It ended on the most ironic of notes for a Republican administration. In disbanding the Pence Kobach "voter fraud" commission, the federal government put the blame on a lack of cooperation from states. The fault-finding would normally run in the reverse direction: The “feds” are supposed to be the culpable party, bulldozing over state sovereignty. Come to think of it, that is how many states did view the blundering Pence Kobach operation. But in this case, with a need to pin the failure on someone, the White House did not find the federalist uprising at all to its liking.

The administration wisely shut this initiative down. Pence-Kobach generated nothing but bad press and became a magnet for lawsuits. It earned the distinction of being sued by, among other parties, one its own members. Unable to produce a report that would have been taken seriously anywhere, in courts or legislatures, where it might have counted, it was useless. Why, then, continue and sink even lower?

It is not clear what this experience teaches other than the trap that zealotry sets for itself. The Commission’s goal was exactly what its founding suggested: riding on the president’s claim that fraud denied him a popular vote victory in 2016, a mostly familiar cast of “vote fraud” crusaders hoped to slap a spanking new cover, marked “federal government-approved,” on their old tall tale about an electoral process corrupted through-and-through by illegal voting. The plan was certain to fail.

It is true that commission time and again stumbled badly. But what it set out to do would have been hard to pull off anyway. Across the states, the years following the Florida recount debacle have seen a sharpened, data-driven and sophisticated focus on the very real problems with election administration. There has been true progress, much of it bi-partisan, representing a major step toward vitally needed professionalism. Election officials, civil society organizations, scholars and policy experts have produced valuable research, and they have launched and collaborated on productive reform initiatives. Given its leadership, staffing and objectives, Pence Kobach stood no chance of hawking its counterfeit product to an informed election administration and reform community, or counting on it to let its sales job pass without critical comment.

In 2016, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson found that state election officials were suspicious of federal offers of assistance in defending their voting systems from cyber attack. He tried to persuade them to accept DHS designation of those systems as “critical infrastructure,” which would have given states access on a priority basis to a range of protections. The response he received ranged from “neutral to negative.” DHS concluded that, in the middle of an election, it was best not to have a protracted, politicized fight over this step. It focused on providing assistance where it could, and a large number of jurisdictions requested help. In January 2017, even with officials remaining skeptical about the designation, Secretary Johnson proceeded to issue it.

According to Johnson, and as further reflected in reporting by The Washington Post, election officials resisting this engagement with the federal government viewed it as a threat to” states rights.” At least one, Brian Kemp of Georgia, suspected that the Administration might be using the claimed Russian interference as a ploy to advance the political prospects of its favored candidate, Hillary Clinton.  Kemp and others were not convinced that the Obama Administration had properly fixed blame on the Russians. Congressional Republican leadership stayed close to their state allies on these points, also stressing the rights of states and declining to embrace the finding of Russian intrusions.

This is a revealing part of the 2016 story: government at war with itself, in the grip of partisanship, when under cyber attack from a foreign government. The attack was directed at the electoral process, and yet it was still not enough to produce a unified, fully coordinated federal and state response. For all the progress in bipartisan election administrative reform in recent years--and there has been a fair measure of it--Johnson’s account exposes key, and altogether familiar, structural obstacles.

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:

President Trump’s arrangement for an inquiry into election voting fraud is fatally compromised by political self-interest. Before the November election, he insisted that voter fraud might cost him the victory. After he had won, he decided that it robbed him of success in the popular vote. He put the number of illegal voters at 3 to 5 million, all of it allegedly committed at his expense.

And having taken this position, he is not only looking back. He is already a candidate for reelection, and this project would serve his purpose of reducing the risk of another popular vote disappointment. So he will establish a presidential commission to look into voting fraud, and he intends to appoint as its chair his Vice President, who was his presidential running mate in the last election and will very probably be on the ticket again 2020

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This process has lacked credibility from the start, and if it were only a matter of appreciating the nature and limitations of this political project, then not much more attention would need to be paid to it. But in what happens next, once this Pence Commission is formed and launched, the long-term cost to bipartisanship in voting reform could prove high.

There has been to this point room for bipartisan cooperation on election reform, and it has been productive. This is not to say that the political parties don’t fight over these issues, and sue each other, or that self-interest and outright chicanery is not evident in legislation, regulation, administrative interpretation and positions taken in litigation. But there has been over the same time that the “voting wars” have broken out, Democrats, Republicans, and others have done what they could to figure out where, in the interests of voters, the partisan brawling could give way to measured, professionally disciplined discussion of real problems and feasible reforms to improve the voting experience for all citizens.

This cooperation has occurred in support of special studies like the one undertaken by the Presidential Commission on Election Reform. It continues through other programs, such as those sponsored by the Bipartisan Policy Center. BPC in fact recruited to this work a former Commission member, a Democrat, and a former Republican Secretary of State, a Republican, who were paired in the leadership of this work. The Commission, the BPC and other similar initiatives have counted on, received and benefitted enormously from engagement on a bipartisan basis with the National Association of Secretaries of State, the National Association of Election Directors and other election administration professionals. These relationships provide access to reliable information and to the best judgment of experienced officials and experts. The keys are bipartisanship and professionalism.

With two elections within sixteen years won by the candidate who lost the popular vote, it is a natural turn that the Electoral College moves higher on the reform agenda. There remain other items for consideration: the state of the political parties, campaign finance, and voting rights. The question is: in what ways will the substance of reform, and its timing or tactics, be affected by the outcome of this election?

1. Attention to the Electoral College is now heightened at a time of mounting impatience with the other ways in which the electoral process deviates from the expectation that the most votes should decide. James Ceaser has correctly said that we've arrived at the point in our political culture that it is, if not unthinkable, difficult in the extreme to stand against the principle that the person with the most votes wins. So Republican leadership balked at any program to stop Trump at least in part because they struggled to explain how the nomination could somehow be denied to the candidate in a field of 17 who won by far the most contests and the most votes. The Democrats have run into similar problems with the role of super-delegates.

The case against the Electoral College is strengthened considerably by this strong trend in popular expectation. Whether we will see sustained momentum for reform is a different question.

2. Meanwhile, what about the parties? Ezra Klein has come to the view that parties may be weak but partisanship runs high, and that this complicated combination explains a good bit of what some see to have gone wrong with the nominating processes. Parties do not mediate voter choice: it is not accepted that they should step in against the candidates the voters favor and compel an alternative choice presented as superior in experience, governing credentials, or electability. So the voters decide, and once they have decided, the parties and their partisan fall into line. As Klein explains it, this is the worst of all worlds: weak parties, high partisanship.

The absence of strong parties on the traditional model has been keenly felt in this way, and perhaps in other less visible ones. For example, candidates now rely upon polling data to shape strategy and to adjust as necessary to changed political conditions. All of this is done at headquarters, shaped by sophisticated analytics. And the analytics are highly advanced. A modern campaign cannot operate without them. But genuinely strong parties are built on something more. They would have good intelligence "on the ground" delivered by seasoned party officials and operatives. The state and local party would speak authoritatively on local conditions. It pick up quickly on changes in those conditions not easily accessible through polling.