Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, which compared state records to find people possibly registered to vote in more than one place. The program had been launched in 2005 by a predecessor of Kobach, Republican Ron Thornburgh. From 2011 until the program's temporary suspension in early 2018, Kobach oversaw its rapid expansion to 30 states. The program was dogged with accusations of voter suppression enabled by its primitive data matching. According to the New York Times, "The program searches for double registrations using only voters' first and last names and date of birth, and it generates thousands of false matches—John Smith in Kansas can easily be confused with John Smith in Iowa." Due to its tendency to produce false matches, the program could be implemented to suppress the vote and wrongly remove legitimate voters from voter rolls. The large numbers of false positives produced by the program led to sensational and misleading headlines: for example, 35,750 voters in the 2012 North Carolina general election matched with voters with supposedly identical voters in other states, but upon close investigation only "eight cases of potential double voting were referred to prosecutors and two people were convicted." A 2016 paper by researchers at Stanford, Harvard, Yale and the University of Pennsylvania found that if the program were fully implemented "200 legitimate voters may be impeded from voting for every double vote stopped." By 2017, doubts over the accuracy of Crosscheck had led four states to withdraw from the program. In 2017, researchers revealed that Crosscheck's massive database was poorly secured. Tech reporter Dell Cameron wrote in Gizmodo "It would be difficult to overstate Crosscheck's carelessness when it comes to handling voter records". Fourteen national security experts wrote an amicus brief asserting that "large-scale databases containing personal information are particularly attractive targets for malicious cyber actors" to argue against Kobach building a second, similar database. As Crosscheck member states grew concerned over the safety of their voter data, Kobach suspended the program temporarily in early 2018. The program's suspension became federally mandated upon the settlement of Moore v Kobach (later referred to as Moore v Schwab) in December 2019 which accused the Crosscheck program of violating voters' privacy rights through their careless handling of voter data. Kobach's data leaks The technology website Gizmodo discovered that Kobach's office had made the last four digits of the Social Security (SS) numbers of thousands of state employees and legislators