Trump’s voter fraud panel itself a fraud, run by a liar

It is neither paranoid nor alarmist to begin asking if the Trump administration plans to rationalize blocking a large number of voters who oppose the president from casting ballots in 2018 and 2020. And it is imperative that the civic-minded of all parties demand the disbanding of a government commission whose very existence is based on a lie.

The lying doesn’t stop. Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, is vice chairman of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. Its name reminds us why the adjective “Orwellian” was invented. Kobach chose to use a meeting of the commission held in New Hampshire recently to continue to cast doubt on the state’s election results.

It was an object lesson into how Trumpists will twist, cook and distort facts about voting to manufacture numbers that sound ominous but vanish as soon as they’re examined.

That Kobach had initially made his case on Breitbart, the right-wing website, is a sign that the man in charge of what is supposed to be a sober inquiry is simply a propagandist. Here’s how Kobach confected his Breitbart tale. New Hampshire allows would-be voters to register on Election Day. Kobach noted that 6,540 sameday registrants used outof-state driver’s licenses to verify their identity.

This is perfectly legal in New Hampshire, but Kobach’s “aha!” moment was to reveal that “10 months after the election” (the damning italics are his), only 1,227 of the 6,540 had either obtained New Hampshire driver’s licenses or registered a vehicle. Ergo, Kobach concluded, “It seems that they never were bona fide residents of the state.”

And then he labeled the 5,313 as “fraudulent votes.” He noted that Democrat Maggie Hassan defeated then-incumbent Republican Sen. Kelly Ayotte by 1,017 votes. His explosive claim: If 59.2 percent or more of these fake voters went for Hassan, “the election was stolen through voter fraud.” Yes, he wrote “stolen.”

It all sounds nice and scientific. Here’s the problem: Backed by other election law specialists, New Hampshire’s Secretary of State Bill Gardner, a Democratic member of the commission, noted that Kobach simply ignored what the state’s election law actually says. It allows voting by those “domiciled” in the state — people who spend most of their nights in New Hampshire — and not just “residents.” Yes, they can vote even if they have driver’s licenses from other states.

This category includes college students, and New Hampshire Public Radio found that the highest rates of voting using outof-state IDs occurred in college towns.

So Kobach’s charges of fraud are themselves fraudulent, but he can’t seem to admit outright that he was simply wrong. Absent more data, he said, “we will never know the answer regarding the legitimacy of this particular election.”

But we do know the answer. It was legitimate. We also know the answer to the question about the existence of in-person voter fraud: There is almost none of it. This is true despite Trump’s groundless post-election claim that 3 million to 5 million illegal votes were cast in 2016. When he could not produce a shred of evidence, he named a commission that would concoct some.

We do not need an official government body whose job is to spin fictional horror stories.