Matt Dunlap is the Secretary of State in Maine, which means he is a Democratic official working in the same state government as the country's worst governor, human bowling-jacket Paul LePage. He also was chosen to be one of four Democratic politicians on the president*'s blessedly forgotten commission on "voter fraud," the one that was chaired by Kansas Secretary of State and all-around grifting machine, Kris Kobach. (The latest news from Kobachland has him wondering why all these white supremacists keep joining his campaign.) I attended one of the commission's public hearings up in New Hampshire, and I was more than a little entertained watching Dunlap trying to come to grips with the basic absurdity of what he was hearing.

Last Friday, however, after the shebeen had been shuttered for the weekend, Matt Dunlap got dead serious about the farce that had gone on around him. In a letter dispatched both to Kobach and to Vice President Mike Pence, the nominal head of the commission, Dunlap laid out quite clearly the obvious fact that the commission's true purpose was to validate the president*'s horse-hockey about how three to five million illegal votes were cast. The wheel was rigged, Dunlap wrote, and there were 23 jokers in the deck, and at least three or four on the commission. From The Washington Post:

"After reading this...I see that it wasn't just a matter of investigating President Trump's claims that 3 to 5 million people voted illegally, but the goal of the commission seems to have been to validate those claims...We had more transparency on a deer task force than I had on a presidential commission."

Mark Wilson Getty Images

Things got so bad that Dunlap sued the commission while it was still purportedly active, seeking access to documents he and the other Democrats on the commission had been denied. He got them, finally, in July. They were a revelation to him. One statistician was recommended by a commission member because she was sure "he is conservative (and Christian, too)."

In its own way, this commission was as serious an attack on the electoral system as anything produced at the behest of the Volga Bagmen, and this was coming directly from the White House, at the direction of the president* and at a substantial cost to taxpayers, as wish-fulfillment as regards why the president* got beat in the popular vote count. We'd have been better off handing the whole thing over to the deer commission.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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