Some good news today.
New York Times, Jan. 3, 2018: "Trump Disbands Commission on Voter Fraud"
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 at all corrupt.
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.
“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.”
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 shutting down of the commission was a major blow for Kris Kobach, the secretary of state of Kansas and the panel’s vice chairman. Mr. Kobach was one of a few state officials to support Mr. Trump’s contention of widespread fraud.
Groups that opposed the president’s commission were quick to declare victory.
“The President’s Election Integrity Commission was a vehicle launched with the singular purpose of laying the groundwork to promote voter suppression policies on a national scale,” said Kristen Clarke, the president and executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. “This unprecedented effort demonstrated this administration’s clear hostility to voting rights,” she said in an emailed statement, adding that “today’s executive order disbanding the commission is a victory for those who are concerned about ensuring access to the ballot box across the country.”
The Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York, said in a statement that “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.”
Richard L. Hasen, a law professor and election law scholar at the University of California, Irvine, was sharply critical of the commission in a blog post.
“The commission was poorly organized and conceived,” he wrote. “It tried to operate to a large extent in secrecy, without recognition that doing so would violate the federal laws that govern presidential commissions and that protect privacy. It made rookie, boneheaded mistakes about handling documents used by the commission, again in violation of federal law. It did not seem to have an endgame,” he wrote.
While Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed there was widespread voter fraud in the 2016 election, he announced the abandonment of the commission late on a day dominated by revelations in a new book about the White House and his presidency. The book, Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff, prompted Mr. Trump to excoriate his former chief political strategist, Stephen K. Bannon.