July 24, 2017
A federal judge on Monday allowed President Trumps voting commission to go forward with collecting voter data from 50 states and the District, ruling the White House advisory panel is exempt from federal privacy review requirements whatever additional risk it might pose to Americans information.
The ruling averted a public setback for a president who has claimed widespread fraud cost him the popular vote in November. The commissions request for the voting information of about more than 150 million registered voters remains controversial, with many state leaders from both parties voicing objections about its potential to reveal personal information, suppress voter participation and encroach on states oversight of voting laws.
The panels June 28 letter to the states requested that they turn over publicly-available voter roll data, including name, address, date of birth, party registration, partial Social Security numbers and voting, military, felony and overseas history, among other data.
On July 10, the White House clarified that it had scrapped plans to use a Pentagon-operated website to accept the data and had designed a new system inside the White House to take the submissions.
Those changes appeared crucial in a 35-page ruling by U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of Washington said.
The mere increased risk of disclosure stemming from the collection and eventual, anonymized disclosure of already publicly available voter roll information is insufficient to block the data request, she wrote.
Kollar-Kotelly, who was appointed by president Bill Clinton in 1997, ruled against the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a watchdog group that sought to block the commissions data request because the panel had not conducted a full privacy impact statement as required by a 2002 federal law for new government electronic data collection systems.
She concluded that while EPIC had the right to sue under the law for a privacy review, the commission was a presidential advisory panel, not a federal agency subject to the privacy law.
Neither the Commission or the Director of White House Information Technology who is currently charged with collecting voter roll information on behalf of the Commission are agencies of the federal government subject to the courts review in this matter, Kollar-Kotelly wrote.
To the extent the factual circumstances change, however for example, if the
powers of the Commission expand beyond those of a purely advisory body this determination may need to be revisited.
Kollar-Kotelly wrote the only added risk to privacy were if the White House computer systems are more vulnerable to security threats than those of the states, or that its de-identification process would be inadequate.
