TRUMP DISBANDS BOGUS COMMISSION STUDYING NON-EXISTANT VOTER FRAUD

…Kris Kobach was the real driver of the bogus commission on voter fraud.

Trump had created a commission in response to his unsubstantiated claim of illegal voters

If you follow the news at all, you probably remember when the president, who just couldn’t stand that he had lost the nation’s popular vote, went ballistic about illegal voting. Trump then claimed that millions of voters had voted illegally, especially those in western states..  Upon declaring that, Trump as the new president created a commission in response to this claim, for which he of course, had provided no proof that he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton because of millions of illegally cast ballots.

The president has now announced that he is disbanding the controversial panel studying “alleged voter fraud”.  It was a panel that became mired in multiple federal lawsuits and that faced resistance from states that accused it of a total overreach.

This decision is just another major setback for Trump, who created the commission last year only in response to his unsubstantiated claim of illegal voters.

The panel was claimed to be bipartisan,  and was known as the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity”.  It had been nominally chaired by Vice President Pence, but it was actually led by the former Kansas Secretary of State, Kris Kobach.   Kobach is a Republican who has aggressively sought to go after the non-existent voter fraud in Kansas.  Pence has rightfully sought to distance himself from the panel’s work, but it has stuck to him like glue.  Pence pretends to support the president, but some insiders say he expects Trump will not be president for long and is obviously next in line for the White House if he can remain squeaky clean.

In the disbanding statement, the Press Secretary Sanders said Trump had signed an executive order asking the Department of Homeland Security “to review its [the commission's] initial findings and determine the next courses of action.”

Critics of the commission hailed Trump’s announcement, calling it long overdue.

As the Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said: “The commission never had anything to do with election integrity, it was instead a front to suppress the vote, perpetrate dangerous and baseless claims, and was ridiculed from one end of the country to the other. This shows that ill-founded proposals that just appeal to a narrow group of people won’t work, and we hope they’ll learn this lesson elsewhere.”

Former Missouri secretary of state Jason Kander (D) also wished the panel “good riddance.”

“President Trump created his sham voting commission to substantiate a lie he told about voter fraud in the 2016 election,” said Kander, president of the advocacy group Let America Vote. “When he couldn’t come up with any fake evidence, and under relentless pressure, he had no choice but to disband his un-American commission.”

As expected, Trump, stands by his claims of voter fraud, but still without offering any further evidence.

In his tweets, Trump said the commission “fought hard” to investigation allegations of voter abuses “because they know that many people are voting illegally. System is rigged, must go to Voter I.D.”

President Trump claims that widespread voter fraud occurred in the 2016 election. But does the 'integrity of the ballot box' depend on Voter ID laws?  I don’t think so.

President Trump still alleges that widespread voter fraud occurred in the 2016 election. More states than ever before are requiring voters to show photo ID to cast a ballot. Here are the two sides of the Voter ID law debate:

“As Americans, you need identification, sometimes in a very strong and accurate form, for almost everything you do . . . except when it comes to the most important thing, VOTING for the people that run your country,” Trump wrote this in a separate tweet. “Push hard for Voter Identification!”

The 11-member commission was highly controversial from the beginning.  In fact, they were sued by one of its members, Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap (D), who alleged that he has been kept in the dark about its operations saying his participation was “essentially meaningless.”  The Republicans on the commission accused Dunlap of being paranoid, however a federal judge has ruled in his favor.

In an interview, Dunlap said it was premature to celebrate the demise of the commission, given Trump’s announcement that Homeland Security would pick up the work. The department, he said, could angle to change regulations affecting driver’s licenses and other matters affecting voting without as much public scrutiny.  “I think people who are saying ‘the witch is dead’ should be very alarmed by this move,” he said. “I think that’s very dangerous.”

The commission was hit with eight lawsuits seeking to stop its operations or make its deliberations more transparent. Several of those stemmed from an sweeping request to states for ­voter data that some, including by Republicans, deemed too intrusive. The panel sought all publicly available information about voter rolls in the states, such as names of registrants, addresses, dates of birth, partial Social Security numbers and other data. Why all that data???

The commission met publicly in Washington in July and in New Hampshire in September. Other meetings planned across the country never happened.

At the meeting in New Hampshire, Kris Kobach came under fire from that state’s secretary of state for an article he wrote for Bannon’s Breitbart News where he speculated, without any concrete evidence, that the result of New Hampshire’s 2016 Senate election were “likely” changed because of voter fraud. The episode only emboldened critics of the commission who argued that Kobach, who is running for governor in Kansas, and other Republican members, were so eager to find fraud where it doesn’t exist.

But after the meeting, Bill Gardner, the longtime New Hampshire secretary of state and a Democratic member of the commission, said he was still hopeful that the panel could overcome its rocky start.  “Sometimes if you’re tested severely at the beginning, you end up much stronger at the end,” Gardner said.  Several Republican members of the commission did not respond to requests for comment.

The original executive order establishing the commission called for it to produce a report to Trump detailing laws and policies that either enhance or undermine “the American people’s confidence in the integrity of the voting.” It was expected to meet at least five times and had a budget of $500,000.  Despite the accusations of bias, both Trump and Pence had said in opening remarks at the first commission meeting that it had no preordained agenda.  That comment did nothing to reassure critics.

“This commission started as a tragedy and ended as a farce,” said Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice, a fierce critic of the panel. “It was a colossal waste of taxpayer money from the very beginning.”

A senior White House aide, however, said Democrats on the commission were to blame for refusing to work with the panel, as were states that refused to turn over public data.

The aide, who of course, was not authorized to speak on behalf of the commission and who also spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the Department of Homeland Security is “better equipped to take up the matter.”

It’s pretty frightening that the recognized “non-issue” of illegal voting is going to be taken up by a government agency, and the actual involvement of the Russians into our elections is being ignored by the Trump administration.

As Trump would probably tweet….SAD.

Copyright G.Ater  2018