Trump sets up 'commission on election integrity' but really he means commission to suppress the vote

Rss@dailykos.com (laura Clawson) · Thursday, May 11, 2017, 1:15 pm

Popular vote loser Donald Trump is gearing up for the next step in pushing his lies and/or delusions about millions of people voting illegally last November:

The officials say Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach will be announced as Chair and Vice Chair of the ‘Presidential Commission on Election Integrity’ in a press release today. It's not clear whether the White House will allow coverage of the order signing.

The commission, which will include Republicans and Democrats, will be tasked with studying "vulnerabilities" in U.S. voting systems and potential effects on "improper voting, fraudulent voter registrations and fraudulent voting," according to one official with knowledge of the announcement.

Yes, that’s the Kris Kobach who helped draft Arizona’s racist “papers, please” law and whose voter suppression efforts in Kansas have been repeatedly knocked down by the courts. The same Kris Kobach who Trump’s people turned to back in February to prove voter fraud on television, and failed to do so. And no wonder Kobach can’t prove Trump’s bizarre claims of millions of illegal votes, when a Brennan Center study recently found—like other studies before it—that there is no basis for this. No basis at all:

In the jurisdictions we studied, very few noncitizens voted in the 2016 election. Across 42 jurisdictions, election officials who oversaw the tabulation of 23.5 million votes in the 2016 general election referred only an estimated 30 incidents of suspected noncitizen voting for further investigation or prosecution. In other words, improper noncitizen votes accounted for 0.0001 percent of the 2016 votes in those jurisdictions.

But Kobach and Pence won’t just be going after those 30 votes. They’ll be looking for ways to clamp down on voting by every group that leans Democratic. That’s Kris Kobach’s mission in life and it’s one of the Republican Party’s top strategies for winning elections these days. Now it’s got its own presidential commission.

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