Trump Disbands ‘Voter Fraud’ Commission

President Trump has shut down the commission he established to investigate unsupported claims of "voter fraud" in the 2016 election.

Donald Trump Shrug

Less than a year into his Presidency, President Trump is disbanding the commission established largely in an effort to find evidence of so-called ‘voter fraud’ in the 2016 Presidential election:

WASHINGTON — President Trump on Wednesday abruptly shut down a White House commission he had charged with investigating voter fraud, ending a brief quest for evidence of election theft that generated lawsuits, outrage and some scholarly testimony, but no real evidence that American elections are corrupt.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump called for requiring voter identification in a pair of Twitter posts because the voting system “is rigged.” “Push hard for Voter Identification!” Mr. Trump wrote.

Mr. Trump did not acknowledge the commission’s inability to find evidence of fraud, but cast the closing as a result of continuing legal challenges.

“Despite substantial evidence of voter fraud, many states have refused to provide the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity with basic information relevant to its inquiry,” Mr. Trump said in a White House statement on Wednesday.

“Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today I signed an executive order to dissolve the commission, and have asked the Department of Homeland Security to review these issues and determine next courses of action,” he said.

In fact, no state has uncovered significant evidence to support the president’s claim, and election officials, including many Republicans, have strongly rejected it.

Mr. Trump established the commission after his repeated insistence, without credible evidence, that widespread voter fraud explained how Hillary Clinton received about 2.9 million more votes while he won the presidency in the Electoral College.

It is an issue that continues to resonate with his base voters, and Mr. Trump has mentioned it in recent rallies, but there have been few Republicans in Congress who have followed him.

The closing of the commission was a blow for Kris Kobach, the secretary of state of Kansas and the panel’s vice chairman. Mr. Kobach was one of a few state officials to support Mr. Trump’s contention of widespread fraud.

But Mr. Kobach insisted in an interview that the commission’s work would not end but rather would be transferred to the Department of Homeland Security, one of the federal agencies charged with ensuring election integrity and one that he said critics would find more difficult to target.

As a White House commission, the voter-fraud panel was subject to public-disclosure requirements and other restrictions that Mr. Kobach said opponents of the inquiry had seized on in “a determined effort by the left” to hamstring its investigation. At last count, he said, the panel faced at least eight lawsuits accusing it of ignoring various federal requirements, including one from a commission member, Matthew Dunlap, the Maine secretary of state, that claimed he had been illegally excluded from its deliberations.

“It got to the point where the staff of the commission was spending more time responding to litigation than doing an investigation,” Mr. Kobach said. “Think of it as an option play; a decision was made in the middle of the day to pass the ball. The Department of Homeland Security is going to be able to move faster and more efficiently than a presidential advisory commission.”

A spokesman for homeland security, Tyler Q. Houlton, said on Wednesday that “the department continues to focus our efforts on securing elections against those who seek to undermine the election system or its integrity.”

“We will do this in support of state governments who are responsible for administering elections,” he added.

But states may well not cooperate with the department any more than they did with the panel.

(…)

Groups that opposed the commission said its real mission was voter suppression, in ways that would help Republicans, and they were quick to declare victory.

“The commission’s entire purpose was to legitimize voter suppression,” said Vanita Gupta, the president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and former head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

“The abrupt abandonment of the commission makes clear that it had become a thoroughly discredited body that could not find evidence of mass voter fraud,” Ms. Gupta said. “The commission itself was unable to justify its existence as a result.”

The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin calls the decision a reason to celebrate:

The lesson here is threefold.

First, beating back against Trump’s ludicrous falsehoods pays off, though it takes time and resources. (In the meantime, his actions generate considerable backlash.) Trump’s lies take hold when they are not debunked.

Second, one of the critical institutional protections against Trump’s overreach remains the states. To a certain extent, that makes this year’s gubernatorial and state attorney general races national. You’ll see Democrats run on the promise to “protect the voters from Trump,” be it on voting or health care.

