WICHITA, Kan. (AP) The future of a much-criticized database that checks if voters are illegally registered in multiple states is up in the air after its patron, Kris Kobach, lost the Kansas race for governor and is out of elected office.
A spokeswoman for Kobachs successor as Kansas secretary of state said Friday the office is reviewing the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program and consulting with other member states about it. No formal decision has been made either way about whether to end the program, said Katie Koupal, the spokeswoman for Secretary of State Scott Schwab.
Crosscheck, which had been administered by Kobachs office, compares voter registration lists among participating states to look for duplicates. The program is aimed at cleaning voter records and preventing voter fraud, but has drawn criticism for its high error rate and lax security.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas alleged in a lawsuit filed last year that reckless maintenance of the program has exposed sensitive voter information. Kobach has called that lawsuit baseless, citing the U.S. Supreme Court last year in an Ohio case dealing with maintenance of voter rolls.
On Friday, Kobach noted Crosscheck has grown from four states at its start in 2005 to 30 states.
It grew quickly because it provides such valuable information, he said. Continuing the Crosscheck program is a no-brainer.
Lauren Bonds, legal director for the ACLU of Kansas, said Friday it would be hard to reform the Crosscheck program in a way that would make it constitutionally sound.
If there was a way to make sure the program was more accurate and secure, we wouldnt necessarily be calling for its full abolishment, Bonds said. But I think it would be hard to make those adjustments without changing the program fundamentally.
Kobach, a longtime champion of strict voter registration laws, was vice chairman of President Donald Trumps now-disbanded commission on election fraud. Kansas voters elected Schwab, also a Republican, to replace him after Kobach ran for governor and lost to Democrat Laura Kelly.
Crosscheck compares registration lists and analyzes voters first and last names and date of birth to determine whether a person is registered in multiple states, but critics say most of the hits are false matches.
By comparison, the Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC as it is better known, uses encrypted voter information along with Social Security Administration death records, driver license information and U.S. Postal Service change-of-address data.
Twenty-six states now use ERIC system, according to its website. ERIC, based in Washington, D.C., is a non-profit corporation governed by a board of directors made up of member states.
A number of states use that for a fairly reasonable fee and that seems like a much better option than trying to rebuild Crosscheck from the ground up so it doesnt have the problems it currently has, Bonds said.
The ACLU lawsuit alleges Kobach used reckless methods such as unencrypted email to transmit sensitive personal voter information, such as partial Social Security numbers, to other states while investigating possible double registration. As administrator of the Crosscheck server, he regularly sent server passwords in plain text emails that were widely shared.
Crosscheck was started in 2005 and had only four participants when Kobach took office in 2011. By 2017, 30 states were participating in Crosscheck and more than 100 million voter records were added to the database, according to the ACLU lawsuit. Eight states Florida, Alaska, Kentucky, Washington, Oregon, New York, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts have left the program due to security risks and data reliability concerns since Kobach began managing it.
