Trump ends phony voter fraud commission

One of Trump’s oldest and favorite refrains is that he only lost the popular vote because Hillary Clinton got millions of illegal votes thanks to widespread voter fraud. That this is an egregious and endlessly debunked lie hardly matters to his acolytes or his voter base, the former because it suits them and the latter because they don’t live in reality anyway.

To try and bolster his ridiculous lie, the White House set up a commission to investigate all the supposed voter fraud that somehow failed to keep Trump out of office. Several months and lawsuits (and absolutely zero evidence found) later, he’s now calling it quits:

President Trump on Wednesday abruptly shut down a White House commission he had charged with investigating voter fraud, ending a brief quest for evidence of election theft that generated lawsuits, outrage and some scholarly testimony, but no real evidence that American elections are corrupt.

[…]

Mr. Trump did not acknowledge the commission’s inability to find evidence of fraud, but cast the closing as a result of continuing legal challenges.

“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,” Mr. Trump said in a White House statement on Wednesday.

“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,” he said.

In fact, no state has uncovered significant evidence to support the president’s claim, and election officials, including many Republicans, have strongly rejected it.

I wonder if part of the reason for disbanding the commission is that it found voter fraud is almost always committed by Republicans?

It’s extremely telling how the announcement claims they’re disbanding the commission despite having “substantial evidence” of fraud. If that were true, then they’d never abandon their investigation; they’d ramp it up, using their evidence as a cudgel to get their way and obtaining court orders forcing recalcitrant officials to turn over their data. The fact that they instead gave up this quickly instead proves that they had no real evidence whatsoever, least of all of millions of illegal votes. The entire thing was a farce from the start, and when states refused to play along, the enterprise just collapsed.

That said, whilst it’s good news that the government will no longer waste time and taxpayer funds trying to defend an obvious lie, the fact remains that it’s already accomplished its two main goals: it helped assuage Trump’s ego by playing into his delusion that only cheaters would oppose him, and it helped justify Republicans’ voter suppression efforts around the country.