The Pence/Kobach Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity is collecting the 50 states' "publicly available" voter records for an analysis aiming to "identify laws, rules, policies [...] that enhance or undermine the American people's confidence in the integrity of federal elections processes."

Election integrity is a public good that all citizens support. That's why the Commission's goal can't be entrusted to its partisan appointees, who have already expressed their conviction that "voter fraud" is rampant in America despite a lack of evidence. A biased commission's conclusions will be unverifiable, serving only to inflame the passage of new, draconian voter suppression laws targeting the poor, minorities, first-generation Americans, and young voters.

The Commission's task is too important, too complex, and too vulnerable to fraud to entrust to that body's partisan political appointees alone. The uniquely unbiased technical services of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS, chartered by Congress and Abraham Lincoln) are urgently needed. Our fragile democracy needs the NAS to conduct and report an unbiased parallel analysis of the Kobach Commission's data either to verify, or to illuminate the errors in, the Commission's findings.