States push back on vast request for voter information

President Donald Trump lashed out Saturday at the growing number of states - including Iowa - so far refusing to give voters' names, addresses and personal information to a commission he created to investigate his allegations of widespread voter fraud.

'Numerous states are refusing to give information to the very distinguished VOTER FRAUD PANEL. What are they trying to hide?” Trump said on Twitter.

The voting commission last week stumbled into public view, issuing a sweeping request for nationwide voter data that drew sharp condemnation from election experts and resistance from more than two dozen states that said they cannot or will not hand over all of the data.

The backlash marked the first significant attention to the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity since Trump started it last month and followed through on a vow to pursue his unsubstantiated claims that voter fraud is rampant and cost him the popular vote.

The White House has said the commission will embark upon a 'thorough review of registration and voting issues in federal elections,” but experts and voting rights advocates have pilloried Trump for his claims of widespread fraud, which studies and state officials alike have not found.

They say they fear, rather, that the commission will be used to restrict voting.

Those worries intensified last week after the commission sent letters to 50 states and the District of Columbia asking for a trove of information, including names, birth dates, the last four digits of voters' Social Security numbers, voting histories and, if possible, party affiliations.

The letters also asked for evidence of voter fraud, convictions for election crimes and recommendations for preventing voter intimidation - all within 16 days.

While the Trump administration has said it is just requesting public information, the letters met with swift and sometimes defiant rejection. By Friday, 25 states were partially or entirely refusing to provide the requested information; some said state laws prohibit releasing certain details about voters, while others refused to provide any information because of the commission's back story.

Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate, a Republican, said he had received the commission's letter but not shared the information, The Gazette reported Saturday.

Iowa Code specifies a formal process for requesting voter information, Pate said. His office would fulfill the request if it complies with state law. 'However, providing personal voter information, such as Social Security numbers, is forbidden under Iowa Code,” Pate said.

Other state officials around the nation, of both parties, were at times more harsh.

'This entire commission is based on the specious and false notion that there was widespread voter fraud last November,” Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, said in a statement. '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.”

California, a state Trump singled out for 'serious voter fraud,” also refused to participate. Alex Padilla, the California secretary of state, said providing data 'would only serve to legitimize the false and already debunked claims of massive voter fraud.”

Vice President Mike Pence, who is chairman of the commission, hosted a conference call with its members Wednesday morning, three weeks before they are scheduled to have their first meeting in Washington. During the call, GOP Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the vice chairman, told the other members about the letters.

A Pence spokesman defended the letters.

'The commission very clearly is requesting publicly available data in accordance with each state's laws in an effort to increase the integrity of our election system,” Jarrod Agen, the spokesman, said in a statement. 'The commission's goal is to protect and preserve the principle of one person, one vote because the integrity of the vote is the foundation of our democracy.”

The request drew a new round of scrutiny to Kobach, a candidate for governor of Kansas in 2018 and an intellectual and political leader among conservatives who want to crack down on illegal immigration and the perceived threat of voter fraud.

In office, Kobach aggressively pursued cases of potential fraud and promoted the 'Crosscheck” system to see whether voters had registered in multiple states. But he frequently lost in court, as judges warned that measures meant to keep noncitizens off the rolls were ensnaring too many legitimate voters.

'It looks like they're putting together a database of who people voted for,” said Jason Kander, a former Missouri secretary of state who runs the nonprofit group Let America Vote. 'Democrat, Republican, independent, everybody should be outraged by that. This is from the same people, from Kris Kobach to Donald Trump, who've tried to make it harder for people to vote, and this seems like a step in the process. If the Obama administration had asked for this, Kris Kobach would be holding a news conference outside the Capitol to denounce it.”

The idea of collecting all national voter data for an audit has traveled through conservative circles for years. True the Vote, a group that promoted the fear that bogus voter registrations led to stolen votes in the 2008 election, also advanced the theory that millions of illegal votes denied Trump a popular mandate in 2016.

In West Virginia, Wood County Clerk Mark Rhodes said he is confused by the angry reaction from some states.

'The request that went out is asking for public information, not any confidential information,” he said. 'If you want to make a match, you want to make sure you have enough data to avoid a false positive. In previous data matches, you might be Mark D. Rhodes on your driver's license and Mark Douglas Rhodes on your voter registration, and you've got a problem.”

Some states have said that they do plan to hand over information, albeit less than the broad sweep requested.

Wisconsin's elections commission administrator, for one, said the state would provide voter information that's public - for a fee of $12,500.

But experts described the request as unprecedented in scope, a recipe for potential voter suppression and troubling for privacy issues.

'This is an attempt on a grand scale to purport to match voter rolls with other information in an apparent effort to try and show that the voter rolls are inaccurate and use that as a pretext to pass legislation that will make it harder for people to register to vote,” said Rick Hasen, an election-law expert at the University of California, Irvine.

The Washington Post, Reuters and James Q. Lynch of The Gazette contributed to this report.