The better question is what Mr. Trump and his allies so desperately hope to find. Remember that the commission was reverse-engineered to provide a veneer of legitimacy to Mr. Trump’s bogus claims that millions of noncitizens voted in 2016 — his explanation for losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by almost three million. (One would think that sitting in the Oval Office might have eased his pain.) But the circumstances of its creation are secondary to its real goal — to make voting harder for millions of Americans, on the understanding that Republicans win more elections when fewer people vote. According to the election-law expert Rick Hasen, the commission will probably aim to roll back parts of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, also known as the motor-voter law, which has registered millions of voters.
The real problem, of course, isn’t fraud. It’s low turnout — in a good year, nearly half of all eligible American citizens fail to vote. As the nation marks 241 years of independence, the most pressing voting issue should be getting those tens of millions of nonparticipating Americans registered and to the polls, so that their voices can be heard. If the paranoid voter-fraud crusaders devoted a fraction of their inquisitorial energy to solving that vexing problem, now that would be something to celebrate.
