In apparent haste, with not all its members appointed, the President issued the executive order establishing the Pence vote fraud Commission. The appointments still to come will add only marginally to an understanding of this Commission’s objectives. As the Order is written, and with the naming of Kansas Secretary of State Kobach as Vice Chair, those objectives are clear, and the outcome not hard to forecast. And yet there are extraordinary features to the Commission, none of them surprising, and none are the result of error or lack of foresight.

Begin with the leadership:

The Chair is the Vice President of the President who has announced that millions of illegal votes were cast in the last election, all against him (or for his opponent). Now Mr. Kobach, as Vice Chair, has joined the leadership ranks as a public supporter of the President’s claims.  He has said that the “White House has provided enormous evidence with respect to voter fraud.” This is untrue.   As for the problem of non-citizen voting, Kobach has asserted that there is a “lot of evidence” of it. This is also untrue. The larger point is that the Vice Chair of the Commission has reached these conclusions long ago, before a day of testimony or an hour of deliberation. What are the chances that this Commission will arrive at judgments contrary to the ones asserted so confidently by the President--and echoed by Mr. Kobach whose bid for national prominence rests on loudly ringing the alarm about voter fraud?

Now, onto the Commission's purposes:

The Seventh Circuit insists that the district court in the Wisconsin ID litigation was too lenient with the option of an affidavit for voters who could not with reasonable effort obtain a qualifying photo ID. So the Court directs that this relief be limited to the class of voters in genuine need, and it is seeking from the court below “objective standards” election officials could use in determining what constitutes “genuine difficulties” in obtaining ID.  To support its position, the Seventh Circuit cites a portion of Crawford, offering this selection:

Yet the Supreme Court held in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, 553 U.S. 181, 198 (2008), that “the inconvenience of making a trip to the [department of motor vehicles], gathering the required documents, and posing for a photograph surely does not qualify as a substantial burden on the right to vote, or even represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting.” A given voter’s disagreement with this approach does not show that requiring one trip to a governmental office is unreasonable.

The Seventh Circuit chooses to omit the opening three words of this sentence in Crawford: “For most voters…” In other words, the Supreme Court in Crawford does not say that the inconveniences are minor for all voters, but more generally for most voters. It does not even suggest that the number of voters for whom these inconveniences would be significant are small or trivial in number, only that it is a “limited number” and that “most voters” don’t confront the problem. Crawford suggested that the limited number may include elderly persons born out of state and those economic and unspecified “personal” limitations. 553 U.S. 199.

Donald Trump doesn’t have any particular feeling for irony and so he misses it altogether in his recent suggestion that the coming election is likely to be rigged against him. Of course he’s now doing the rigging: he’s rigging the post-election assessment of the results. If he wins, it reflects the will of the electorate; if he loses, that will has been thwarted, by a rigging.

This raises the question discussed here of whether, if there are limits to ends-justifies-the-means political ethics--if it is accepted that there are superior and inferior types of political morality-- Trump has exhibited clearly a moral style that is both distinctive and troubling.

It does not seem that there is a clear and shared view of when political ethics have become unacceptable, and so, in Trump’s case, the analysis has now shifted to issues of mental health. It is not suggested that his lying exceeds the limits of the ethically permissible but that we have departed from the domain of ethics altogether.

As the courts work their way through claims against ID and other voting restrictions, they continue on a course of “softening" voting impediments but not eliminating them altogether. They remain reluctant to deny states the authority to enact rules, on virtually non-existent evidence, to protect against in-person voter fraud. Remedies are then fashioned that provide relief to voters facing a “reasonable impediment” to voting but the question has been legitimately raised: how much of an impact can these sorts of measures be expected to have?

Like the right to a provisional ballot provided for under HAVA, these other remedies-- like accommodating indigent voters with access to cost-free identification--help voters, but only a limited number. The reach and effectiveness of these measures depend upon the states’ performance of their obligations: the information they provide to voters, and the good faith and competence with which they administer the remedies. The same may be true of more robust remedies, like the option recently ordered for Wisconsin, affording access to an affidavit alternative to documentary identification.

Still “softening” is useful. Political actors—notably, parties and presidential campaigns--and nonprofit voting organizations have dramatically improved upon their capabilities in effectively advising voters about remedial options and assisting them in exercising them. Voters are not, then, entirely dependent upon state officials for help. In successive election cycles, the effectiveness of these partisan and nonprofit voter protection programs has improved, each rebuilt successfully on the experience of the last.

FEC Commissioner Weintraub believes that she has hit upon a regulatory maneuver to stop publicly traded corporations from making independent expenditures, or unlimited contributions to independent expenditure committees.  At a time when newspaper editorialists carry on with attacks on the Commission as “worse than useless,” the Commissioner seems determined to prod the FEC to face the major “money in politics” issues of the day.

This is her theory: foreign nationals cannot make contributions or independent expenditures, which means that the FEC could establish that no corporation with foreign nationals as shareholders could engage in this political spending.  The rule would not bring about this result outright: it would require a corporation to "certify" that it was not making contributions or independent expenditures with these funds.  As a practical matter, corporations with foreign national shareholders could not risk making the certification and would forgo this political spending.  The Commissioner plans to direct lawyers to produce proposals that she and her colleagues can consider in a future rulemaking.

This is an interesting proposal, but it is generally appreciated that a Commission unable to agree on matters of lesser moment will not find a majority in favor of this one.  But even beyond that, the proposal is vulnerable to questions about its viability as a regulatory measure.