Lawsuits filed over Trump voting commission requests

CONCORD, N.H. — President Donald Trump’s commission investigating election fraud faced further pushback Thursday in the form of lawsuits seeking to block its collection of detailed information about every voter in the United States.

The commission last week asked secretaries of state for voters’ names, birthdates, partial Social Security numbers and other detailed information if it is public under state laws. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia are refusing to comply, while many others plan to provide the limited information that is public under their laws.

On Thursday, two New Hampshire lawmakers joined the local American Civil Liberties Union chapter in suing Secretary of State Bill Gardner, arguing that turning over the data doesn’t fit any of the specific scenarios allowed under state law. Gardner, a Democrat and member of the commission, plans to submit what is considered public in New Hampshire: names, addresses, party affiliations and voting history.

The Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center also filed a lawsuit this week in federal court seeking to stop the commission from gathering the data. The group argued that the commission should have completed an assessment of privacy concerns before making the request, that it was using a non-secured website to receive the information and that partial Social Security numbers should not be made public.

In a court filing Wednesday, the commission argued that the advocacy group did not make a case that any of its members would have been harmed by gathering the information and that there is nothing wrong with one government entity sharing public information with another. The commission also said the data would be transmitted securely and then stored on a secure White House server.

In the letter sent to states, commission vice chairman Kris Kobach said: “Please be aware that any documents that are submitted to the full Commission will also be made available to the public.” But in Wednesday’s court filing, Kobach said he meant for that to apply only to answers to a series of questions about the role of the commission — not to the voter data.

Kobach, the Republican secretary of state in Kansas, also told the judicial panel that the data request, as he noted in the letter, applied only “if publicly available under the laws of your state.”