NBC reports still more flaws in the Trump-instigated voter data gathering effort that only Arkansas Secretary of State Mark Martin complied with before ongoing federal lawsuits put a halt to things.
It seems:
1) There’s already a bipartisan, multistate effort to share data both to root out fraud and — unlike the average Republican effort — encourage voter registration.
2) Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who’s leading the vote info drive for Trump, has a sorry track record
NBC quotes Shane Hamlin, executive director of the Election Registration Information Center:
Hamlin, a former election official in Washington State, said he was stunned when he read the letter from Trump’s commission seeking voter information from all 50 states.
“It wasn’t clear how they were going to protect the data and generate results that were actually going to be usable,” he said. “If you have garbage in, you’re going to get garbage out.”
The first person to dump the trash was Mark Martin, who speedily delivered names of 1.7 million Arkansas people, plus street address, phone numbers, birth dates and which partisan primaries they’d voted in. No dissent was heard from his pal David Dunn, a former Arkansas legislator, who got a seat on the Trump data dump commission thanks to his friendship with Martin. Martin didn’t provide some information Kobach wanted — partial Social Security numbers, military record, criminal record.
David Becker, the executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, was also a part of the team that helped set up ERIC.
“Every chance they had, they went the wrong way,” Becker said of the Trump commission. “This is a textbook study on how not to use data.”
“There is no comprehensive security plan, no detailed methodology or outline,” he added about the commission’s data request.
UPDATE: The ACLU lawsuit over Kobach’s shady commission has turned up e-mail that reveals Kobach’s designs on changing federal law in the interest of vote suppression.