Trump disbands voter fraud commission
US President Donald Trump is dumping a controversial commission that was charged with investigating his unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud during the 2016 election, Politico.com reports, citing the White House.
Trump has asked the Department of Homeland Security to look into the issue instead.
“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,” a statement from the president said. “Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today I signed an executive order to dissolve the Commission.”
The commission was the focus of heated contention even before it was formally announced in May with Vice President Mike Pence as the chairman and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach as vice chairman. Democrats urged Trump to abandon the idea altogether, but the president chose to press forward.
The White House struggled to find Democrats willing to give the effort a bipartisan patina after prominent party leaders denounced the effort as an attempt to give respectability to Trump’s assertion that 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally in 2016, a volume that the president suggested accounted for Hillary Clinton’s decisive win in the popular vote.
Democrats and liberal groups rejoiced over the commission's demise Wednesday, but in an interview with POLITICO Wednesday night, Kobach said that exuberance is misplaced.
"Anyone on the left needs to realize that by throwing the food in the air, they just lost a seat at the table," Kobach said.
The Kansas official said he expects officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and political appointees overseeing that agency to take over the commission's work and begin efforts to match state voter rolls to federal databases of noncitizens. He insisted he was not disappointed with the president's decision.
"It’s the right move," Kobach said. "It's a shifting in tactics from having the investigation be done by a federal commission to having it be done by a federal agency. The agency has a greater ability to move quickly to get the investigation done."
Kobach acknowledged that ICE has little expertise in other types of potential voter fraud, such as multiple voting or voting by felons who've been disenfranchised, but he noted DHS has a broad mandate to address election security issues as critical US infrastructure.
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