Citing the Illinois Election Code, the State Board of Elections has announced it will not comply with a request for voter data by the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.
The Commission, set up by President Donald Trump and co-chaired by Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, requested information about voters in all 50 states, including party affiliation and social security numbers, and the Illinois Board of Elections says that it legally cannot comply with the request.
“In short, the State of Illinois does not have a publicly available voter roll. Therefore, our agency does not have any material responsive to the Commission’s request,” State Board of Elections General Counsel Kenneth Menzel said in a letter to the Commission.
The Board of Elections said that they could not comply with the request because the Commission plans to release voter information to the public, which would violate the Illinois Election Code.
Illinois joins a long list of states that will not submit data to the Commission, which was set up to investigate potential voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election. Nearly every one of the 50 states has said that they will not comply with at least a portion of the request, including Kobach’s own state of Kansas.
