Trump's Commission Produced No Evidence of Voter Fraud

Trump and Kobach sought to manufacture support for Trump's lies. 

His fragile and narcissistic ego apparently unable to cope with the reality that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election, Trump claimed that as many as three to five million fraudulent votes had been cast in the 2016 election.  Lacking any proof for the claim - which was eagerly embraced by his knuckle dragging, racist and white Christian nationalist supporters - Trump established a commission to investigate whether voter fraud had occurred. Vice Chair of this group was Kris Kobach who has a ugly record of voter suppression and untruths in his home state.  Ultimately, faced with multiple law suits, the commission was disbanded.  As for voter fraud and/or voting by illegal aliens, the commission produced no evidence whatsoever. The commission's entire purpose in retrospect was to manufacture  support for Trump's lie.  A piece in the Washington Post reports on the commissions true agenda and failure to produce any evidence of fraudulent voting.  Nonetheless, mindless and/or racist Trump supporters continue to repeat the meme and some, like one local "friend" continue to re-post utterly false information.  My view on this individual and those like them: be honest about your bigotry and join a white supremacist group.  Here are article highlights: 

Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, one of the 11 members of the commission formed by President Trump to investigate supposed voter fraud, issued a scathing rebuke of the disbanded panel on Friday, accusing Vice Chair Kris Kobach and the White House of making false statements and saying that he had concluded that the panel had been set up to try to validate the president’s baseless claims about fraudulent votes in the 2016 election.

Dunlap, one of four Democrats on the panel, made the statements in a report he sent to the commission’s two leaders — Vice President Pence and Kobach, who is Kansas’s secretary of state — after reviewing more than 8,000 documents from the group’s work, which he acquired only after a legal fight despite his participation on the panel.

Before it was disbanded by Trump in January, the panel had never presented any findings or evidence of widespread voter fraud. But the White House claimed at the time that it had shut down the commission despite “substantial evidence of voter fraud,” due to the mounting legal challenges it faced from states.

Dunlap said that the commission’s documents that were turned over to him underscore the hollowness of those claims: “they do not contain evidence of widespread voter fraud,” he said in his report, . . .

Dunlap said of the more than 8,000 pages of documents in an interview with The Washington Post, “I see that it wasn’t just a matter of investigating President Trump’s claims that three to five million people voted illegally, but the goal of the commission seems to have been to validate those claims.”

Dunlap said that his time on the panel was “the most bizarre thing I’ve ever been a part of.” “We had more transparency on a deer task force than I had on a presidential commission,” he said. “We had probably a dozen meetings. They were all public. We published everything we did in the newspaper and published results, including information we got from the public.” In contrast, the voter-integrity panel was marked by obfuscation, secrecy and confusion related to the work the panel was engaged in.

He received the documents he sought only in July, after a federal judge ordered the administration to turn them over, despite the objections of the Justice Department.

The materials provide a window into the panel’s operations. In one email, Christy McCormick, a Republican member of the commission, spoke to a staff member about recruiting a career statistician from the Department of Justice to the commission, writing that she was “pretty confident that he is conservative (and Christian, too).”

Trump’s claim that as many as three to five million fraudulent votes were cast in the 2016 election remains one of his most notable falsehoods.

No credible evidence has ever been produced, by the White House or anyone else, to substantiate the claim. 

That lawsuit is not yet resolved. Dunlap says he believes that the committee may yet have more information to procure, while the government has said it wants to terminate the litigation, said Clark Pettig, a spokesman for American Oversight.

Meanwhile, despite the truth, I expect my "friend" to continue pushing the Trump inspired lie that voter fraud is rampant. What truly amazes/sickens me is the failure of such people to see the common humanity of others.  Sadly, seemingly, all they see is black or brown skin and the other is transformed into something less than fully human.  Yet many of them park themselves in church pews every Sunday even as they make Christianity an exercise in rank hypocrisy. No wonder the younger generations are leaving religion in droves.