the order after county clerks said it was unnecessary, and voting rights advocates called in any attempt at voter suppression. Also in 2004, Blackwell ordered clerks to toss out provisional ballots cast in the wrong precinct, a policy criticized by voting rights advocates but ultimately permitted by a federal appeals court. In March 2006, Blackwell's office also inadvertently released the Social Security numbers of 5.7 million voters. Commission activity 2017 request for voter information First request On June 28, 2017, Kris Kobach, in his capacity as vice chair of the Commission, wrote a letter along with the Department of Justice to the top election official in every state requesting they turn over voter data ostensibly to aid a countrywide search for evidence of election irregularities. Besides information such as the names, addresses and party affiliations of all registered voters, Kobach sought birth dates, felony conviction records, voting histories for the past decade and the last four digits of all voters' Social Security numbers. Many states' election officials claim they never received the request and some said they only forward the request from another state's secretary of state. The letter was not made public, and it became publicly known only after Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, tweeted out an image of the letter the day after the letter was written. Along with the image of the letter, she wrote "Pence and Kobach are laying the groundwork for voter suppression, plain & simple." A few hours after Gupta's tweet, Kobach confirmed to The Kansas City Star that the letter was authentic. Kobach provided an e-mail address and a website for the election official to electronically submit the personal voter data. The e-mail address lacked basic encryption technology and was found to be insecure. The request may have violated the federal Paperwork Reduction Act because it was not submitted to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) prior to being made to the states. The submission to the OIRA would have required a justification and an explanation of how the data would be used and protected. Additionally, the request did not come with an estimate of how many hours it would take the states to respond. Regulatory experts opined that the consequence of a violation would be that states would not be required to respond. In January 2018, it was reported that the