AARON LAVINSKY, DML – STAR TRIBUNE STAR TRIBUNE Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, shown in 2015, said Friday that he won’t fulfill a request from a presidential panel to ship voter registration information for some 4 million state voters to Washington.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon said Friday that he won’t fulfill a request from a presidential panel to ship voter registration information for some 4 million Minnesota voters to Washington.
Simon questioned both whether Minnesota law would allow him to provide the information to President Trump’s Election Integrity Commission and to what end it would be used.
“When Minnesotans registered to vote, they didn’t ever think their personal information would end up in some federal database in Washington, D.C.,” said Simon, a DFLer elected to his statewide post in 2014.
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Vice President Mike Pence are overseeing the commission, which Trump established in May to explore his unfounded claim that millions of people voted illegally in the last election. In a letter Thursday, Kobach asked election chiefs in every state to provide, if public, the names of registered voters, party affiliation, last four digits of Social Security numbers, voting history back to 2006, felony convictions, military history and voter registration in another state. Read more.
