Nick Oxford/Reuters
President Trump’s voter-fraud commission reportedly asked Texas for electoral data explicitly flagging voters with Hispanic surnames, according to The Washington Post. The commission’s policy advisor Ronald Williams II filled out the form, but the decision to request the data was not a “committee decision.” The panel’s vice chairman Kris W. Kobach said “at no time did the commission request any state to flag surnames by ethnicity or race. It’s a complete surprise to me.” Kobach continued: “I don’t know what sort of data analysis you would do even remotely relevant to it,” and having Hispanic surnames flagged for just one state is “useless; it just doesn’t make any sense.” A White House official stated that the request was made to “resolve data discrepancies or confusion," and there “was never a request made to flag people based on their ethnicity.” The data was never delivered to the White House after a lawsuit blocked its release.