Trump dissolves vote-fraud body

WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced that he is disbanding a panel he formed last year to study voter fraud but that became mired in federal lawsuits, including from one of its own members, and faced resistance from states that accused it of overreach.

Trump created the commission last year in response to his claim that he lost the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 because of millions of illegally cast ballots.

The commission met only twice during the series of lawsuits seeking to curb its authority and claims by Democrats that it was stacked to recommend voting restrictions that would be favorable to the president's party.

"Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order to dissolve the Commission, and he has asked the Department of Homeland Security to review its initial findings and determine next courses of action," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement.

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Still, Sanders emphasized that there is "substantial evidence of voter fraud."

Critics have noted that past studies have found voter fraud to be exceptionally rare. The commission was also seen as an attempt to distract from ongoing investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and potential collusion between Moscow and Trump campaign aides. The intelligence community concluded that the Russian government mounted a campaign to help Trump win.

The bipartisan panel, known as the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, had been nominally chaired by Vice President Mike Pence and led by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican who has aggressively sought to prosecute allegations of voter fraud in his state.

Kobach, the commission's vice chairman, characterized the decision to dissolve the group as a "tactical change" and argued that the Homeland Security Department can pursue an investigation of election fraud more quickly and efficiently.

"The Democrats, both on and off the commission, made very clear that they were not interested in determining the scope and extent of voter fraud and, indeed, they were trying to stop the commission in its tracks," Kobach said. "The Democrats lost their opportunity, lost their seat at the table, by stonewalling."

But Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., slammed the group as having nothing to do with rooting out voter fraud.

"The commission never had anything to do with election integrity," Schumer, who is not on the commission, said in a statement. "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."

Other critics of the commission, including former Missouri Secretary of State Jason Kander, a Democrat, also hailed Trump's announcement.

"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. ... Good riddance."

The 11-member commission proved a magnet for controversy from the outset and was sued by one of its own members, Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, a Democrat who alleged in November that he had been kept in the dark about its operations, rendering his participation "essentially meaningless."

A federal judge last month ruled partly in Dunlap's favor.

The commission had been targeted in at least eight other lawsuits seeking to curb its operations or make its deliberations more transparent. Several of those stemmed from an early, sweeping request to states for voter data that some, including those led by Republicans, deemed too intrusive.

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

The panel was rattled in the fall by two unforeseen events: the arrest of a staff member on charges of possessing child pornography and the death of one of the commissioners, 52-year-old David Dunn, a former state legislator in Arkansas.

Dunn, a Democrat from Forrest City, died in October in Little Rock while undergoing surgery.

Dunn was a former three-term member of the state House of Representatives who was recommended for the commission by Arkansas Secretary of State Mark Martin, a Republican who served in the House with Dunn.

Martin's office oversees elections in Arkansas, which was one of the states to submit voter information to Trump's commission.

Trump's original executive order establishing the commission called for it to produce a report to the president detailing laws and policies that enhance or undermine "the American people's confidence in the integrity of the voting."

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 did not reassure critics.

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

While there have been isolated cases of people voting illegally, and many voter rolls often contain outdated data, there is no evidence that voter fraud is a widespread problem in the United States or has effected election results.

A study by a Loyola Law School professor found that out of 1 billion votes cast in all American elections between 2000 and 2014, there were 31 known cases of impersonation fraud.

Dale Ho, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Voting Rights Project, accused the commission of engaging in "a wild-goose chase for voter fraud, demonizing the very American voters whom we should all be helping to participate -- with the not-so-secret goal of making voting harder with unnecessary barriers.

"President Trump has tried and failed to spread his own fake news about voter fraud," Ho said.

Information for this article was contributed by John Wagner of The Washington Post; by Jill Colvin, John Hanna and Ken Thomas of The Associated Press; and by staff members of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

A Section on 01/04/2018