Voter Fraud Commission: Using Government Power to Propagate Election Lies

Overview

The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity was established to find evidence for a lie. Trump had claimed, without any evidence, that millions of people had voted illegally in 2016 — the only explanation he offered for losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes.

The commission's vice chair, Kris Kobach, was one of the nation's most prominent advocates for voter ID laws and other measures that critics documented disproportionately suppress minority voting. His presence signaled the commission's purpose.

What the Commission Found

After eight months and two meetings, the commission was disbanded. It publicly released no findings of significant voter fraud — because there were none.

The Brennan Center for Justice had documented the actual rate of voter fraud in American elections: between 0.0001% and 0.0025% of ballots cast. Studies of specific elections, voter rolls, and fraud allegations consistently found that the documented cases were vanishingly rare and nowhere near the scale Trump claimed.

The commission's failure to find what it was looking for confirmed what election experts had said from the start: the premise was false.

The Data Collection Attempt

The most alarming aspect of the commission was its data collection request. Requesting Social Security numbers, party affiliation, voting history, and felony convictions for all registered voters in the United States — in a single collection administered by political appointees with voter suppression records — raised obvious concerns about how the data would be used.

Nearly every state, including Republican-controlled states, refused. The refusals came not just from Democratic secretaries of state but from Republican officials who recognized that the request exceeded any legitimate election integrity purpose and raised serious privacy and legal concerns.