UPDATE: After additional reporting, WIRED discovered that Jared Kushner’s erroneous voter registration was due to an error on the part of the New York State Board of Elections. This post has been updated on September 30, 2017, to reflect that fact, and it has been corrected to remove any implication that Kushner was at fault for the error. You can read an original cached version of the story here.
Since moving into his White House office months ago, Jared Kushner—senior adviser and son-in-law to the President, savior of the Middle East, and possible person of interest in a federal investigation—has amassed a rather extensive project portfolio. The issues under Kushner's purview include negotiating peace between Israel and Palestine, fixing the opioid crisis, updating technology across the entire federal government, and spearheading criminal justice reform, to name just a few. It seems like a nearly impossible set of challenges for anyone to tackle, and even more so for Kushner. Because, in addition to not having any previous government experience, the former real estate exec has demonstrated repeated difficulty in keeping simple, routine paperwork in order. This includes his own voter registration form. According to records held by the New York State Board of Elections, Jared Corey Kushner was registered as a woman from 2009 until this week.
This past July, for instance, CBS reported that Kushner updated a disclosure form necessary to obtain security clearance no fewer than three separate times. Kushner originally filed the form on January 18 with zero names listed under a section that asked about foreign contacts. He later claimed his team had accidentally hit send before he had a chance to fully fill it in, according to The Washington Post the form also got the dates of his graduate degrees incorrect, and even omitted his father-in-law's address. He submitted a supplemental form acknowledging that the original form was incomplete the following day.
The second time Kushner attempted to fix his security clearance form, sometime in May, he added more than 100 calls and meetings with foreign contacts. But soon after, it came to light that he had attended a meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who had allegedly offered to provide damaging information about Hillary Clinton. Kushner submitted the security form a third time to include, as he put it, "the person who has since been identified as a Russian attorney" on June 21.
How, exactly, Kushner managed to bungle the form multiple times has been the subject of much debate, as well as his own testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. But regardless of the cause, his apparently chronic inability to correctly fill out boxes is troubling coming from the man who's supposed to overhaul the entire United States government.
"Kushner can't even fill out the most basic paperwork without screwing it up, so it's a mystery why anyone thinks he's somehow going to bring peace to the Middle East," says Brad Bainum, a spokesperson for American Bridge, a liberal opposition research hub and the group that first identified Kushner's registration slip-up. "Would anyone but the president's son-in-law still have a West Wing job after repeated disclosure errors and a botched a security clearance form?"
In the case of his voter registration, it appears as though Kushner’s original New York voter registration, which was filled out at the DMV in 2009, listed him as a male. The “M” next to Kushner’s birth date in the scanned copy below indicates gender. Most likely, a subsequent data entry error led to Kushner being listed as a female in the database, according to the New York Board of Elections. It wasn’t until Wednesday, when the mistake was made public, that the board corrected the eight-year-old error.
Donald Trump has said that three to five million illegal votes were cast in the 2016 election—a claim that continues to go unfounded. Later, at the first public hearing for Trump’s voter fraud commission, Trump remarked, “This issue is very important to me because throughout the campaign, and even after, people would come up to me and express their concerns about voter inconsistencies and irregularities which they saw.”
While Trump’s voter fraud commission has yet to provide any evidence of actual voter fraud, Kushner’s mis-entered gender does offer at least one case of an inconsistency. Still, when it comes to whether Kushner's misstated gender constitutes a voter fraud violation, the chances seem nil. "There has to be an intent to give the false information," says Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt. "If he, for some reason, knowingly registered as a woman—for what purpose, I could not guess—that might be described as voter fraud, though it would have negligible effect on the determination of his eligibility, and so wouldn't amount to much anyway."
We reached out to Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who Trump tapped to be the vice-chair of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, for comment on Kushner's voting status. We'll update if and when we hear back.
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