As President Donald Trump’s voter fraud commission prepared to convene in New Hampshire this week, it already faced questions about its seriousness of purpose and whether it was a hopelessly biased endeavor.
Then things got worse.
An email surfaced in which the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky, one of the commission’s most conservative members, lamented that Trump was appointing Democrats and “mainstream” Republicans to the bipartisan panel.
Its vice chairman, Kansas Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach, drew rebukes from voting rights advocates – and a couple of fellow commissioners – for an article he wrote for the hard-right Breitbart News website. The article asserted, without proof, that voter fraud had likely changed the result in New Hampshire’s most recent U.S. Senate race.
A third Republican on the panel, J. Christian Adams of Virginia, later feuded on Twitter with a journalist, questioning whether she had lied about her academic credentials. She had not.
The fresh controversies angered some Democratic commissioners already feeling heat from their party for taking part in Trump’s commission, which critics say is really aimed at making it more difficult to vote. Even some Republicans following the commission and sympathetic to its mission said it may now face an even tougher job of selling any recommendations it crafts.
“Let’s just say the execution has been less than perfect,” said Barry Bennett, a campaign adviser to Trump last year. The ongoing “fusses” could make it more difficult for the commission to make its case, Bennett said.
The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity was formed in response to Trump’s baseless claim that millions of illegally cast ballots cost him the popular vote against Hillary Clinton last year. Leading members – including Vice President Mike Pence, who serves nominally as chairman – have nevertheless insisted they launched their work with no preconceived notions and would follow the facts wherever they might lead.
By the end of a seven-hour meeting Tuesday, some Democratic members of the panel were openly questioning that proposition, saying they had witnessed a one-sided parade of testimony by conservative analysts that overstated the evidence of voting fraud.
“I don’t think we’re going in a productive direction right now,” said Matthew Dunlap, Maine’s secretary of state and one of five Democrats on the 12-member commission. “The panels were dominated by darkness and foreboding.”
Dunlap said in an interview that he was highly offended by von Spakovsky’s email, which was released later in the day by an advocacy group that had unearthed it through a public-records request. The email, which was eventually forwarded to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, was written in February, as Trump was preparing to make appointments to the panel.
“There isn’t a single Democratic official that will do anything other than obstruct any investigation of voter fraud,” von Spakovsky wrote in the email, relaying that he had just learned that Trump intended to make the panel bipartisan. “That decision alone shows how little the (White House) understands about this issue.”
Von Spakovsky added that “if they are picking mainstream Republican officials and/or academics to man this commission it will be an abject failure.”
Dunlap said van Spakovsky was trying to keep people like him from serving, adding that he is well-respected by legislators in both parties in Maine.
“It really taints Mr. Spakovsky’s participation on the commission,” Dunlap said. “If he had any dignity, he’d step down.”
Through a spokeswoman, von Spakovsky said he “no plans whatsoever” to step down, had written the email to “private individuals” and had no idea it would be forwarded to Sessions or become public. The copy of the email released by the Justice Department redacted the name of the original recipient.
Adams – who has conducted years of research on voting by noncitizens, including in Virginia – said that the widespread opposition to the commission’s work by Democrats was in effect “proving Hans right.”
“Some people don’t want to get to the truth about vulnerabilities in our elections,” he said of the panel, which he also said includes some open-minded Democrats.
For his part, Adams said that he considered the meeting in New Hampshire to be “fantastic” and that it showed there are areas where Republicans and Democrats can “work together to fix vulnerabilities in the election system.”