The version of the database that the Board will send to the presidential commission will be the same as those that have been sent to members of the public in the past. | Getty New York will send records to Trump's voter fraud commission

ALBANY — Despite Gov. Andrew Cuomo's declaration that New York would not share its voter data with a presidential commission tasked with investigating voter fraud, the state will indeed share a database containing almost all of the requested records.

At a Wednesday meeting of the state Board of Elections, Republican co-chair Peter Kosinski said the board had received a state Freedom of Information Law request for the state's voter records. The two Democratic and two Republican commissioners had agreed to share the database with the commission, Kosinski said.


Cuomo said definitively in late June that New York's secretary of state, Rossana Rosado, would not fulfill the commission's request for the names, party affiliation, partial Social Security Numbers, addresses and participation history of Empire State voters "if publicly available," according to a form letter made public by officials in Connecticut. Cuomo stated that New York "refuses to perpetuate the myth voter fraud played a role in our election."

But the decision was never his to make; the database is maintained by the Board of Elections, which is not directly under the governor's purview.

And the provisions of a 2005 law that created the database, partially with the intent of making it easier to investigate voter fraud, make it available to the general public as long as a recipient isn’t using it for “non-election purposes.” Either full or partial versions of the database have been sent to members of the general public 1,379 times since the beginning of 2015.

The version of the database that the board will send to the presidential commission will be the same as those that have been sent to members of the public. It will contain information such as voters' dates of birth, addresses and voting history, but will exclude identifying information such as Social Security numbers or driver's license numbers.

"To be clear, the original letter from the President's Election Commission requested information that the Commission is not legally entitled to obtain,” Cuomo said in a statement released Wednesday afternoon. “Accordingly, our administration rejected that request because it not only violated privacy rights - but also state law. Our position remains unchanged and we will continue to deny requests for sensitive personal data about New York residents, which is protected under the law. We will never provide private voter information to anyone, especially a politically-motivated organization seeking to perpetuate the myth of voter fraud."

UPDATE: This story has been updated with an additional quote from the governor from Wednesday afternoon.