The Kobach Commission (sometimes referred to as the Pence Commission) on voter fraud was created in the way so many things have been in the Trump administration. It started with an angry and completely unsubstantiated tweet, echoing a campaign trope, followed by public statements doubling down on the message, followed by a half-baked executive order. The Commission was created to investigate the allegations of Trump’s alternative universe, where massive voter fraud cost the president millions of votes. The true voter fraud—creating obstacles to the right to vote—is not part of its mandate. Kris Kobach is of course the perfect choice. As Kansas secretary of state, he has made his reputation seeking to make it as difficult as possible for people in Kansas to vote, and by fanning the fantasy of massive voter fraud.
Kobach has been sued four times by the ACLU for his efforts to prevent people from voting, and lost all four cases. After months of aggressive investigation, he has found nine cases of fraudulent voting in the state out of 1.8 million votes cast. The Kansas City Star recently called him “the Javert of voter fraud.” Recently, when Michael Wines of The New York Times surveyed all 50 chief election officials as to whether there were significant levels of voter fraud in their states, 49 of them said there was not; Kobach refused to respond. For a while it looked like this commission might not even reach the executive order stage. It took almost five months between a January 23 meeting with congressional leaders where Trump talked about the three to five million illegal voters that cost him the popular vote, and the executive order May 11 creating—partially and haphazardly—the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.
We’ve had successful Commissions on Election Reform before. The Carter-Ford (2001), Carter-Baker (2004), and Bauer-Ginsberg (2013) commissions were all genuinely bipartisan, looked broadly at election processes, and came up with important and agreed-upon recommendations. The Trump commission, by contrast, lacks even a veneer of genuine bipartisanship or a semblance of balance in the questions it seeks to explore.
Full Article: Kobach ‘Voter Fraud’ Commission Gets Fast Thumbs Down.