Sen. Cory Booker is trying to strip funding from Trump’s ‘sham’ voter fraud commission

Thinkprogress

Democratic lawmakers in both chambers of Congress introduced a bill Wednesday that would cut off funding for the White House’s voter fraud commission, claiming that “even one taxpayer dollar spent on this circus would be a waste of resources.”

Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI), Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-LA), Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-NM), and Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) unveiled the Anti-Voter Suppression Act exactly one week before the “Voting Integrity Commission” is set to hold its first meeting. The bill would “repeal President Trump’s executive order establishing the commission and prohibit any funds from being used to investigate the non-issue of voter fraud,” according to Richmond.

Acknowledging the legislation is unlikely to pass in a Republican-controlled Congress, the Democrats claim it still represents another opportunity to raise concerns about commission’s end goal of voter suppression.

“We will not go back to a time when millions of people — most of them poor and minorities — were silenced through disenfranchisement,” Booker said in a statement. “Yet that is exactly what President Trump seems to want to do with this sham of a commission.”

Trump signed an executive order establishing the commission in May, stating that the goal was to find vulnerabilities in election systems that could allow for “fraudulent voter registrations and fraudulent voting.” Voting rights advocates immediately sounded the alarms, saying the administration was “laying the groundwork for voter suppression.” [MORE]