Spin Control: No surprise if the Chinese had state voter data. Some of it is easy to get

It wasn’t long into President Donald Trump’s speech on election security Thursday night when he mentioned something about voter data that made my ears perk up. The Chinese had voter registration data on some 200 million American voters for the 2020 election, and that’s apparently a shocking thing.

Or is it? Somewhere in a documents box in a cabinet, cupboard or closet, I have data on more than 4 million Washington state voters. Names. Street address. City. County. Gender. Age. Whether they voted in recent elections.

It’s not under lock and key, or in any way secure, unless being somewhere that requires me to spend about a half-hour to find it counts.

I didn’t buy it with crypto coins on the dark web. I didn’t pay some teenage computer ninja to hack a state database for it.

I got it from the Washington secretary of state’s office. Just by making a phone call and sending a follow-up email with a Public Records Act request. I actually have several versions of the database, acquired over some two decades of covering state and local politics.

In Washington, as in most states, voter rolls, or at least a portion of them, are public records. Along with newspaper reporters – many colleagues in the ink-stained wretch profession have similar collections – these databases also are common among campaign organizations, political consultants and pollsters.

If you know how to work a data crunching program like Access, you can whittle the full list down to a desired subset, like female voters in cities within Spokane County between 40 and 65 who voted in three of the last four elections.

Or you could ask the elections office for a particular subset. We just asked for the full list because that allowed us to research any questions whenever they came up. Like, is the candidate who filed for that council seat registered to vote in that council district? Or has the person making voter participation a key platform of their campaign been voting in previous elections?

So, you might wonder, if I have some slightly dated Washington voter data and the Chinese had information on Washington voters – there were only about 168 million registered voters in the United States in 2020 so Washington’s 4.5 million had to be in the mix – why are the state and the feds in court over access to Washington’s voter data?

The answer is that the Washington Secretary of State’s office would be happy to give the feds the same thing it gives anyone who files a public records request for it. But the Trump administration wants some things that are protected under state law, and not released to anyone, plus some information the state doesn’t collect, Stuart Holmes, Washington elections director, said.

Along with the standard releasable data, the federal government is asking for the signature documents, full birth dates, driver’s license numbers and phone numbers, which are determined to be private and thus subject to constitutional protections.

“State law doesn’t allow us to share such information with anyone,” Holmes said.

The feds are also asking for the full nine-digit Social Security numbers. That’s more than the last four digits collected by the state but even those aren’t releasable, he said. They also want an alien verification number, or A-Number, if the voter has one, and the state doesn’t ask for that.

This is partly to weed out people who aren’t eligible to vote because they aren’t citizens, although not everyone who has a Social Security number is a citizen, and people with A-Numbers could be immigrants who became naturalized citizens.

There are also technical problems with the state uploading data to the national database the federal government is creating, known as the SAVE System, Holmes said.

The state does participate in another multistate system to check voter registrations, the Electronic Registration Information Center, which allows it to check some data on its rolls.

States that participate in ERIC, as it’s known, can find out if they have possible matches in which the same voter is registered in a member state. They can also check their database to see if anyone matches a list prepared by the Social Security Administration of people who have died, and remove them from the rolls.

The Help America Vote Act allows any state to verify voter status with Social Security numbers, Holmes said.

ERIC only asks for information that’s releasable under state law, he said. It’s possible federal government may at some point be willing to accept that, too, he added.

But Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin seemed to cast doubt on that Friday, announcing states that don’t comply with federal demands for voter data could lose federal election aid and their elections officials could face criminal charges if they don’t comply with the Trump administration’s voting roll probe ahead of the midterms.

“Before and after the election, we will scrub all election records looking for illegal aliens and those who are ineligible to vote, including those that somehow voted yet they were deceased,” Mullin told news organizations, like NBC News and the Hill, at a news conference from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building near the White House. “If you’re illegal and attempted to vote, or you tried to vote illegally for someone else, we will find you and we will charge you,” noting those who do so could face up to five years in prison.