Not only that, but its short existence was marked by a string of embarrassing missteps. There were the clumsy requests for voter data, in some cases partial Social Security numbers, that at least a dozen states, Republican and Democratic alike, rightly rejected. There were multiple lawsuits alleging that the commission was violating the Constitution by discriminating against voters of color or infringing on Americans’ privacy rights. The commission was even sued by one of its own members, Matthew Dunlap, the Maine secretary of state and a Democrat, who said he was being kept in the dark about the commission’s activities and called any claims of bipartisanship a “facade.”

The commission’s only real accomplishment was to give a national platform to the nation’s most dogged vote deniers — men like J. Christian Adams, who has produced reports on noncitizen voting titled “Alien Invasion,” helpfully illustrated with pictures of U.F.O.s; Ken Blackwell, the former Ohio secretary of state who tried to toss out voter registrations for being printed on the wrong thickness of paper; and Hans von Spakovsky, who has been hawking phony tales of voter fraud at least since the George W. Bush administration, and who advocated staffing the commission with “real experts on the conservative side on this issue,” as opposed to Democrats or “mainstream Republican officials” — both of whom live in the reality-based world, where election administrators of both parties agree that fraud is rare to nonexistent.

And then there is Kris Kobach, the commission’s vice chairman and guiding light, the man more responsible than perhaps anyone else for keeping alive the bogus specter of voting fraud in America. Mr. Kobach is the secretary of state of Kansas, where he has worked tirelessly for years to smoke out illegal voting by noncitizens, dead voters and other malefactors. In place of actual evidence, he relies on an antifraud data collection program with a 99-percent error rate. His results? Nine convictions, mostly of older white Republican men who voted twice.

Mr. Kobach’s failures have not induced in him any apparent humility. In September, he said it was “highly likely” that more than 5,000 fraudulent votes swung the 2016 Senate election in New Hampshire, which was narrowly won by a Democrat, Maggie Hassan, and suggested fraud was also responsible for Mrs. Clinton’s victory in the state. Like almost all other claims of voter fraud, it wasn’t true — most of those votes probably were cast by college students who legally registered and voted with out-of-state IDs. But that didn’t stop Republican lawmakers in the state from passing a bill on Wednesday that would impose what is essentially a poll tax on students who want to exercise their right to vote.