In 2017 President Trump signed an Executive Order surrounding the 2016 election. Led by former VP Mike Pence, this work was never finished.
President Trump created through an Executive Order the Presidential Advisory Commision on Election Integrity. It was attacked from the start. Why were Trump’s enemies so intent on blocking this initiative?
Even the Brennan Group attacked this initiative:
On May 11, 2017, President Donald Trump signed an executive order creating the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.” Vice President Mike Pence is the chair, and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach — one of the nation’s leading promoters of the myth of voter fraud and laws restricting access to voting — is the vice chair. Its members include Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation and J. Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, two of the country’s most notorious advocates for voter suppression.
The Commission was created in the wake of President Trump’s repeated assertions that millions voted illegally in the 2016 election. For years, exaggerated claims of fraud have been used to justify unwarranted restrictions on voting access. The president’s invented legions of illegal voters are the most extreme such claims in recent memory. His statements have been almost universally rejected; for example, a recent Brennan Center survey of local election officials found just 30 suspected incidents of noncitizen voting out of over 23 million ballots cast in the surveyed jurisdictions.
Eventually, the Commission was shut down due to the massive pushback from the Democrats. Kris Kobach shared the following on NPR:
Well, what happened was a series of lawsuits. There were almost a dozen suits filed against the commission by various organizations on the left of the political spectrum. And you also had one suit filed by a Democrat member of the commission itself. And as a result, the staff of the commission was spending more time addressing the litigation than they were doing the investigation that the commission was set up to do. And so it eventually became clear that the better way to move forward would be to have the Department of Homeland Security do it within an executive branch agency rather than use the mechanism of a commission under the Federal Advisory Commission Act.