A request for publicly available Colorado voter data made by the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity has been renewed by the commission's vice chair, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach.
The request, made in late June, caused an uproar from privacy-minded voters who were in opposition to Secretary of State Wayne Williams' move to honor it. Kobach is renewing his request because it had been put on hold by a pending court decision. Earlier, this week the court denied the motion made by the Electronic Privacy Information Center in a D.C. district court, allowing the commission to move forward again.
"In light of that decision in the Commission's favor, I write to renew the June 28 request as well as to answer questions some States raised about the request's scope and the Commission's intent regarding its use of the registration records," Kobach wrote.
Williams previously stated that he would turn over the voter data as his "job is to follow the law" when it comes to requests for public voter-roll data. Social Security numbers, date of birth, and driver's license numbers are private under state law and aren't part of the data included with an EX-003 report.
By mid-July more than 3,000 Colorado voters had canceled their registrations following the Trump administration request. The Denver Post notes the number now stands at 5,072 voters who've unregistered, out of more than 3.3 million active voters in the state.
"It’s my hope that citizens who withdrew their registration will re-register, particularly once they realize that no confidential information will be provided and that the parties and presidential candidates already have the same publicly available information from the 2016 election cycle," Williams said in a statement.
The election integrity commission was created by executive order and has been controversial from its start. Many worry that the work will be less about voter fraud and instead may suppress voting. You can read commission vice chair Kris Kobach's letter to the Colorado Secretary of State below:
