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Trump administration wants voter data from Mass., and Mass. is saying no

Massachusetts Secretary of State William F. Galvin.Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff

Massachusetts Secretary of State William F. Galvin’s office is denying the Trump administration’s request for voting data as part of a White House probe into voter fraud.

In an e-mail Friday, the Elections Division of Galvin’s office said it “will not be providing any voter information to the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.”

Earlier in the week, the White House said that Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the vice chair of the commission, told members that a letter would go out Wednesday “to the 50 states and District of Columbia . . . requesting publicly available data from state voter rolls and feedback on how to improve election integrity.”

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On Friday, the Bay State balked. In all, 24 states were refusing all or part of the request, The Washington Post reported.

“The central voter registration is not a public record. Period,” Brian McNiff, a spokesman for Galvin’s office, told the State House News Service.

The commission is seeking the name, address, birth date, party affiliation, last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number, and voting history back to 2006 for every voter in the country, the news service reported.

The panel is scheduled to hold its first meeting July 19, according to the White House.

Vice President Mike Pence recently told commission members that the “integrity of the vote is a foundation of our democracy; this bipartisan commission will review ways to strengthen that integrity in order to protect and preserve the principle of one person, one vote.”

President Trump has raised the spectre of voter fraud in the 2016 campaign, in which he defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton. No evidence of widespread fraud has emerged.

In February, Trump told a group of senators in a private meeting that he lost New Hampshire last November because thousands of Massachusetts residents were bused to the neighboring state to cast ballots against him.

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The president offered no evidence to support the claim.

New Hampshire’s secretary of state, who is in charge of elections in the state, disputed the president’s claims, as did the state’s two US senators.


John R. Ellement, Annie Linskey, Matt Viser, and James Pindell of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Travis Andersen can be reached at travis.andersen@globe.com.