US President Donald Trump has scrapped his advisory commission on “election integrity,” ending an initiative that was widely denounced by civil rights groups as a thinly veiled attempt to suppress the votes of poor people and minorities.
A White House statement released on Wednesday evening said that Trump had signed an executive order dissolving the commission.
The president put the blame for the panel’s failure on the many states that refused to cooperate with it by handing over voters’ sensitive personal data.
Trump said he had made the decision to spare taxpayers the expense of fighting legal battles against the recalcitrant states.
Trump repeated the factual inaccuracy that drove him to set up the commission in the first place, saying that he was dismantling the inquiry, “despite substantial evidence of voter fraud.”
After he won the presidential election in November 2016, Trump claimed that at least 3 million illegal votes had been cast — the same number by which he lost the popular vote to Hillary Rodham Clinton.
That claim has never been substantiated and studies have found that more people are struck by lightning each year or attacked by sharks than are accused of election fraud.
Voting rights advocates responded with delight to news of the demise of the commission.
Vanita Gupta, former head of the civil rights division of the US Department of Justice under former US president Barack Obama, heralded the announcement as a “big victory.”
Jonathan Brater, counsel with the Democracy Program of the Brennan Center, said it was a “victory for voters who will no longer be threatened with a violation of their privacy. After spending large sums of taxpayer money and using up months of public officials’ time this was shown to be nothing but a farce.”
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia
ON ALERT: A Russian cruise missile crossed into Polish airspace for about 40 seconds, the Polish military said, adding that it is constantly monitoring the war to protect its airspace Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and the western region of Lviv early yesterday came under a “massive” Russian air attack, officials said, while a Russian cruise missile breached Polish airspace, the Polish military said. Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a series of deadly aerial attacks, with yesterday’s strikes coming a day after the Russian military said it had seized the Ukrainian village of Ivanivske, west of Bakhmut. A militant attack on a Moscow concert hall on Friday that killed at least 133 people also became a new flash point between the two archrivals. “Explosions in the capital. Air defense is working. Do not