President Trump on Wednesday announced that he is disbanding a controversial panel studying alleged voter fraud that became mired in multiple federal lawsuits and faced resistance from states that accused it of overreach.
The decision is a major setback for Trump, who created the commission last year in response to his claim, for which he provided no proof, that he lost the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 because of millions of illegally cast ballots.
The commission met only twice amid the series of lawsuits seeking to curb its authority and claims by Democrats that it was stacked to recommend voting restrictions favorable to the president’s party.
In a statement, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said there is “substantial evidence of voter fraud” and blamed the ending of the commission on the refusal of many states to provide voter data sought by the panel and the cost of ongoing lawsuits.
The bipartisan panel, known as the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, had been nominally chaired by Vice President Pence and led by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a Republican who has aggressively sought to prosecute alleged voter fraud in his state. Pence in recent months had sought to distance himself from its work.
In the statement, Sanders said Trump had signed an executive order asking the Department of Homeland Security “to review its initial findings and determine next courses of action.”
Critics of the commission hailed Trump’s announcement, calling it long overdue.
“The commission never had anything to do with election integrity,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) 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.”
Former Missouri secretary of state Jason Kander (D) also wished the panel “good riddance.”
“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.”
Trump, however, appeared to stand by the claims of voter fraud without offering any further evidence.
In tweets Thursday, he said the commission “fought hard” to investigation allegations of voter abuses “because they know that many people are voting illegally. System is rigged, must go to Voter I.D.”
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January 04, 2018
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