The election integrity commission created by President Trump will meet for the first time in July, Vice President Pence announced Wednesday.
Pence, chair of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, told its members on an “organizational call” that the group’s primary work will be to “protect and preserve the principle of one person, one vote.”
Trump created the commission in May. The commission came after Trump repeatedly claimed, without presenting any evidence, that millions of illegal votes were cast in the 2016 election — an idea he blames for his popular vote loss to Hillary Clinton.
“The integrity of the vote is a foundation of our democracy,” Pence said Wednesday, according to a White House press release. “This bipartisan commission will review ways to strengthen that integrity in order to protect and preserve the principle of one person, one vote.”
On Wednesday, Pence “reiterated President Trump’s charge to the commission with producing a set of recommendations to increase the American people’s confidence in the integrity of our election systems,” according to the readout of the call.
{mosads}Trump’s May executive order establishing the commission stated that the purpose of the group is to “promote fair and honest Federal elections.”
The order also named Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach as vice chair of the commission. Kobach has been repeatedly criticized for pushing stringent laws on voting, with the ACLU dubbing him the “king of voter suppression.”
Kobach has also echoed Trump’s unsubstantiated claims about large numbers of undocumented immigrants voting in U.S. elections, even as independent investigations have found no evidence of significant amounts of voter fraud.
In January, Kobach told Fox Business that “it will be impossible to ever know what the exact number is of non-citizens voting. I think it probably was [millions].”
“If you take the whole country, I think it is probably in excess of a million, if you take the entire country for sure,” Kobach said.