Kris W. Kobach, vice chairman of Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, said Monday the commission’s job is not to prove President Trump’s claims of voter fraud in the 2016 election.
“I’ve been asked what about the presidential election of 2016 [and] President Trump’s claims he made in January? My answer is the purpose of the commission is not to prove or disprove what the president said in January,” Mr. Kobach, who also serves as Kansas’ secretary of state, said on the “Mack on Politics” podcast, hosted by Washington Times columnist Matt Mackowiak.
“My answer was we’ll never know,” Mr. Kobach said when asked if there really were millions of illegal votes in the 2016 election as the president has previously claimed.
Mr. Kobach adds that the commission hopes to wrap up its work over the course of the next year, but that impeding lawsuits could delay their work.
“Our hope is to complete the work in a year, in 12 months. I say hope though because we have seven other lawsuits pending. I have never seen a commission in history that has been besieged with this many lawsuits right out of the gate,” he said. “It shows that it touched a nerve with groups like the ACLU and the NAACP and a few others, groups on the left, that want to stop the commission in its tracks.”
Mr. Kobach said he was offered two positions in the administration, but that he and his family decided not to make the move to Washington, D.C. He was then offered this role on the voter commission, an issue he has been passionate about for a long time, including implementing some of the strictest voter ID laws in the country.
• Sally Persons can be reached at spersons@washingtontimes.com.
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