Donald Trump's sham election commission is doing exactly as well as you might expect or, actually, even worse. Former election officials and civil rights advocates say the panel is a disaster that far from improving voter confidence in our elections is already harming the system and even suppressing the vote. NBC's Dartunorro Clark writes:
"F at the beginning, F all along, F now. It's an F enterprise," said Bob Bauer, a Democrat who served as the co-chairman of President Barack Obama's presidential election commission in 2013 and 2014.
Most notably, critics say, the commission has already prompted thousands of voters to de-register after a sweeping request for data from every state raised privacy concerns and sparked a bipartisan backlash from election officials. It is fighting several lawsuits. [...]
"It was destined to be a calamitous failure," Bauer said. "It was simply affected from the very beginning by partisan design and partisan leadership."
The commission, which is co-chaired by two Republicans—Kansas Sec. of State Kris Kobach and VP Mike Pence—was formed specifically to cast doubt on the fact that Donald Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes.
That’s killing the juvenile currently sitting in the Oval Office with access to the nuclear codes—so much so, that over the weekend he tweeted fantasy video of himself hitting Hillary Clinton with a golf ball. Yep, that's the guy who’s so concerned about "election integrity” that he formed a commission to discredit the votes he didn’t like and dissuade the people who cast those ballots from voting in the future.
Vanita Gupta, who was head of the of Justice Department's Civil Rights Division under Obama, said the commission had already done harm.
"I think the commission has had a suppressive effect," she said, pointing to thousands of voters in Colorado who de-registered because, they said, they feared that the panel would make their information public.
Prior to last week's meeting in New Hampshire, Kobach penned an op-ed perpetuating the conspiracy theory that thousands of out-of-state voters tipped the Granite State's balance to Clinton last November. He provided zero evidence.
David Becker, executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, a nonprofit Washington institute, said the commission had no accomplishments to date and was on the wrong track.
"If there's been a more embarrassing or less accomplished presidential commission in history, I'd love for someone to point it out," said Becker, who has worked with a group that conducts much of the same voter data sharing the commission aims to do.