Kansas will not provide social security numbers to voter fraud panel

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R) says his state will not provide certain information to the voter fraud commission for which he serves as the vice chairman. 

The Kansas City Star reported Friday that Kobach has declined to hand over the last four digits of voters’ Social Security numbers to the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, the panel created by President Trump to investigate his claim of widespread voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election.

“In Kansas, the Social Security number is not publicly available,” he told the Star. “Every state receives the same letter but we’re not asking for it if it’s not publicly available.”

Kobach sent a letter to 50 secretaries of state this week requesting that they provide the commission with troves of information on registered voters, including names, dates of birth, driver license numbers and the last four digits of Social Security numbers.

{mosads}The Social Security numbers, Kobach said, were necessary to “prevent false positives” in potential cases where two voters have the same name and date of birth.

So far, at least 20 states have either declined to provide certain pieces of information — like Social Security numbers — to the commission or have flatly refused the requests altogether.

Kobach said the commission does not expect states to provide information that they do not make publicly available.

Some officials have said that their state’s laws do not permit them to release information that’s not publicly available. Others, however, said they would not comply with the request in protest of Trump’s establishment of the commission, which some have accused of being a voter suppression tool.

Trump has claimed multiple times since his November victory that he would have won the popular vote if not for millions of people casting ballots illegally. 

That claim has been widely debunked and rejected by state officials on both sides of the aisle.