President Donald Trump's voter-fraud commission specifically asked for records identifying all Texas voters with Hispanic surnames, according to newly released documents.
Records made public by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee show that the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity asked every state for detailed voter registration data, but in the case of Texas, the commission went one step further.
On two Texas voter-data request forms, Ron Williams, a policy adviser for the commission, checked a box explicitly asking for "Hispanic surname flag notation."
Other documents show that the commission ended up paying Texas officials roughly $3,500 for 49.6 million voter records Sept. 15. Voters with "Hispanic surnames" would have been specifically flagged in those records, per Williams' request.
White House officials claim that the commission never obtained the Texas data because a voting rights group filed a lawsuit that blocked any exchange.
Trump disbanded the commission Jan. 3. He said he did so because several states had refused to provide, but maintained that there's plenty of evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2016 election.
The commission was been in controversy since Trump established it last May. Trump said it would get to the bottom of his unsubstantiated claim that millions of undocumented immigrants voted illegally in the election _ a suggestion that critics called outright racist.
The commission's former vice chairman, Kris Kobach, first denied that there was any request to flag Hispanic surnames.
But when the Washington Post provided him with the documents Monday, Kobach attempted to separate the surname request from the commission, saying that Williams must have acted on his own.
"Mr. Williams did not ask any member of the commission whether he should check that box or not, so it certainly wasn't a committee decision," Kobach told the Post, which first reported the documents.
Texas has the country's second-largest Hispanic population. Since 1983, the state has made specific annotations in the voter rolls for voters with Hispanic surnames to send election notices in both Spanish and English.
