Trump did away with his voter fraud commission on Wednesday, but definitely not before the situation had already become insulting, outlandish, and distracting.




The New York Times reported on Wednesday that the “Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity,” which the White House dreamed up in May so that Trump could better convince the voices within him and subject to him that voter fraud is a real honest-to-god problem, was being terminated, but not, according to the administration, because the President was wrong.


Trump gave his weird excuse in a White House statement:

“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. 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.”

The President’s given reason is quite apparently absurd, as no state has found significant evidence of voter fraud, and internally the White House does not seem too calm about how this whole nonexistent issue was handled. A White House advisor told CNN that the commission was a “shit show” that went “off the rails.”

Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights told the Times that “the commission’s entire purpose was to legitimize voter suppression.” That sounds about right.