In the middle of today’s various presidential hissyfits, Donald Trump’s White House had yet another unexpected announcement to make: His Kris Kobach-led commission charged with rooting out supposed voter fraud is packing up and going home.
“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 White House statement said. "Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today I signed an executive order to dissolve the Commission.”
The commission had not met for some time, leading to speculation as to whether it even remained functional after the Maine Secretary of State, a member of the commission himself, in November sued the commission for violating federal law by refusing to provide himself and other commission members with committee documents. It was also the subject of multiple other lawsuits and, as the White House statement hinted at, widespread resistance from states skeptical of commission demands to turn over full, detailed information about their voting citizens.
Public condemnations of the Kobach commission were also substantial, including multiple petitions organized by Daily Kos, the largest of which topped 185,000 individual signatures.
Although Republican claims of “voter fraud” have been omnipresent, whenever conservative candidates do not receive as many votes as they believe the public ought to have given them, no evidence of such fraud has ever been provided. Kobach has based his career on claiming such fraud is widespread, but neither he nor any other supposed investigators have at any point been able to identify more than a bare handful of provable cases nationwide—and his legacy of supposed fraud-prevention laws have resulted in steep taxpayer costs in the various states in which they have been tried.
He’s not likely to go away, but this marks another spectacular and expensive failure by the man who has devoted his life to claiming a widespread conspiracy of fraudulent voting but who has at no point been able to offer up any meaningful evidence of such a thing.