Commission launched to investigate president’s voter-fraud lie
WASHINGTON— U.S. President Donald Trump has turned his big lie about the presidential election into an official government commission — and handed a leadership role to a vocal backer of that lie.
Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to launch a commission to look into voter fraud. Raising fears of a coming assault on minorities’ access to the ballot box, he named Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a hard-line crusader against the minuscule problem, as the commission’s vice-chairman.
According to every independent expert and almost every state elections chief, voter fraud is nearly nonexistent. But Trump falsely claimed in January that more than three million illegal immigrants had voted illegally in 2016, every single one of them for his opponent Hillary Clinton.
Perhaps uncoincidentally, Clinton earned 2.9 million more votes than Trump did. And perhaps uncoincidentally, the conspiracy website InfoWars had promoted the same false claim about illegal immigrants.
Kobach, known for his own false claims about the severity of voter fraud, said at the time that the president’s lie was “absolutely correct.” He pointed, as Trump did, to a pre-2016 study that does not prove the case; he, too, offered no actual evidence.
Voting-rights advocates have been concerned for a year about the consequences of Trump’s attempts to foster public suspicions about the integrity of the electoral system as a whole and about non-white voters in particular. Molly McGrath, a Wisconsin-based voting rights organizer, said the commission is “paving the way for unnecessary and suppressive voting laws.”
“They’re setting out on a mission with what appears to be a predetermined goal. And with Kris Kobach at the steering wheel, that seems evident,” McGrath said Thursday.
Numerous Republicans around the country have attempted to impose new requirements for voting — they say to preserve the integrity of the system, critics say to make it harder for Democratic-leaning black, Hispanic and young people to cast ballots. Kobach is an outlier even within the party, pushing some of America’s most stringent voting laws. Daniel Dale