Third, the independent courts — often reviled by Trump — serve as another check on his power. The Post reported in July, “A federal judge has upheld a $1,000 fine against the vice chair of President Trump’s Election Integrity Commission, citing a ‘pattern’ of ‘misleading the Court’ in voter-ID cases. The ruling represents another blow to the credibility of a commission plagued by lawsuits and controversy in its first months of existence.” Likewise, in December the Associated Press reported: “A federal judge has ruled that Maine’s Secretary of State can’t be excluded from participating in the work of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, on which he serves. U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling Friday in Washington, D.C., largely agrees with Matthew Dunlap’s argument that as a member of the commission he must be given access to substantive commission documents.” Approximately eight lawsuits were underway challenging some aspect of the commission’s operation.

Ilya Somin, meanwhile, calls this a victory for federalism:

State governments’ successful resistance to the Commission’s demands is a victory for privacy, and also for federalism as a constraint on overreaching by the federal government. It is dangerous to trust the feds with sensitive information on voters across the country – especially, but certainly not exclusively, when the presidency is held by a man with as little respect for civil liberties as Trump. This issue, along with others such as the litigation challenging the administration’s efforts to punish sanctuary cities, is an example of how state and local governments (many of them liberal Democratic ones) are using federalism to resist Trump. In many cases, the legal doctrines in question were first developed by conservative judges, often over the bitter opposition of the left. Perhaps these cases will help lead the left to rethink some of their traditional skepticism about federalism and judicial enforcement of constitutional constraints on federal power, as some liberals have already begun to do. At the same time, we should not be overly optimistic, as “fair weather federalism” is a longstanding problem on both sides of the political spectrum.

(…)

[A] commission headed by a highly biased figure like Kobach was hardly the right way to seek solutions. Moreover, subject to the constraints imposed by constitutional rights, the Constitution leaves most issues of election administration to state governments. It is they who should deal with voter fraud.

Federal control over election procedures would potentially enable the party that controls Congress and the White House to bias voting rules around the country in its own favor. Similar abuses can and do occur at the state level, as well. But at least pro-Democratic bias in liberal states is offset by Republican bias in conservative ones, and vice versa.

In a tweet this morning, President Trump claimed that the commission was hobbled in its efforts thanks to the refusal of “mostly Democratic states” to cooperate with the Commission and its efforts to obtain voter data regarding the 2016 election specifically and voter registration records in general. In reality, there were some 44 states that were refusing to cooperate with the commission’s requests in whole or in part. This included many deeply red states where the relevant authorities are Republicans. In many cases, this refusal was based on the fact that existing state laws prevented them from making some of the data that the commission was requesting public. In others, it was due to the fact that voters in their states were speaking out quite loudly against the idea that their personal information, which in some cases would include information such as addresses, voting history, and even identifying information such as Social Security numbers, being shared with some commission in Washington for what were clearly blatantly political purposes.

In reality, of course, there was no real justification for the existence of the commission to begin with. There is no credible evidence of voter fraud during the 2016 election specifically and, more generally speaking, little evidence of the kind of in-person voter fraud that Voter ID laws are supposedly intended to combat, Instead, as several studies have shown, those laws end up having the primary impact of making it more difficult for poor and minority voters to vote, something that has caused several Federal Courts across the country to strike down Voter ID laws in states such as Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Texas. In some cases, these rulings have come after specific evidence was presented establishing that the primary purpose behind the laws was to make it more difficult for these groups, which primarily tend to vote Democratic, to either register to vote or be able to cast a vote because they either lack a proper form of identification or because it is too difficult for them to get such identification. While none of these cases has reached the point where they would be reviewed by the Supreme Court yet, that won’t be the case forever.

In any case, this is yet another setback for the myth of “voter fraud,” and a victory for those aiming to set aside the efforts by many states to make it harder for some groups of people vote.

FILED UNDER: 2016 Election, US Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Doug Mataconis
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.

Comments

  1. Mark Ivey says:

    “many states have refused to provide the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity with basic information.”

