WASHINGTON—U.S. President Donald Trump has turned his big lie about the presidential election into an official government commission — and handed a leadership role to a vocal backer of that lie.

Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to launch a commission to look into voter fraud. Raising fears of a coming assault on voting rights, he named Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, a crusader against the minuscule problem, as the commission’s vice-chairman.

According to every independent expert and almost every state elections chief, voter fraud is nearly nonexistent. But Trump falsely claimed in January that more than three million illegal immigrants had voted illegally in 2016, every single one of them for his opponent Hillary Clinton.

Perhaps uncoincidentally, Clinton earned 2.9 million more votes than Trump did. And perhaps uncoincidentally, the conspiracy website InfoWars had promoted the same false claim about illegal immigrants.

Kobach said at the time that the lie was “absolutely correct,” pointing, as Trump did, to a pre-2016 study that does not prove the point. He, too, offered no actual evidence.

Voting rights advocates have been concerned for a year about the consequences of Trump’s attempts to foster public suspicions about the integrity of the electoral system as a whole and about minority voters in particular. Molly McGrath, a Wisconsin-based voting rights organizer, said the commission is “paving the way for unnecessary and suppressive voting laws.”

Numerous Republicans around the country have attempted to impose new requirements for voting — they say to preserve the integrity of the system, critics say to make it harder for Democratic-leaning black, Hispanic and young people to cast ballots. Kobach is an outlier even within the party, pushing some of America’s most stringent voting laws in Kansas.

“They’re setting out on a mission with what appears to be a predetermined goal. And with Kris Kobach at the steering wheel, that seems evident,” McGrath said Thursday.

Vice-President Mike Pence will chair the commission. Pence has declined to endorse Trump’s lie, but he has applauded the president for his “refreshing” willingness to express his opinion on the matter.

Kobach has long alleged that voter fraud is rampant. Since 2015, when he became the only state secretary of state to get the power to prosecute voter fraud, he has obtained eight convictions; Kansas has 1.8 million registered voters.

As the White House on Jan 24, 2017 stuck firmly to U.S. President Donald Trump's claim that millions of people voted illegally in the November election, the Republican Speaker of the House said he's seen "no evidence to that effect."

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The American Civil Liberties Union and others are fighting Kobach in court over a state law he championed that requires people to demonstrate proof of their citizenship to become registered voters.

In January, Trump promised a “major investigation into voter fraud.” The White House described the commission as a broader “review” of “policies and practices that enhance or undermine the American people’s confidence in the integrity of federal elections — including improper registrations, improper voting, fraudulent registrations, fraudulent voting, and voting suppression.”

During the campaign, Trump said voter fraud is “very, very common.” Without any evidence, he was especially critical of big cities like Philadelphia and Chicago, both of which have large black populations and lean strongly Democratic; “so many cities are corrupt,” he said in October.

Donald Trump said 213 false things in his first 100 days. These are all of them:

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