The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a privacy advocacy group, filed suit on Monday against President Donald Trump’s bogus “election integrity” commission over its request to all 50 states for sensitive voter information.
“[T]he Commission had already committed two egregious security blunders,” EPIC said in a statement on its website. “(1) directing state election officials to send voter records to an unsecure web site and (2) proposing to publish partial SSNs that would enable identity theft and financial fraud.”
In its suit requesting a temporary injunction against the commission’s data collection activities, filed in the D.C. District Court, the group called the request for partial Social Security numbers “both without precedent and crazy.”
It also accused the commission of violating the E-Government Act of 2002, which requires a privacy impact assessment be completed and made available to the public before the collection of personal information by the federal government using information technology. No assessment was conducted before requesting voter data, the suit alleges.
The commission’s broad request for data combined with the lack of any privacy assessment could “cause irreparable harm to EPIC’s members,” the suit alleged.
“Once data has been leaked, there is no way to control its spread,” it continued. “With a data breach, there is literally no way to repair the damage, once done.”
A number of states — 41, by CNN’s count — have refused to cooperate with all or part of the commission’s request for sensitive voter data in recent days, some citing state and federal law.
In addition to personal and political information, the committee requested information regarding voters’ potential felony, military and overseas citizen statuses.
The suit named both the commission’s chair and its vice chair, Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, in their official capacity. Both of their home states have declined to share certain information with the commission, citing state law.
Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly gave the defendants until 4:00 p.m. ET on Wednesday to respond to the suit.
I feel like the phrase “without precedent and crazy” could apply to this entire administration.
I was gonna say: without precedent and crazy?
That’s my Trump!
Goes to show that publicity stunts always end badly for him
If this so-called "Election Integrity Commission had any integrity whatsoever its primary mission would be to root out, expose, and take aggressive legal action to eliminate the voter suppression laws that have been sprouting up like malignant weeds for years in Republican dominated states. But seeing as Mike Pence, a vocal defender of voter suppression and Kris Kobach, the crown prince of voter suppression evil lead the committee, there is little hope for that.
No, they will just go ahead wasting our tax dollars defending the indefensible so that maybe, just maybe our so-called “President” will no longer have to live with the fact that his opponent in the last election got more votes than he did.
In a nutshell…
MAGA = WPAC = WTF