While we already knew that President Trump’s so-called “election integrity” commission was a sham, this week brought a few new pieces of evidence that shredded any credibility the commission might have had left.
In a short video, PFAW Senior Fellow Peter Montgomery outlines the updates activists need to know about the Trump administration’s attempts to undermine voting rights through its sham commission:
Transcript:
Hi everyone, Peter Montgomery at People For the American Way, here with a quick update on the Trump administration's sham voting commission. This commission, as we’ve talked about before, is designed to manufacture evidence to support the kind of voting suppression laws that Republicans around the country have been pushing through in state legislatures.
Three things happened this week: One, Kris Kobach, the vice chair of the commission, published an op-ed claiming he had new evidence that the New Hampshire senators’ race was decided by fraudulent votes. That's a lie—and the New Hampshire Secretary of State, who actually sits on the commission with Kobach, made it clear that that's just not true.
Two, The Heritage Foundation, it turns out, had sent a memo to Attorney General Jeff Sessions about the makeup of the commission. That memo became public this week, and it makes clear that the commission was a sham. They urged the administration to keep Democrats and even establishment Republicans off the commission because they might get in the way of the propaganda that they wanted to come out of it. It turns out that that memo was written by Hans von Spakovsy, the Heritage Foundation representative on the commission, even though he denied to a reporter that it was him. So another shot to his credibility and the credibility of the commission.
And the third thing that happened was that the commission actually met in New Hampshire. They heard from all white men, and one of those guys suggested that voters should actually be subjected to the same kind of criminal background checks that gun purchasers go through. And I wish that were a joke—but it's not. The only joke here, and it's a bad one, is the Trump administration's sham election commission. It should be disbanded. The Trump administration's not going to shut it down, so Congress should.