U.S. President Donald Trump is set Thursday to create a commission on voter fraud and voter suppression, a move that follows his unsubstantiated claim that millions of people voted illegally last year, costing him a win in the popular vote.
White House officials said Trump plans to sign an executive order to establish the commission and name Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach to lead it. Ahead of Trump's order, the officials said the commission would look at allegations of improper voting and fraudulent voter registration across the United States in last November's election.
Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton, a former U.S. secretary of state, winning the White House in the Electoral College, the U.S. system of picking presidents in which state-by-state outcomes determine the winner, not the national popular vote.
Clinton, however, won nearly three million more votes than Trump in the popular vote.
Trump has claimed that three million to five million people voted illegally in the election, denying him a popular vote win.
But state election officials throughout the country have uniformly said there was no massive voter fraud in the November 8 election, although there were reports of a relative handful of individual instances of illegal voting, such as voting twice in different locations.
There also have been reports of voter rolls that that were significantly outdated, either because people had died or moved to other states without the voter lists being corrected. There was no indication, however, the outdated voter rolls played any significant role in illegal voting.
White House officials said the commission would include Republicans and Democrats, both current and former state election officials.