President Trump’s election integrity commission is a sham and an attempt to distract from the both the Russian attack on the 2016 presidential election and blowback the White House is receiving for firing FBI Director Comey. To launch an election commission at any time on voter fraud would be throwing away resources in a search for mythical creatures – problems that don’t exist – while failing to address the real problems in our elections systems: suppressive tactics. To investigate any election problems at this juncture while denying and ignoring the Russian attack on the presidential election, moreover, is irresponsible and a slap in the face to the American people who want and deserve to know what happened.

Firing the FBI Director will not make the Russian election attack go away. An independent commission must be convened to thoroughly and impartially investigate the past and inevitable future attacks on our elections. We can’t safeguard ourselves from future foreign attacks until we know the extent of the problem.  That commission’s findings must be shared with the American people to help to rebuild their faith in our democracy.

The details revealed to date about the ‘election integrity’ commission and its members read like a blueprint for trying to justify voter suppression. It is insulting that the new commission is headed by two champions of voter suppression – Mike Pence and Kris Kobach. It is hard to believe that any “findings” of this commission headed by those individuals will do anything but condone and seek to justify voter suppression efforts.