I was going to post this a few weeks ago, but more and more things came out about it and I was seeing where it all went.
I'll start with some background on all this:
Trump for the past year, or so, kept claiming that our election system was rigged against him, only to win the general election. He then claimed that the US had a massive voter fraud problem, suggesting that 3 to 5 million voted illegally- the amount he lost the popular vote by. He didn't have any proof for this, and he ignored hundreds of studies done by academia, and both political parties, who could only find a few dozen cases of it - with more stories about Republicans being caught trying to commit it because they heard how easy it was. This has such high priority on his list, more important than the hacking of the DNC, or the attempted hacking of several states election systems - which he has shown no interest in looking into - that he signed an executive order a few months ago to create the "Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity".
This commission is technically bipartisan, made up of 6 member, 3 republicans and 3 Democrats. I say technically, because while it does have members from both parties involved, it's really being lead by 3 well known Republicans activists, who have a history of promoting voter laws to make it harder for people to vote, and register. The Democrat members are basically nobodies. Seriously, all I know is that one was an election clerks, or something, with one wondering why he was picked to be a member of the commission. And early this month, one of the Democrat committee member resigned for unknown reasons.
So who are the 3 Republican members leading the commission? The head of the committee is Vice President, Mike Pence, who is known for sending police to raid organizations that register minorities weeks before elections, on questionable accusations of voter fraud. The 2nd in command is Kansas's Secretary of State, Kris Kobach, who enacted the strictest voter laws in the country, and has advised Trump to pursue similar laws on the federal level. The final Republican member is Hans von Spakovsky, who is a voter fraud alarmist and has worked tirelessly to promote tougher voter laws in states for the past 2 decades.
So, it's pretty obvious where all this is heading, and what they are going to propose to the president, regardless of their findings. But the other problem is how they are going about this. Their first order of business was to demand that all US states turn over personnel information of all their registered voters, this includes full name, date of birth, SSN, party affiliation, and voting history since 2006 (when Republicans lost control of Congress). Even the DOJ was sending letters to states on the same day seeking information on how states purge their voter rolls, making sure they are in compliance with the Voter Registration Act of 1993, which determines when voters can be kicked off - which some see as a fishing attempt to go after states that they determine are in non-compliance to it.
To say the least, they stirred up a hornets nest, not just from Democrat states, but also from Red states, who are pretty furious at what the commission is requesting from them. Some states are outright ignoring it, which has infuriated Trump, who tweeted "what are they trying to hide". But most states are only releasing some of the information, citing state laws for why they can't release all of it - including one of the commission's own, Kris Kobach. This has also lead to various lawsuits against them, and many people trying to un-register to vote (which is pretty stupid). Currently the commission has put the data collection on hold, for the moment, to deal with lawsuits against it.
The reason for all this?
It's been kinda confusing following all this shit, because a lot of it seems like smoke. The purpose of the commission was quite clear from the beginning: To promote the idea of widespread voter fraud, regardless of the evidence against it, and to promote tougher voter laws all across the country, which would disenfranchise, or make it harder to vote, or register, for millions of legal US citizens, especially for the poor and minority groups, who have a higher tendency to vote Democrat. And Trump formed this commission to further delegitimize our voting system, ignoring the DNC hacking, or attempted hacking of state election systems, by forming a commission, lead by people who would try to legitimize his claims for why he lost the popular vote, all because his ego would not allow the idea that more legitimate voters didn't want to vote for him than did.
The idea that this was a bipartisan commission at the start was a laugh, because it was being lead by Republicans, who had a history of promoting tougher voting laws, while the 3 Democrats remained largely unknown, or unimportant, as if they were only there as an afterthought, only to make the commission seem vaguely legitimate. But the biggest and most confusing farce was the data collection of hundreds of millions of voter personnel information. This was bizarre, not only because it defied conservative philosophy about government collecting such data on millions of US citizens (like over Firearms), but one of the committee's own members, Kris Kobach, should have known it wouldn't have worked because of his state laws - which he used as a reason not to send all the information which his commission required. And if you think about it, not only was it legally questionable for a commission ( which had no government oversight) to ask for such information, it would also require a specialized database to store all of it in (a gift-wrapped present to Russia?), and it would require thousands of people to go through it and check against some government database to see if each one of them were legitimate US citizens - even though much of the information they would get would be incomplete - and the whole thing would take years to go through. The more you think about it, not only does it seem like a poorly conceived idea, but a con-man's game.
So, it seems like it was all about the motions of trying to be a legitimate investigation, even though though it was impossible for them to do what they set out to do, knowing full well that they were doing a lot of bullshitting. Now, at their first meeting with Trump, Kobach is already saying that it's unknown if Clinton got the popular vote, while Trump is reiterating his complaints about States trying to hide something about voter fraud by not complying with the commissions demands on personal information. So, we will see where it goes from here
