The U.S. president continued an eight-month quest to assert a popular-vote victory — he lost to Hillary Clinton by 2.86 million actual votes but won the Electoral College — when Trump’s election integrity commission demanded the 50 states turn over voters’ names and birth date, party affiliation, any felony conviction, a decade’s worth of vote data, and four digits of their social security number, the New York Times reported on June 30. Over two dozen states have refused, including California, whose Secretary of State Alex Padilla declared: “I will not provide sensitive voter information … California’s participation would only serve to legitimize the false and already debunked claims of massive voter fraud made by the President, the Vice President, and [Kris] Kobach.”
VP Pence heads the commission, according to The Hill, and Kobach has been called “the king of voter suppression” by the ACLU. His own state of Kansas “balked,” according to the website Snopes, stating social security numbers were off limits. The White House has yet to look into allegations of Russian interference in the election.