Trump dissolving his commission on election integrity

President Donald Trump Jan. 3 issued an executive order dissolving the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, which he formed to prop up claims he lost the popular vote due to fraud.

From the start, critics had called the commission a sham and civil rights and good-government groups sued.

“Donald Trump’s so-called election integrity commission was a scam and a fraud from beginning to end,” said Marge Baker, executive vice president of the progressive People for the American Way. “It’s purpose was never to make elections stronger. It was to twist and distort the facts in order to help justify onerous new restrictions on the right to vote designed to help Republicans rig our democracy in their own favor.”

Trump, who won the electoral college but lost the popular vote, repeatedly alleged he lost the peoples’ vote because of voter fraud.

A White House statement on Trump’s order blamed numerous states for refusing to provide voter information.

“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 spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders stated.

“It’s telling that even in his announcement to its long overdue demise, President Trump continues the false narrative that there is ‘substantial evidence of voter fraud,” Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, said Jan. 3. “There is no proof of widespread illegal voting or voter fraud in the 2016 election. The sham commission was a political ploy to provide cover for the president’s wild and unfounded claims of mass voter fraud and to lay the foundation to purge eligible voters from the rolls.”

Baker said of the commission’s demise: “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

She called Trump’s order a “major victory for every activist who has called out this sham commission for what it is.”

The list of activists and organizations that challenged the commission is lengthy, including many of the nation’s most prominent civil rights groups and good-government nonprofits.

At the American Civil Liberties Union, voting rights project director David Ho said, “President Trump has tried and failed to spread his own fake news about voter fraud.”

Ho encouraged an examination of real problems when it comes to elections: low voter turnout, unnecessary barriers to participation, outdated and insecure machines and reported foreign interference.

The ACLU was one group that sued over the commission. So did Common Cause, the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

“We mounted successful litigation against the administration that exposed its failure to abide by federal transparency requirements and vowed to keep fighting until the commission was terminated,” said Kristen Clarke, executive director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Now, she said, activists must “remain vigilant. …This administration has a track record of repackaging and reissuing old and discriminatory policies.”