interpreted a line saying that documents will be made public to mean that all of the information will be disclosed. […]

Kobach said Friday that the commission has no legal authority to compel states to hand over the information but that the Justice Department does possess such power. He said he could not say whether the department would become involved in the effort to obtain information from states.

Any relevant comments are welcome in this thread.

UPDATE: Charles Stewart wrote a good post on the Kobach letter (hat tip to Kedron Bardwell).

I want to make clear that there is no intrinsic problem with matching voting lists against other lists and reporting the results. In fact, valuable insights can emerge from linking voter records. I don’t know a better way to advance knowledge and practice than to conduct research, report the results, and then hash out what they mean.

But here’s the caveat. As a social scientist who has conducted voter roll matching both for scientific research and for litigation, I know how hard it is to do this right. For example, the well-known “birthday problem” makes it likely that two different people will be mistakenly matched to one another. Few people have the expertise to handle these complexities correctly. […]

The letter reflects a naive understanding of how to go about voter list matching. […]

Acquiring voter files from every state and matching them — among themselves and with other databases — will be a quagmire. Second, public auditing of voter files based on database matching (and other procedures) is something that should be done more often and more publicly. Because we have entrusted states to manage the voter files — for better or worse — a state-directed initiative would seem a better strategy than a controversial, high-visibility activity of a temporary federal commission.

SECOND UPDATE: Hall responded,

I take issue with this statement of yours: “Pate also has a history of releasing data on “election irregularities” that were mostly mistakes, not examples of fraudulent voting.” This is false.

We didn’t release any data to anyone who did not request it, and we always included the caveat that things like bouncebacks do not necessarily constitute fraud. The writer of the AP story you linked repeatedly requested data over several weeks. We finally gave him what we had, but clearly stated these did not necessarily constitute fraud.

I know you have a bias, but that doesn’t mean accuracy has to take a back seat to it.

Point taken. The Iowa Secretary of State’s office wasn’t planning to release these numbers on “election irregularities.”

I do “have a bias” against policies that make it harder to exercise a fundamental constitutional right, at great public expense, for no legitimate public purpose.

I should have written that Pate has a history of citing Iowans’ lack of confidence in the system to justify changes that would not improve “election integrity” or address the real causes of (very infrequent) improper voting. There was no reason to link technology upgrades like electronic poll books with imposing new barriers on eligible voters. Pate ignored objections from many county auditors and spent a huge amount of energy advocating for voter ID and signature verification, neither of which would prevent some ineligible voters from registering or casting a ballot. Linn County Auditor Joel Miller pointed out that the seven people with felony convictions who may have voted in his county last year (representing 0.006 percent of the ballots) all had IDs.

Unfortunately, the secretary of state “has a bias” against acknowledging evidence from other states, which shows that voter ID will prevent many citizens from casting a ballot, or will force them to cast a provisional ballot at greater risk of going uncounted. Seniors, students, racial minorities, and people with low incomes are more likely to be affected by the new restrictions. Not only Democrats, but also representatives of non-partisan organizations like the AARP and the Iowa Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander Affairs tried to convey that message. Instead of listening, Pate kept pushing an agenda that is popular with the Republican base and GOP politicians who stand to benefit from suppressing voting by certain groups of people.

THIRD UPDATE: A reader shared her e-mail correspondence with the Secretary of State’s office. Her original e-mail to Pate:

Sec Pate: I have lived in Iowa for 37 years, and have voted in all elections since 1985 (except one local sch board election when I simply forgot). I am adamantly opposed to the release of my public information (and any of my private information) in Iowa’s voter registration rolls to the president’s commission on voter fraud. The collection of the information sought by the commission will not serve the purpose for which it is claimed to be needed. Because regulation of voting is solely within the purview of the individual states, it would make more sense to gather information generally about each state’s voter registration processes, analyze those, and offer constructive ideas for improvement.

If we, as a nation, are committed to voter integrity and voting security, then the creation of a federal mega database makes no sense. Start with the hacking and work backward from there to the registration processes.

I specifically oppose the state of Iowa sharing my voting information with this commission that has no authority to remedy voter security issues. The data is to be uploaded to an unsecured digital platform. I’m sure you can use your imagination to conjure up all the ways this mega database can be abused.

Please remove my voter registration from Iowa’s voter rolls before you send any information. I will re-register at a later date.

Director of Elections Dawn Williams responded,

Good afternoon and thank you for contacting our office, Secretary Pate asked that I respond to you request. The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity did send a letter last week requesting voter registration information. Based on the letter alone, we will not be sending Iowa’s information.

Iowa has a very specific processes for requesting voter registration information, how the list is used, and what data we can provide and how it is transmitted. Information provided in all voter registration lists is consistent with Iowa law and will not provide information protected by state law. Voter lists do not contain the voter’s Social Security Number, whole or last 4 digits, or their driver’s license number. Additionally, the vote history that we provide is limited to which elections a voter votes in. There is no record, public or private as to how a person marks his/her ballot.

It is our sincere hope that by providing the above information, it will allow you to place the importance to register and vote above your concerns. Additionally, many voter list requests are for historical information and cancelling your registration will not erase past information. Should you choose to cancel your registration, you may do so by completing a written request and sending it to your local county auditor.

Please feel free to contact me if you have additional questions.

JULY 18 UPDATE: Sarah Beckman reported for ABC 5, that the Secretary of State’s office has not sent any information to the White House commission, because on July 10, “the commission sent an email to all the states asking that they not send any data while they deal with challenges to the request in court.”