Voter fraud commission seems to be going nowhere
It should come as no surprise that a commission — created by President Donald Trump and headed by Vice President Mike Pence — to investigate voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election is floundering.
Even when created, the group lacked a well-defined mission. And it was no mystery, even to Trump’s top-level advisers, as to why he created the group in the first place. Trump wants to be able to proclaim himself a winner of a landslide victory in 2016 over Hillary Clinton.
And he simply refuses to believe that he could have lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million to Clinton, whom he despised and railed against on the campaign trail, to the exclusion of any discussion of serious issues or any specific plans for policy changes. Trump was just blustering from city to city, enjoying the cheers of his most ardent supporters as he talked about “Crooked Hillary.” But Trump, whose understanding of the finer points of the American electoral system is sketchy, never believed he would be elected.
And when he was, by a substantial majority in the Electoral College despite a substantial shortfall in the popular vote, Trump was determined to prove that his victory was overwhelming in all ways, and that the only way he could have lost the popular vote was through a fluke that was the product of voter fraud.
So enter his commission, which is supposed to be proving Trump’s viewpoint, though its stated purpose is to investigate fraud.
Vice President Pence, who likely isn’t all that happy with the endeavor, now finds himself astride a horse that seems to be going nowhere but is plagued by internal strife. The Associated Press reports that some commission members (there are only four Democrats on the 11-member panel) are complaining they’re not in the loop and have a hard time finding out when meetings are. In addition, Democratic U.S. senators say the commission isn’t responding to requests for information from Congress and some are even saying they want an investigation of the commission.
President Trump, in claiming election fraud — how else, in his mind, could he have lost the popular vote? — really didn’t appoint a group to conduct an honest inquiry. He built windmills and ordered members of the commission to tilt at them, and then report to him upon completion of their mission that he actually won the popular vote by a huge margin.
But it’s always a mistake to decide what the outcome of an investigation is going to be before the investigation has been completed — or, in this case, has even begun.
The appointment of this group was a mistake from the beginning, a silly exercise designed by a president whose own ego and desire to aggrandize himself dominates his every statement, his every action, in public life. If Trump were politically savvy, which he is not, he would quietly disband the group and dismantle the windmills.