Phony voting fraud

Trump’s ‘Election Integrity’ Commission is a waste of time and a waste of taxpayer money.

Anybody who watches a baseball game on television knows the drill.

A close call happens on the field. A manager thinks the umpire got it wrong. The play gets reviewed by some impartial officials in another city, who study the video replays to reach an unbiased final decision. And the game goes on.

Now, imagine if the play were reviewed not by some dispassionate officials carefully watching the evidence, but by a heckler yelling at the ump. That’s what’s wrong with President Donald Trump’s “Election Integrity Commission,” an investigative body run by a guy who’s spent years screaming that the game is rigged.

The president created this commission in the wake of one of his most ludicrous Twitter rants — and that’s saying a lot — in which he claimed that millions of illegal voters cast ballots against him last year. Never mind that not a single state election official, Republican or Democrat, has found any evidence of widespread illegal voting in 2016. Never mind that academic studies and government investigations — including probes conducted at the behest of GOP officials — have repeatedly concluded that illegally cast votes in this era are vanishingly rare.

Although Trump’s commission is chaired by Vice President Mike Pence, the man who’s apparently running the show is its vice chairman, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. As his state’s chief elections officer, Kobach has been an outspoken promoter of the notion that voter fraud is a significant problem, even though he’s managed to file only nine criminal cases from the pool of 1.6 million Kansas voters. He’s the heckler who’s been yelling from the stands, and now he’s running a committee reviewing whether the game was rigged.

Kobach did something last week that even a loud mouth at a ballgame could have told him was a bad call. He sent letters to every secretary of state in the nation asking for a broad range of information about all American voters, including their voting histories, their birth dates, their party affiliations and the last four digits of their social security numbers. Even some state officials from his own party — who’ve spent years screaming bloody murder about federal government overreach — cried foul.

Texas Secretary of State Rolando Pablos said his office will turn over only public information routinely available to any citizen, such as the names, addresses, birth dates and political party affiliations of voters. Other secretaries of state are flatly refusing to cooperate. Mississippi’s top election official, a Republican, told the commission to “go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.” Democrats decried the investigation as a fishing expedition designed to bolster voter suppression efforts.

That bipartisan reaction is evidence this commission is a waste of time and a waste of taxpayer money. The reason is simple: Kobach has no credibility. Even if you’re one of those people who believe voter fraud is a big problem, his measly record of nine prosecutions in Kansas should convince you he’s as ineffective as Barney Fife.

If President Trump is serious about investigating allegations of voter fraud, he should appoint a dispassionate committee trusted by people in both parties. Presidential commissions that have seriously addressed serious problems have been bipartisan and apolitical, like the Warren Commission investigating the Kennedy assassination and the Rogers Commission probing the Challenger disaster. At a time when our election systems are under attack by a hostile foreign government, a trusted commission could make valuable recommendations acceptable to people in both parties.

Instead, the president has called a heckler down from the bleachers to review what he claims was a bad call. That’s no way to make our election system a fair game.