The American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against Secretary of State Kris Kobach, charging that his “reckless” operation of a federal data base used to detect voter fraud is compromising sensitive voter data.
The ACLU, which just won a big case Monday against the state’s proof-of-citizenship requirements, claims in its class-action lawsuit that Kobach’s office is sharing personal voter information in unencrypted emails that leave voters vulnerable to identity theft.
Kobach said there is no merit to the lawsuit, saying it’s another ACLU attack on “secure and fair elections in America.”
“The ACLU is attacking states that try to keep our voter rolls clean. I will fight them every step of the way,” Kobach said. “The people of Kansas will win this lawsuit.”
The ACLU’s lawsuit, he said, ignores last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding Ohio’s efforts in purging voter rolls.
The lawsuit targets the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, which compares voter registration records from one state with the 26 other participating states to check for dual voter registrations and possible double voting.
Critics say Crosscheck is vulnerable to security breaches and removes voters from the rolls because it erroneously confuses people sharing the same name and birth date.
They contend the program is rife with false positives, heightening the odds of legal voters being cut out of casting a ballot.
The ACLU, for instance, contends that the system produces false positives in 99.5 percent of the cases when it incorrectly claims two people with the same name are a single person.
The lawsuit cites an instance from November 2017 when sensitive information about Kansas voters was released as part of an open records request filed in Florida seeking information about the Crosscheck program.
The Florida elections office released 200 emails, including one from Kobach with unencrypted documents that contained voters’ partial Social Security numbers and other personal identifying information, according to the lawsuit.
The lawsuit alleges that Kobach failed to redact the partial Social Security number of 945 voters listed in the document.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Kansas City., Kan., was brought on behalf of three Kansas residents who were inaccurately flagged for being registered to vote in Florida and Kansas. The lawsuit said all three shared the same names with voters in Florida.
The lawsuit said personal information from all three voters was compromised when Florida fulfilled the 2017 open-records request that included the unencrypted email from the Kansas secretary of state.
The ACLU’s announcement comes a little more than a week after a federal judge in Indiana issued a temporary injunction barring the state from using a 2017 law allowing the state to remove voters from the rolls who were tagged in the crosscheck system.
In the Indiana case, the NAACP argued that the Crosscheck program as employed there would disproportionately harm African-American voters because minority groups were more likely to share common names and were more likely to be flagged.
There was legislation introduced in Kansas this year that would have removed Kansas from the Crosscheck program but it never got out of committee.
Kobach has defended the program as an effective way of stopping voter fraud.
The ACLU and Kobach have been battling for several years over the state’s proof-of-citizenship requirement for would-be Kansas voters. A judge on Monday struck down the citizenship requirement.
Kobach has touted the ACLU’s opposition of his voting policies as a badge of honor in the cause of protecting the integrity of the country’s elections systems.
