President Trump's Election Integrity Panel Found No Evidence of Voter Fraud
Maine secretary of state, Matt Dunlap, released a report yesterday detailing his review of 1800 files collected by President Trump's voter fraud panel known as the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. His report, which he published in the form of a letter, is here. Dunlap states in the letter that there is simply no evidence of voter fraud in the 2016 election.
The Guardian: "Matt Dunlap, the top elections official in Maine, said he had examined 1,800 commission documents that were denied to him while he served and that he had since obtained through a court order. He found nothing in them to substantiate the claims made by the commission’s vice-chair, Kris Kobach, and the White House when the commission was disbanded in January."
“The sections on evidence of voter fraud are glaringly empty,” Dunlap reported in an official letter to Kobach and the vice-president, Mike Pence, the commission chair. “After months of litigation that should not have been necessary, I can report that the statements by Vice Chair Kobach and the White House were, in fact, false.”
Claims of large-scale voter fraud have been circulating for years among right-wing conspiracy theorists and President Trump created the panel in the hopes of substantiating such claims.
The Guardian: Most voting rights experts view in-person voter fraud as passingly rare and see the efforts by Kobach and other Republicans to argue otherwise as a pretext to try to stifle the vote of immigrants and other groups that they view as more likely to favor the Democratic party. When Trump asserted in January 2017 that he had lost the popular vote only because of millions of illegally cast ballots, the country’s state elections chiefs pushed back with a rare joint statement saying they saw no evidence of it.
Conspiracy theories can be difficult to quash, however, so expect this one to return, especially if the GOP loses the House or Senate this Fall.
By: Don Lam
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