    And those are: The Deep States…. Bah hah hah…

  2. al-Ameda says:

    In reality, of course, there was no real justification for the existence of the commission to begin with. There is no credible evidence of voter fraud during the 2016 election specifically and, more generally speaking, little evidence of the kind of in-person voter fraud that Voter ID laws are supposedly intended to combat, Instead, as several studies have shown, those laws end up having the primary impact of making it more difficult for poor and minority voters to vote, something that has caused several Federal Courts across the country to strike down Voter ID laws in states such as Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Texas.

    So naturally, the Supreme Court, in Shelby County v. Holder, in a predictable 5-4 decision, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing the majority opinion, invalidated Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which opened the door for states like Texas to move ahead with voter identification laws, that are very clearly intended to suppress voting among Democratic Party constituencies.

    No wonder Mitch McConnell declined to hold hearings an the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, the stakes for conservatives were too high to risk confirmation.

  3. Raoul says:

    Kobach has gone further, he said yesterday that DHS and ICE will match voter roles and seek to purge suspect immigrants.
    The history of GOP purges strongly suggest massive overreach and many wrongful registration strikes to come.
    And now without any Dems on that pesky commission to flag problems or sue.

  4. michael reynolds says:

    I blame Democrats. For failing to commit any actual voter fraud.

  5. Daryl's other brother Darryl says:

    I’m not an advocate for small Government, or large Government…I’m an advocate for smart Government…and this was always just dumb government…set up to deal with a problem that exists only in the most partisan of Republican brains.
    I have to say, though, that I don’t have a problem with presenting an ID to vote. They ask me for one here in CT whenever I vote and I give it to them because…why not?
    The black turnout in the Alabama senate race shows that ID’s aren’t necessarily a problem, or that if it is a problem it can be overcome.
    Why keep fighting over this? Go along with the ID…make the effort to get everyone, who doesn’t already have an ID, an ID…then watch the next excuse Republicans come up with to supress the vote.
    It just seems a silly hill to die on.

  6. Joe says:

    “Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today I signed an executive order to dissolve the commission, and have asked the Department of Homeland Security to review these issues and determine next courses of action,” Trump said.

    How is this a Homeland Security matter?

  7. al-Ameda says:

    @Joe:

    How is this a Homeland Security matter?

    We need to keep Russian hackers and wiki-leak staff off the voting rolls.
    At least, that’s my guess?

  8. CSK says:

    Slightly OT, but David Yancey, the Republican, has won the drawing for the 94th District in Virginia.

  9. Monala says:

    @Daryl’s other brother Darryl: One of the issues is that some of the states that have enacted strict ID laws have made it harder to get the appropriate IDs, by closing down the offices or drastically reducing the open hours where you can get an ID in Democratic communities, making the list of documents you need to present to obtain (or renew) your ID long and complex, and accepting certain types of IDs more likely held by Republicans (such as concealed carry permits), but not others held by people more likely to be Democrats (such as student IDs).

  10. gVOR08 says:

    @CSK: The Dem is suing. I hope the Dems take this all the way to the Supremes if necessary. Fight.

  11. Sleeping Dog says:

    @Doug

    Instead, as several studies have shown, those laws end up having the primary impact of making it more difficult for poor and minority voters to vote…

    This is a feature, not a bug.

    Read more: https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/trump-disbands-voter-fraud-commission/#ixzz53GGtp577

  12. Matt says:

    @Daryl’s other brother Darryl: That’s true except the GOP won’t allow a national ID let alone one that is easy to get.

    As mentioned in other posts Republican run states have shut down DMVs and other offices where you can get IDs in heavily Democratic areas.

    In Illinois getting my license or ID was a quick 20 minute thing. Here in Texas I live in a blue area which just so happens to have only one facility you can go to for a license, ID etc. I spent about 6 hours waiting in line to get my Texas driver’s license. Other people waiting in line included people who just wanted a proper state ID. I showed up before the place even opened and there was already a line. I didn’t get out of there until about 3pm. The line was out the door all day.

  13. An Interested Party says:

    We need to keep Russian hackers and wiki-leak staff off the voting rolls.
    At least, that’s my guess?

    Oh that’s rich considering those people helped get Trump elected…