The panel, convened in May, was widely criticized by voting rights advocates.
President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that he was ending a panel convened in May to investigate voter fraud.
The White House’s announcement came as a surprise. Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), the panel’s vice chair, said last week that it would meet in January.
“Despite substantial evidence of voter fraud, many states have refused to provide the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity with basic information relevant to its inquiry,” the White House said in a statement. “Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today I signed an executive order to dissolve the Commission, and have asked the Department of Homeland Security to review these issues and determine next courses of action.”
Alan King, a Democrat on the commission, told HuffPost he was surprised to learn from a reporter that the commission had dissolved Wednesday evening. “As someone who has handled 43 elections and who knows election officials across the United States, this is good news. I don’t believe there is a conspiracy of voter fraud throughout this nation and never have believed that there was. I was willing to serve on this commission and have an open mind, but I never believed that this commission would be able to produce evidence or testimony to support the claim of a widespread conspiracy of voter fraud in the United States.”
Asked what he hoped the commission’s legacy would be, King said, “For future issues that a presidential commission might be impaneled, that more advanced forethought would be put into the decision to study an issue before spending taxpayer money.”
The panel had been closely watched and criticized by voting rights advocates, who said it was an effort to substantiate Trump’s claims that there was widespread voter fraud in the 2016 election. Even though several studies and investigations have shown voter fraud is not a widespread issue, critics said the panel would try to stir up uncertainty about fraud in hopes of passing more restrictive voting laws.
From the start, the panel faced controversy. Several states refused to comply with a June request from Kobach for voter data from all 50 states. The request sparked widespread privacy concerns, and even Republican election officials said they could not turn over all the information the commission was asking for. As of October, about 20 states had turned over voter information to the commission.
White House officials indicated that the panel planned to use the voter data it collected against federal databases to try to identify people illegally on the voting rolls.
In one lawsuit, the Brennan Center for Justice sued to get records of commission communications with other federal agencies, such as the Department of Homeland Security, which administers a database of non-citizens and the Department of Justice. The request for those records is still pending. It’s unclear now if those records will become public.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday that the panel was never intended to uncover fraud.
