A Kansas state court found that Republican Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab modified a software platform used by the state to tally election results so that the program couldn’t report data on provisional ballots requested by a voting rights group, the Associated Press reports.

The information requested could have easily been delivered using the software as it was provided by the vendor, the court ruled; however, Schwab had department programmers modify the program so that it would disable the reporting function, making it impossible to assemble in a useable fashion.

Voting-rights group Loud Light had requested the data to aid its effort to help voters avoid the need to cast provisional ballots, which in Kansas are given to tens of thousands of voters whose voter registration information is not identical to what the state has on record.  Voting rights advocates have suspected that those ballots are not properly tallied, and that the people targeted with registration questions requiring them to vote provisionally are voters Republicans don’t want to vote.

Advocate Davis Hammet founded Loud Light after the 2018 election, when thousands of provisional and mail-in votes were thrown out due to shady reasons, allowing arch-conservative Trumpette Kris Kobach to win the GOP nomination for governor by just 343 votes.

“The report feature may have been of no use to the Secretary but it was useful to Hammet and the public,” Judge Stephen Hill wrote on behalf of the three-member appeals court panel. “And that is the point of open public records.”