Kentucky secretary of state: ‘Not enough bourbon in Kentucky’ to make me release voter data

Kentucky’s secretary of State delivered a biting rejection on Friday of a presidential voter fraud commission’s broad request for voter registration information, saying “there’s not enough bourbon” in Kentucky to convince her to comply with the demand.

“There’s not enough bourbon here in Kentucky to make this request seem sensible,” Alison Lundergan Grimes (D) said on MSNBC. “Not on my watch are we going to be releasing sensitive information that relate to the privacy of individuals.”

“Not on my watch are we going to be turning over something that’s left to the states to run – elections are left to our states under the 10th Amendment – to the federal government.”

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Kentucky is among at least 24 states that have either wholly or in part rejected a request by the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to hand over key voter registration information as part of its investigation into President Trump’s claims of widespread illegal voting.

The request, sent by the panel’s vice chairman, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, this week asks states to provide voters’s names, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers and other information. 

Lundergan Grimes told The Hill she had a number of concerns with the White House’s request. She said the commission was “formulated on a sham premise” and its mission goes against states’s right to run their own elections and voter registration.

Trump created the commission last month to investigate his assertions that millions of illegal voters cost him the popular vote in the November election. That notion has been widely debunked, and critics have argued that the panel is essentially a voter suppression tool.

Some officials have declined to turn over certain information, like the last four digits of voters’s social security numbers, to the panel, saying that state laws prohibit them from disclosing non-public information.