There is no evidence any of the following the Trump administration’s request for voter information were ineligible to participate in elections, Secretary of State Wayne Williams said Thursday.
“Itap my hope that citizens who withdrew their registration will re-register, particularly once they realize that no confidential information will be provided and that the parties and presidential candidates already have the same publicly available information from the 2016 election cycle,” Williams said in a written statement. “Clearly we wouldn’t be asking them to re-register if we didn’t believe they were eligible.”
Williams’ remarks come as his office prepares in the coming days to send publicly available voter data — including names, addresses, party affiliations and birth years — to the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Julia Sunny, a spokeswoman for Williams, said the information is slated to be submitted by Monday night.
The commission established by President Donald Trump , but then told the state July 10 to hold off on sending the information until court challenges to the request played out. On Monday, a federal court in Washington, D.C., declined a request to halt the process.
In light of that decision, the commission renewed its request for voter data Wednesday.
The in May with a mandate to focus on voter fraud, voter suppression and other “vulnerabilities.” But and distrust, particularly following Trump’s unfounded claims that millions of people voted illegally in 2016 and cost him the popular vote.
In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)
Williams, along with dozens of other secretaries of state, has said he will provide only information considered public under state law.
Since June 28, — including Democrats, Republicans and unaffiliated voters — withdrew their registrations. Some county election officials said the trend was .
As of Wednesday, 5,072 Colorado voters had unregistered. There are more than 3.3 million active voters in the state.
More than 200 other Colorado voters have signed up in that span to become “confidential voters,” a designation that allows their information to be withheld.
In a Wednesday letter to Williams, Kris Kobach, vice chair of the election integrity commission, promised that he would not release any “personally identifiable information from voter registration records to the public” and that all data will be disposed of — as permitted by federal law — once the panel’s work is complete.