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Just over three years after President Trump's "commission on election integrity" was shut down after it systematically excluded its own Democratic members from participating, the RNC has now launched a nakedly partisan "election integrity committee." https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/539271-rnc-launches-committee-on-election-integrity
These commissions have become a recurring tool in the right-wing playbook for perpetuating the myth of widespread voter fraud and justifying new restrictions that make it harder for Americans to vote, so let's talk about them for a minute. (thread)
After 2016, President Trump repeatedly insisted that he had won the popular vote as well as the Electoral College. He had, in fact, lost by nearly 3 million votes, so he began falsely claiming that millions of illegal votes were cast. And he set up a commission to investigate.
The Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity was nominally tasked with promoting fair and secure elections. In practice, the group headed by voter-fraud propagandist Kris Kobach and its core members were working to dig up evidence to support new limits on voting.
Maine Secretary of State Matt Dunlap, a Democrat, had joined the commission in good faith in an effort to strengthen elections, but he and other Democrats quickly found themselves shut out of the group's work. He went to court. https://www.americanoversight.org/investigation/dunlap-v-pacei-investigating-voter-fraud-commission
We represented Secretary Dunlap in his lawsuit, and when a federal judge ultimately ruled that Kobach and the PACEI staff must share internal documents with Dunlap, the Trump White House shut down the entire commission. https://www.americanoversight.org/statement-trump-dissolves-voter-fraud-commission
When Secretary Dunlap ultimately obtained and released 8,000 pages of commission records, they revealed that the group had uncovered no new evidence of widespread voter fraud of the kind the president and his allies alleged. https://www.americanoversight.org/voter-fraud-commission-records-show
That wasn't the end of it. Fast-forward to 2020 and multiple states had begun setting up their own "voter fraud" task forces. We began investigating the task forces in Georgia, Texas, Kentucky, Arizona, and Nevada. https://www.americanoversight.org/investigation/election-fraud-task-forces-and-the-threat-of-voter-intimidation
After we sued Georgia for records of its Absentee Ballot Fraud Task Force, the state released thousands of pages of documents — none of which included any substantive information that suggested the group had identified any widespread fraud to investigate. https://www.americanoversight.org/georgias-secretary-of-state-releases-records-in-response-to-american-oversights-lawsuit
Separate records we obtained from two counties in Georgia confirmed that the group had met only once and that mail-in absentee voting was secure and accurate. A fact that was, of course, re-confirmed by post-election recounts and audits. https://www.americanoversight.org/georgia-officials-confirm-voting-by-mail-is-secure-accurate
And now this week, with the 2020 election over, votes counted and recounted with no suggestion that there was any widespread fraud, and with Trump once again claiming (falsely) that there was, the RNC has brought us full circle with yet another "election integrity" group.
We will continue investigating partisan efforts to spread the myth of voter fraud to justify new voting restrictions. This tactic does not appear to be going away, so we'll keep exposing the truth. Track our investigations here: https://www.americanoversight.org/areas_of_investigation/voting-rights-investigations
