Last week, President Trump signed an executive order establishing a presidential advisory commission on “election integrity.” Its mission is not to examine why the United States has one of the lowest turnout rates in the western world or to investigate the intelligence community’s consensus that Russia sought to interfere in the 2016 election.

Instead of addressing those very real issues, the stated purposes of the commission include finding evidence of “fraudulent voter registrations and fraudulent voting,” and identifying “practices that enhance the American people’s confidence in the integrity of the voting processes.” But the commission’s design and personnel indicate that its true purposes can only be the opposite: to undermine public confidence in elections with trumped up evidence of fraud, in order to pave the way for restrictions on voting.

Second, we do not have a problem of waves of ineligible people who are clamoring to vote. There is not a shred of evidence to support President Trump’s assertions that 3-5 million supposedly illegal votes that were cast in the 2016 election (or, for that matter, that once said illegal votes are subtracted, he actually won the popular vote). Elected officials from across the political spectrum including Speaker Paul Ryan, election administrators, and legal experts have rejected the president’s false statements that 3-5 million illegal votes were cast in the 2016 presidential election. And the president’s own legal team told a Michigan court that “[a]ll available evidence suggests that the 2016 general election was not tainted by fraud or mistake.”

We are now watching the sequel to that ill-fated boondoggle. This time, the protagonist is Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who has stated that he believes that Trump is “absolutely correct” about winning the popular vote. He has claimed that non-citizens are registering and voting in substantial numbers, but in 2016, he had the dubious distinction of being called out by two different U.S. Courts of Appeals for his exaggerations: the Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit described Kobach’s claims of noncitizen voting as “pure speculation,” while the Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. described him of having “precious little record evidence” to support his claims.

Asking Kobach to lead a commission tasked also tasked with addressing elections integrity is akin to trusting Bernie Madoff to invest your kids’ college funds. Kobach has supported a variety of measures to restrict access to the polls, including: strict identification requirements that the U.S. Kansas Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission found “may effectively be compared to a poll tax”; excessive documentation requirements for voter registration, which blocked 18,000 motor voter applicants from registering to vote, and which Judge Jerome Holmes, an appointee of George W. Bush, labeled a “mass denial of a fundamental right”; and the voter registration “Crosscheck” program, a system that purports to compare registration rolls in multiple states to find people who are double-registered, but which one recent study found “would eliminate about 200 registrations used to cast legitimate votes for every one registration used to cast a double vote.”

Kobach apparently has national ambitions for his voter suppression agenda. Last November, Kobach was notoriously photographed carrying documents into a meeting with then-President-elect Trump, which appeared to contain a proposal to change federal voter registration laws. The ACLU sought those documents in connection with litigation against Kobach over his office’s violations of the motor-voter law, but Kobach and his legal team sought to withhold them from disclosure, leading U.S. Magistrate Judge O’Hara to blast Kobach for engaging in “word-play meant to present a materially inaccurate picture of the documents,” and to order Kobach to turn them over. The ACLU has now received those documents, but we cannot release them to the public or comment on their contents without a court order, because Kobach continues to claim that they are “confidential” and cannot be shared with the media or the general public.

If the members of this commission believe that the American people have a right to know the truth about the integrity of our elections, they would call on Kobach to release the details of his plans for our elections to the public. And they would focus on real problems instead of witch hunts, starting with serious proposals to encourage broader participation in our democracy.