Trump ends foolish voter fraud commission

After eight months, Trump’s stacked deck of a commission had failed to find evidence of widespread voter fraud and this week he pulled the plug on the inquiry.

A commission created to uncover voter fraud that didn’t exist, and which in the process of its so-called investigation sought to trample on state’s rights, while acting in secrecy, has been disbanded.

Thank goodness, but what a waste of time and money to try to soothe President Trump’s massive ego.

Trump formed the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to validate his delusion that he won not only the electoral college vote but also the popular vote, when in fact he lost the latter by about 3 million votes.

“I won the popular votes if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” tweeted the then president-elect last November.

As far as the evidence to back up the claim, there wasn’t any.

The “election integrity” commission set out to find it. The official chair of the commission was Vice President Mike Pence, but the real henchman was Vice Chairman Kris Kobach. As Kansas Secretary of State, Kobach erected so many barriers to make it harder for folks considered less likely to vote Republican to register — meaning the poor and minorities — that he earned the label “the king of voter suppression” from the ACLU.

Yet, after eight months, Trump’s stacked deck of a commission had failed to find evidence of widespread voter fraud and this week he pulled the plug on the inquiry, something we urged in a July editorial.

He blamed secretaries of state — both Democrats and Republicans from across the country — who refused to turn over to the commission detailed data about their respective states’ voters. In many cases state laws forbade providing such information. To her credit, Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill was among the secretaries to stand up to Trump’s trumped-up commission.

There was also the concern that dumping all this voter information into the same database would have made it far more vulnerable to hacking. But perhaps the president dismissed this concern since he, almost alone, continues to dismiss Russia’s efforts to meddle in the 2016 election as “fake news.”

Trump blamed the protracted legal fights over access to state voter information as his reason for disbanding the commission. More likely, Trump wanted to avoid the embarrassment that would have resulted from the commission’s failure to demonstrate the voter fraud that he had presented as fact.

As we noted previously, Trump would have been better off checking with factcheck.org.

“Voting experts we talked to pointed to numerous studies that have found such in-person voter fraud — the type of fraud Trump is alleging — is virtually nonexistent. A Government Accountability Office report released in October 2014 said that ‘no apparent cases of in-person voter impersonation (were) charged by DOJ’s Criminal Division or by U.S. Attorney’s offices anywhere in the United States from 2004 through July 3, 2014,’” stated the nonpartisan group after it examined the matter.

A Democratic member of the commission, appointed to provide a pretense of fairness — Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap — said he was left out of its deliberations and denied information. When he filed a lawsuit, a federal judge said he should get the data he sought, calling the failure of the commission’s leadership to share information with an appointee “indefensible.”

Trump can’t totally let go. He said his Department of Homeland Security will take up the crusade to uncover voter fraud.

Imagine that. A federal security agency digging into the conduct of elections carried out by the states, not to protect voter rights but to make the case that people should not have been allowed to vote.

And we thought Republicans stood for state’s rights and a less intrusive federal government. Not in the era of Trump, apparently.