The Bogus Voter-Fraud Commission Is Dead, but the Myths Aren’t

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It’s easy to cheer the demise of President Trump’s so-called election integrity commission, which he disbanded abruptly on Wednesday, just eight months after establishing it.

Many send-offs come to mind. Some, like the one a White House adviser used in an interview with CNN, are unprintable in a family newspaper. We’ll stick with the words of Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania: “Good riddance.”

The commission was a transparent sham from the start, nothing more than a cover to justify Mr. Trump’s reckless and unfounded claims about widespread voter fraud in the 2016 presidential election, which he blamed for his losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly three million votes.

The lying continued on Wednesday. In a brief executive order, the president said he was ending the commission “despite substantial evidence of voter fraud” — but the commission turned up no such evidence, substantial or otherwise.

Not only that, but its short existence was marked by a string of embarrassing missteps. There were the clumsy requests for voter data, in some cases partial Social Security numbers, that at least a dozen states, Republican and Democratic alike, rightly rejected. There were multiple lawsuits alleging that the commission was violating the Constitution by discriminating against voters of color or infringing on Americans’ privacy rights. The commission was even sued by one of its own members, Matthew Dunlap, the Maine secretary of state and a Democrat, who said he was being kept in the dark about the commission’s activities and called any claims of bipartisanship a “facade.”

The commission’s only real accomplishment was to give a national platform to the nation’s most dogged vote deniers — men like J. Christian Adams, who has produced reports on noncitizen voting titled “Alien Invasion,” helpfully illustrated with pictures of U.F.O.s; Ken Blackwell, the former Ohio secretary of state who tried to toss out voter registrations for being printed on the wrong thickness of paper; and Hans von Spakovsky, who has been hawking phony tales of voter fraud at least since the George W. Bush administration, and who advocated staffing the commission with “real experts on the conservative side on this issue,” as opposed to Democrats or “mainstream Republican officials” — both of whom live in the reality-based world, where election administrators of both parties agree that fraud is rare to nonexistent.

And then there is Kris Kobach, the commission’s vice chairman and guiding light, the man more responsible than perhaps anyone else for keeping alive the bogus specter of voting fraud in America. Mr. Kobach is the secretary of state of Kansas, where he has worked tirelessly for years to smoke out illegal voting by noncitizens, dead voters and other malefactors. In place of actual evidence, he relies on an antifraud data collection program with a 99-percent error rate. His results? Nine convictions, mostly of older white Republican men who voted twice.

Mr. Kobach’s failures have not induced in him any apparent humility. In September, he said it was “highly likely” that more than 5,000 fraudulent votes swung the 2016 Senate election in New Hampshire, which was narrowly won by a Democrat, Maggie Hassan, and suggested fraud was also responsible for Mrs. Clinton’s victory in the state. Like almost all other claims of voter fraud, it wasn’t true — most of those votes probably were cast by college students who legally registered and voted with out-of-state IDs. But that didn’t stop Republican lawmakers in the state from passing a bill on Wednesday that would impose what is essentially a poll tax on students who want to exercise their right to vote.

All of this is laughable, but it would be a big mistake to assume that the collapse of the commission means the end of the voter-fraud inquisition. To the contrary, Mr. Kobach, who called Mr. Trump’s lie about millions of illegal voters “absolutely correct,” seems more than happy to continue his voter-suppression tactics in the dark. On Wednesday, Mr. Kobach told Politico, “Anyone on the left needs to realize that by throwing the food in the air, they just lost a seat at the table.” If you ask Mr. Dunlap, they never had a seat in the first place.

Mr. Kobach has already shifted his attention to the Department of Homeland Security, which might seem like an odd choice until you remember his anti-immigrant crusade. He’s especially keen on changing federal voting law, as he succeeded in changing Kansas law, to require all voters to show proof of citizenship. He claims this reduces fraud, even though there’s extremely little evidence of noncitizens voting anywhere.

There is a tendency to cast any defeat for President Trump as a win for liberals or the “resistance” more generally. In this case, the win is for democracy, and for competent governance, in the face of a calculated disinformation campaign. So, go ahead and enjoy the demise of a phony diversion that should never have existed to begin with. But as long as the nation is run by xenophobic fabulists with an ax to grind, the animating spirit of the commission will live on to haunt us all.