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| Trump Disbands Commission on Voter Fraud | Trump Disbands Commission on Voter Fraud |
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| WASHINGTON — 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. |