Amid the Senate’s failure to pass health-care legislation and the president’s sexist smear of a TV host, casual news observers may have missed what would otherwise been reported as a major development: the federal government is attempting to collect voter information from every state in the country.

In a letter issued Wednesday, the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, a creation of one of Donald Trump’s executive orders, has asked every state in the country to hand over its publicly available voter data, including full names, addresses, dates of birth, political parties, last-four digits of Social Security numbers, voting history from 2006 on, and more. The official document is signed by Vice-Chair Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and conservative activist who has become infamous for his efforts to enact stricter voter-ID laws and purge voter rolls of duplicate or allegedly fraudulent voter registrations. Kobach and chairman Vice President Mike Pence give the states a deadline of July 14 to comply, and asks states to submit the information over e-mail or through a government file-transfer system.

Critics of the White House’s voter fraud crackdown were appalled. “That they would be able to build out this nationwide database [on such a timeline] with any level of accuracy defies the imagination,” Vanita Gupta, who ran the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the Obama administration, said in an interview. The letter “lays the groundwork for mass voter purging,” she added.

“Back when Obama was POTUS, you told me the Feds should stay out of elections,” Jason Kander, the president of Let America Vote and the former Missouri secretary of state tweeted at Kobach on Friday. “Now Feds should know who we voted for?”

“IT’S TROUBLING TO SEE THE RETREAT AND PERVERSION OF THAT VERY SERIOUS MANDATE.”

At least 25 states were resisting the letter’s demands in some capacity. California, New York, Kentucky, Minnesota, Tennessee, Virginia, and Massachusetts have said they won’t comply with the request at all. Others, such as Missouri, said they will hand over data. (Missouri’s secretary of state is Jay Ashcroft, whose father, former attorney general John Ashcroft, was Kobach’s mentor.) Some states, including Utah and Vermont, said they will hand over some data but not Social Security numbers or drivers license numbers. (One such state, Wisconsin, said the “Presidential Commission does not appear to qualify” as an agency with which it can share the added personal information.)

“I will not provide sensitive voter information to a commission that has already inaccurately passed judgment that millions of Californians voted illegally,” California secretary of state Alex Padilla saidThursday. “California’s participation would only serve to legitimize the false and already debunked claims of massive voter fraud made by the president, the vice president, and Mr. Kobach.”

“They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico and Mississippi is a great State to launch from,” Mississippi secretary of state Delbert Hosemann said in a statement.

In something of a twist, Kobach’s own state of Kansas will also not share Social Security numbers with the commission. “In Kansas, the Social Security number is not publicly available, Kobach told The Kansas City Star. “Every state receives the same letter, but we’re not asking for it if it’s not publicly available.”

Privacy and voting rights advocates immediately expressed alarm about the letter, arguing that it represents the first step toward creating a national voter file, and that the request and data pull could violate regulations surrounding justified federal requests and record-keeping. And some advocates caution that, given Kobach’s background, the letter could be the first step in a nationwide push to aggressively remove voters from rolls—even amid complaints that Kobach’s smaller-scale efforts to this effect have been plagued by inaccuracies.