A review of documents from the commission on election integrity by a former member found no evidence of voter fraud

A review of documents has shown White House claims to have unearthed “substantial evidence” of voter fraud were false, according to a junior member of Donald Trump’s short-lived commission on election integrity.

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.”

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The presidential commission was embroiled in controversy from the time of its establishment in May 2017 until it was abruptly disbanded seven months later. Voting rights activists suspected from the outset that it was a vehicle to promote voter suppression, not electoral integrity, and was designed to find “evidence” of Trump’s baseless claim that up to 5m fraudulent votes were cast in the 2016 presidential election.

The commission was soon inundated in lawsuits for its failure disclose its materials, working methods and agenda. An early request to the states to provide detailed information on voters – including party affiliation and voting histories – provoked a furious bipartisan backlash because it was viewed as an intolerable invasion of voter privacy for no immediately obvious reason.

Dunlap and other commission members complained they were being treated as token figures while Kobach, the elections chief in Kansas, and a small group of others conducted most of the work in secret. When Dunlap sued for access to the commission’s paperwork, the commission preferred to disband than to accede to a judge’s order to share its work with him.

Kobach told Breitbart News at the time that the commission had found more than 8,000 instances of double voting in 21 states and close to 100,000 instances of voter fraud, even if fewer than 1,000 of them had resulted in a criminal conviction.

The White House, for its part, said the inquiry would be moved to the Department of Homeland Security – something that does not appear to have happened – following the discovery of “substantial evidence of voter fraud”.

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.

In his letter, Dunlap said he saw “a troubling bias” in the commission’s predictions, even before it started work, that it expected to find widespread evidence of fraud. He said he was publishing the documentary record in its entirety “so Americans can conclude for themselves that evidence to support the statements of Vice Chair Kobach and the White House… does not exist”.