Trump’s voter fraud commission: from folly to farce

Donald Trump’s long history of refusing to accept facts he doesn’t like matters infinitely more now that he is president. After losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes, Trump tweeted that this was a result of “millions of people who voted illegally.” When he specifically cited California in November, Secretary of State Alex Padilla — the state official responsible for voting — immediately wrote the president-elect to ask for any evidence he had. In an interview with The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board, Padilla said he was eager to follow up because he wanted to do all he could to maintain public faith in the integrity of elections. But Trump never responded to anyone who asked for evidence — because he has none.

This lack of evidence didn’t prevent Trump from issuing an executive order to create the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. When Trump chose Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to lead the commission, that raised new questions given Kobach’s history of restricting voting. These questions hung over his extraordinary June 28 request that every state provide him with the full names of all voter registrants, their addresses, dates of birth and political party, the last four digits of their Social Security numbers, their recent voting history and information about felony convictions, registration in other states and more.

At least 44 states have partly or completely rejected Kobach’s request for a variety of overlapping reasons: state privacy laws, more general privacy concerns, a refusal to pretend that mass voter fraud is real or as a way of signaling animus to the president. This rejection was very much a bipartisan affair. Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann, a Republican, memorably said that Trump’s commission can “go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.”

In a normal era, opposition from Republican and Democratic officials in nearly every state to a presidential request for information would translate into a public consensus that the White House was guilty of overreach. But in an era in which 89 percent of Republicans in one recent SurveyMonkey poll said the president was more trustworthy than CNN, the opposition becomes more fuel for Trump’s voter conspiracy theories — which he encouraged with tweets about states’ refusal to cooperate that wondered “what do they have to hide?”

Kobach also encouraged the anti-media conspiratorialists, but from a different angle. He blasted as “fake news” the claim that 44 states weren’t fully cooperating because 36 were at least partly cooperating. In a normal era, a reasonable person would find Kobach’s parsing to be a weak attempt at spin, given that Kansas is among the 44 that aren’t cooperating fully with his request. Instead, his claims were played up on pro-Trump media.

This editorial board refuses to buy the gloomy idea that the president is pushing America to the abyss. In our view, the checks and balances built into government by the Constitution have kept Trump’s excesses in check, and will keep doing so.

But when a president’s needy ego can lead to the farce that is the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity — and that farce is widely defended — then may our children forgive us.

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