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President Donald Trump’s commission investigating voter fraud held its first meeting Wednesday amid a swirl of partisan acrimony and questions about whether it is looking for facts or has already decided which facts it is trying to find.
The session featured an early statement by Trump, whose baseless claim that he would have won the popular vote in 2016 if not for millions of illegal voters hung over the gathering. He said he was told stories of voting irregularities “in some cases having to do with large numbers of people in certain states.”
The meeting’s coda was an MSNBC television interview in which Kris Kobach, the Kansas Republican who is the panel’s de facto head, was asked, “Do you believe Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 3 to 5 million votes because of voter fraud?” He replied: “We will probably never know the answer to that question.”
In remarks to his Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, Trump pledged that its work would be open to inspection and would “fairly and objectively follow the facts wherever they may lead.” But he soon swung to an attack on officials who had refused to cooperate with the investigation, twice saying that voter data from their states would be “forthcoming” and raising doubts about their motives.
“One has to wonder what they’re worried about,” Trump said.
The day’s events did little or nothing to silence charges by voting-rights advocates that the commission was a sham meant to produce inflated claims of fraud that would pave the way to stricter requirements for registering and casting ballots. Democrats, including the former secretary of state in Missouri, Jason Kander, said Wednesday that the panel’s inquiry was a charade.
“This is not really a policy difference between the two parties” over the danger of fraud, he said, but “a political strategy for them that’s no different from where they run their TV ads, or where they send mailers, or whose doors they knock on. That’s what voter suppression is about for them.”
The panel has met resistance from voting-rights advocates since Trump created it in May. Many state election officials joined the outcry this summer after being asked to provide data on all 200 million registered voters to the panel for analysis.
Academic studies and other investigations have repeatedly concluded that election fraud is minuscule, and that misrepresentation at the ballot box is almost nonexistent.