Trump’s electoral commission is a sham

Editor’s Note: Jason Kander is a CNN contributor and the former Missouri secretary of state. Kander is the president of Let America Vote, an organization dedicated to fighting voter suppression, and was recently named by the Democratic National Committee as chairman of its Commission on Protecting American Democracy from the Trump Administration. The views expressed in this commentary are his own.

President Donald Trump is upset he lost the popular vote by such a historic margin, and this month he announced he is going to do something about it. What started as a presidential lie about voter fraud has turned into the President’s “Commission on Election Integrity,” a group that poses an actual threat to American democracy.

With so much bad news coming out of the White House, a scandal can feel like a welcome distraction from Trump’s policy proposals, which have the potential to harm many Americans.

And that’s exactly what’s happening now. As the investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia gets underway, the President has formed a sham of a commission to suppress voting rights.

Republicans, of course, are taking full advantage. When Trump made up the lie that millions of illegal votes were cast in the 2016 election – ultimately causing him to lose the popular vote – Vice President Mike Pence and other party leaders saw an opening to take their state and local efforts to suppress voters, until now through voter ID laws enacted in 34 states, to the national stage.

So what started as a way to soothe Trump’s ego after losing the popular vote has become the perfect vehicle to attacking American voting rights and making it easier for Republicans to win elections.

While the President has the most authority to change and influence elections, he lacks the know-how. So when Kris Kobach, one of the biggest champions of voter suppression in the country and new head of the electoral commission, has the ear of the President, fire meets gasoline.

Kobach is the only secretary of state with prosecutorial power, and he’s used it to go on a witch hunt for any evidence to support the lies he tells about a voter fraud crisis in America.

All that Kobach has to show for his work is a waste of taxpayer dollars and little evidence of voter impersonation fraud. Still, Kobach helped push through the most restrictive voter ID law in the country – one that could require voters to pay for documents to prove their citizenship just to register to vote.

We can expect the same from Trump’s task force.

Ultimately, this commission is going to come out and say one of two things: Either there is a widespread voter fraud epidemic sweeping the nation, or there is potential for a widespread voter fraud epidemic.

We know from data in individual states that voter fraud is extremely limited, and voter impersonation fraud is all but nonexistent. But this sham commission’s solution will be the same regardless: Pass laws across the country that make it harder for people who have been legally voting for years to vote in 2020. This is the President’s re-election strategy.

Voter ID laws are the most potent form of voter suppression legislation. A lot of states that pass voter ID laws have little to no evidence of in-person voter impersonation fraud, which is the only kind of fraud that voter ID laws could guard against.

After the election, story after story came out about eligible voters in Wisconsin not being able to vote because of the state’s voter ID law. There’s a chance it changed the outcome of elections there, and in a state where Donald Trump won by only 22,747 votes, that’s a big deal. So while voter impersonation fraud has never impacted a presidential election, there may be evidence that restrictive voter ID laws do.

Whether it’s intentional or not, Trump regularly makes news for unprecedented and nonpresidential behavior. It gives him cover to make bad policy, and in this case, change the electoral landscape so he can win again.

The only way to stop him is to pay attention and speak up anytime he takes a step toward suppressing voters. The Democratic National Committee just formed its own commission that will defend American democracy from voter suppression attacks by the Trump administration. As the commission’s chairman, I won’t back down from any fight where voting rights are threatened.

Voter suppression anywhere hurts our democracy everywhere. We need to show Trump that we know what he’s up to and that he’s not going to get away with it.