Publicly available data should be made available. Even to Trump.
A federal judge on Monday cleared the way for President Donald Trump’s commission on election fraud to resume collecting detailed voter roll information from the states.
The commission asked states last month to provide publicly available data including registered voters’ names, birth dates and partial Social Security numbers, but it later told them to hold off until a judge ruled on a lawsuit filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington.
U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, in the District of Columbia, denied the advocacy group’s request to block the data collection in a ruling that commission vice chairman Kris Kobach called “a major victory for government accountability, transparency and the public’s right to know about the integrity of our elections processes.”
“The commission requested this publicly available data as part of its fact-gathering process, which is information that states regularly release to political candidates, political parties and the general public,” said Kobach, the Republican secretary of state in Kansas. “We look forward to continuing to work with state election leaders to gather information and identify opportunities to improve election integrity.”