The U.S. Department of Justice contends Kansas has given the federal government Social Security numbers and Department of Motor Vehicles registration information on registered voters.
The DOJ sought the information as part of a sweeping push by the Trump administration to stop alleged voter fraud.
But Kansas officials said that isn’t true at all.
The Trump administration last year asked 48 states and Washington, D.C., for voter files. That request includes someone’s name, birthday, address, driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number.
The DOJ is hoping to analyze the data, check it across other databases and send states a list of people who shouldn’t be registered to vote. States would then take away those people’s ability to vote. Alaska and Texas already have signed agreements to do so.
The federal government requested this data from Kansas last summer, according to a letter sent to the secretary of state.
The Beacon reported in December that Kansas had declined to provide sensitive information and only handed the federal government public data — data any person in the state could access.
But Eric Neff, an attorney for the DOJ, said in a December court hearing in California that Kansas has provided Social Security numbers and DMV information for every registered voter.
“Offhand, right now, off of memory I believe the states are Kansas, Indiana — there are four,” Neff said in court.
The Beacon emailed Natalie Baldassarre, the senior media affairs manager at the U.S. Department of Justice, who doubled down and said the DOJ stood by what was said in court.
At first, Republican Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab’s office declined to comment on the story and declined to deny the allegation. But then the agency sent a statement saying “Schwab has only provided DOJ with the public voter registration list.”
The Beacon subsequently sent open records requests seeking emails between Kansas and the DOJ, letters between Kansas and the federal government, and any agreements between the federal government and the state over voter information sharing.
No records came back that showed Kansas agreeing to or saying they would provide the data. But the DOJ remains adamant that it already has the data and has had it for months.
Mark Johnson is skeptical of the DOJ’s statement. He was the lead attorney in a decades-old case against former Secretary of State Kris Kobach. He sued Kobach and Kansas hoping to throw out a state law that required everyone to show proof of citizenship to vote.
Johnson, a partner with Dentons law firm who teaches law at the University of Kansas, still knows people in the secretary of state’s office. Johnson said that if it comes down to believing Kansas or the federal government, he believes Kansas.
“The lawyer who said that (Kansas turned over data),” Johnson said, “and based on what (staff from Schwab’s office) has told me, that’s incorrect.”
If true, Johnson is happy the secretary of state isn’t just handing over the information.
He said the requests from the federal government are illegal. The federal government has sued a few dozen states trying to get this information, and the feds have already lost three court cases trying to force the data exchange. Those states are California, Michigan and Oregon. Those cases can still be appealed.
Johnson said the federal government can always ask for the information, but they can’t force states to give it.
A host of concerns
Eileen O’Connor, senior counsel at the Brennan Center, a group tracking which states do or don’t give the information, said the federal government is asking for something it has never requested before. And that comes with a whole host of concerns.
There are privacy issues, O’Connor said, calling a database of sensitive information from registered voters a hacker’s dream. Then there are concerns about what the Trump administration will do with the data.
She said trying to use this data to find ineligible voters will almost certainly end with some U.S. citizens losing their right to vote. These systems have made mistakes before.
The Texas Tribune reported in July that state officials tried to weed out noncitizens and other ineligible voters. Officials checked 1,657 records and nearly 300 had errors that needed to be double-checked for accuracy, nonprofit watchdog group American Oversight found.
O’Connor said the DOJ has no expertise in voting and it hasn’t made it clear how it would even use the data to accurately check for mistakes. On the other hand, states have handled voting for decades, have systems in place and regularly clean up voter rolls.
Micah Kubic, the executive director of the ACLU of Kansas, remembers the legal fights between Kobach and Johnson. He said Kansas has tried to create a system where voters need to show proof of U.S. citizenship to register to vote.
The goal was to clean up voter rolls and make sure nobody was improperly casting ballots, something similar to what the federal government is trying now.
It ended up with more than 30,000 people, or 12% of the total voter registration applications from 2013-2016, being blocked. That law was thrown out.
Kubic is also concerned about data privacy and taking away people’s rights. Kubic supports same-day registration, automatic registration and expanded language access for non-English speakers to improve elections.
The Trump administration’s proposal just won’t work, he said.
“It is unquestionably a bad idea,” Kubic said. “One that compromises our values, compromises our rights and compromises our trust in those who are the custodians of the data.”
This story was originally published by The Beacon, a fellow member of the KC Media Collective.
