The Russians are hacking. Luckily the Trump voter fraud commission isn't in charge. The Kris Kobach group is clownish. But some seriously competent people are mobilizing to protect our elections.

Michael P. McDonald | Opinion contributor

It's bad news that Russian hackers targeted election systems in 21 states last year, as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confirmed in calls to the states Friday. And it would be bad news if we had to rely on President Trump's Commission on Election Integrity to clean up this mess. Fortunately, we don't.

Trump’s commission has been in the spotlight as commission members trade accusations and refutations of voter fraud. It happens, but wild allegations of oceans of fraud evaporate to drops once vigilant election officials and law officers conduct their investigations.

Meanwhile, another group is quietly tackling the cyberattacks that are a potentially greater threat to the integrity of our elections.

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In the closing days of the Obama administration, under the cloud of Russian interference in 2016 campaigns and voting, the DHS designated elections as critical infrastructure. This triggered work to form an Election Critical Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council to address cybersecurity.

The differences between the voter fraud and infrastructure efforts reveal much about what is wrong and right about contemporary politics.

Let’s start by reviewing how these commissions are organized. One is stacked with partisan hacks, while the other is staffed by experts.

Despite platitudes by the co-chairmen of Trump’s commission that it has no preconceived expectations of what it will find, it appears to be tilted in favor of validating Trump’s baseless claim that three to five million fraudulent votes gave Hillary Clinton the popular vote victory. A smoking gun is a letter in which commission member Hans Von Spakovsky urged Attorney General Jeff Sessions to appoint “real experts on the conservative side of this issue.” He objected to naming Democrats who would “obstruct any investigation of voter fraud” and even argued that “picking mainstream Republican officials ... will be an abject failure.”

Why? Mainstream Republican secretaries of state have joined with Democrats in strongly rebutting Trump’s massive vote fraud claims.

The election infrastructure group, by contrast, is highly credible. It includes representatives from the National Association of Secretaries of State, the National Association of State Elections Directors, the United States Election Assistance Commission, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the DHS and the FBI, among others. They are cybersecurity experts and bipartisan leaders chosen by their peers from their respective associations.

The formation of these groups feeds into how they operate. One takes politically charged actions without conferring with its own members, while the other works from consensus.

The first order of business of Trump’s commission: Co-chair Republican Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach issued a controversial request for confidential voter information that prompted the Mississippi Secretary of State, a Republican, to tell Trump’s commission to “go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.” Kobach lurched off without bothering to notify his fellow commissioners of his request, and there has yet to be a public discussion as to why sensitive voter information is being requested and what will be done with it.

The first order of business of the infrastructure council, meanwhile, is to set up a charter detailing how the council will operate so that all members can deliberate about which actions to take and how to follow through.

The nature of these organizations thus affects the credibility of their actions. One is driven by contentious arguments about next-to-non-existent vote fraud. The other is providing timely information to those who need it to counter real threats to election security.

At a recent meeting, Kobach sparred with New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner regarding 5,000 New Hampshire voters who used out-of-state drivers licenses as their identification. Kobach wrote an op-ed claiming this was fraud, implying it proved Trump actually won New Hampshire. Gardner countered that New Hampshire law permits out-of-state drivers licenses for identification and that they are primarily used by college students, whom the Supreme Court has said have the right to determine where they call home.

Whereas the Trump commission debates are colored by partisanship, state and local election officials are responding with appropriate gravity to information about attacks and attempted attacks on their election technology. In the future, the election infrastructure council plans to distribute alerts to election officials about suspicious IP addresses and other intrusion attempts so they can be on the lookout and take action.

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It's unfortunate that a compromised commission is burning up valuable bandwidth to push inflammatory and unsubstantiated claims. But at the same time a serious effort is under way to improve election cybersecurity. Those who care about the security of democratic elections can take solace that serious people are taking action, even if their efforts don’t percolate into the public consciousness.

Clowns are amusing to watch, but they should not govern. We should ask ourselves, what sort of country do we aspire to be? One driven by the spectacle of political infotainment or one ruled by boring competence?

Michael P. McDonald, an expert on elections and redistricting, is an associate political science professor at the University of Florida. Follow him on Twitter: @electproject