I've talked about Trump's Voter Suppression Commission throughout 2017, the efforts by the GOP to create a national voter ID standard and database that would force all states to implement onerous rules to restrict voting as much as possible and disenfranchise millions, possibly tens of millions of poor, elderly, and college voters across the country, mostly Democrats.
The commission, headed by VP Mike Pence and Kansas GOP Secretary of State Kris Kobach, was designed to force states to hand over all voting data to Trump so that the regime could design national legislation to disenfranchise Democratic voters across the country. But even red states told Kobach to go to hell, first blue states said no way, then red states admitted that the Russians had compromised our election process and decided handing stuff over to Trump was unacceptable. When it became clear that the effort was about massive voter suppression of Democrats through a federal Jim Crow background check voting law, it became too much for even the GOP to handle. Even red states refused to drop their lawsuits.
And yesterday evening, Trump quietly pulled the plug on Kobach's commission.
President Trump on Wednesday abruptly shut down a White House commission he had charged with investigating voter fraud, ending a brief quest for evidence of election theft that generated lawsuits, outrage and some scholarly testimony, but no real evidence that American elections are corrupt.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump called for requiring voter identification in a pair of Twitter posts because the voting system “is rigged.” “Push hard for Voter Identification!” Mr. Trump wrote.
Mr. Trump did not acknowledge the commission’s inability to find evidence of fraud, but cast the closing as a result of continuing legal challenges.
“Despite substantial evidence of voter fraud, many states have refused to provide the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity with basic information relevant to its inquiry,” Mr. Trump said in a White House statement on Wednesday.
“Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today I signed an executive order to dissolve the commission, and have asked the Department of Homeland Security to review these issues and determine next courses of action,” he said.
In fact, no state has uncovered significant evidence to support the president’s claim, and election officials, including many Republicans, have strongly rejected it.
The fight is far from over however.
But Mr. Kobach insisted in an interview that the commission’s work would not end but rather would be transferred to the Department of Homeland Security, one of the federal agencies charged with ensuring election integrity and one that he said critics would find more difficult to target.
As a White House commission, the voter-fraud panel was subject to public-disclosure requirements and other restrictions that Mr. Kobach said opponents of the inquiry had seized on in “a determined effort by the left” to hamstring its investigation. At last count, he said, the panel faced at least eight lawsuits accusing it of ignoring various federal requirements, including one from a commission member, Matthew Dunlap, the Maine secretary of state, that claimed he had been illegally excluded from its deliberations.
“It got to the point where the staff of the commission was spending more time responding to litigation than doing an investigation,” Mr. Kobach said. “Think of it as an option play; a decision was made in the middle of the day to pass the ball. The Department of Homeland Security is going to be able to move faster and more efficiently than a presidential advisory commission.”
Kobach at least will be busy running his campaign for Kansas Governor to replace GOP Gov Sam Brownback, so we may have dodged a bullet for now. But this isn't going to go away. I'm betting the goal now is to have voter suppression tactics come down as Homeland Security directives. How quickly that can be accomplished, well, we'll see.
The commission is done, but not the war on voting. Trump tweeted about the need for national voter ID laws again today, and the effort to protect voting access cannot let up.
We still have a long fight ahead.
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