Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, a rare Democrat on the White House’s fishy, since-dissolved “Election Integrity” commission, slammed what he called “false” assertions by the White House and the commission’s vice chair, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, in a Friday letter.
In November, Dunlap sued the commission for violating the Federal Advisory Committee Act by keeping key documents from him and other commission members, among other things. The next month, a federal judge decided in his favor, telling the commission to hand internal communications and other documents over to Dunlap. In June, the judge again ordered the commission to hand over the documents.
Trump abruptly and without warning dissolved the commission on Jan. 3 of this year, saying in a statement that “Despite substantial evidence of voter fraud, many states have refused to provide the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity with basic information relevant to its inquiry.”
Dunlap on Friday called that “substantial evidence of voter fraud” claim false, saying “these assertions appeared aimed at that pre-ordained objective: ratifying the President’s statements that millions of illegal votes were cast during the 2016 elections.”
He also said claims made the same day in a Breitbart News article that included an interview with Kobach — specifically, that “Thus far, the voter fraud commission has revealed 938 convictions for voter fraud since the year 2000 [and that] Fewer than 1 in 100 cases ends in a conviction” — were false.
“Indeed, while staff prepared drafts of a report to be issued by the Commission, the sections on evidence of voter fraud are glaringly empty,” Dunlap wrote. “That the Commission predicted it would find widespread evidence of fraud actually reveals a troubling bias.”
Dunlap published the documents he received as a a result of the lawsuit on his Maine secretary of state website. (Read them here.)
“I have concluded that my only recourse is to publish all of the documents made available to me, so Americans can conclude for themselves that evidence to support the statements of Vice Chair Kobach and the White House regarding the purported preliminary findings of the Commission does not exist,” Dunlap wrote Friday.
Read Dunlap’s Friday letter below:
