President Donald Trump’s beleaguered voter fraud panel will likely reconvene in January after getting waylaid by some eight federal lawsuits, according to the commission’s leader, Kris Kobach.
“Much of the past few months has been spent by commission staff answering discovery requests for information and drafting affidavits and things that like — going through the legwork of litigation, and that takes time,” Kobach, who serves as Kansas’s secretary of state, told the Topeka Capitol-Journal in an interview. “We have a very small staff in Washington, D.C., and that staff has been bogged down in litigation.”
Groups including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law—as well as one of the Democratic members of the panel—have sued the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, alleging a lack of transparency and that the collection of Americans’ personal data violates voters’ privacy.
That litigation has stalled the work of the panel, which has not met since September.
Kobach has been a leader of the effort to gin up concerns about voter fraud and build support for restrictive voting laws. Elections experts say widespread voter fraud doesn’t exist.
