Commission Vice Chairman Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who is currently deadlocked in the GOP primary for the state’s gubernatorial nomination, tethered the commission’s work tightly to his own crusade in Kansas, where he’s unsuccessfully lobbied for a proof-of-citizenship requirement for voting, and has only successfully prosecuted a couple of individuals for fraud despite claiming that there are more than 100 noncitizen voters in the state. The documents reveal just how closely his work and his own political biases steered the commission.

In a letter to Vice President Mike Pence, the commission’s chairman, written after reviewing the collection of documents, Dunlap expressed concern that Kobach’s assertions, and the conduct of the commission more generally, “appeared aimed at the pre-ordained objective: ratifying the President’s statements that millions of illegal votes were cast during the 2016 elections.” Dunlap decried the extreme partisanship of the commission, and also claimed that he had been essentially frozen out of the proceedings. In terms of the commission’s official duties and actions, he describes the actions of a few individuals—likely including Kobach, along with Mark Paoletta and Andrew Kossack, then-aides to Pence—who essentially ran the show.

The White House declares war on the specter of voter fraud

That trio sought to strike a balance between the commission’s necessary appearance as a bipartisan election-reform project and Kobach’s own designs. In a series of emails documenting the crafting of the bylaws of the commission, the trio reviewed deleted text that required that “the membership of the Commission shall be fairly balanced in its membership in terms of the points of view represented,” and Kobach specifically requested that the word diverse be omitted from a passage stating that the commission should “represent a bipartisan and diverse set of perspectives and experience.” None of the stricken text made its way into the final bylaws, and in the end the commission itself was a thoroughly Republican-dominated affair.

Emails released in this collection also suggest that the trio was intentionally unclear about the intended use of a massive set of voter data it attempted to compile—a request that led to multiple lawsuits and the eventual disintegration of the commission. When Kobach and the commission requested all “publicly available” election information from every state, including voters’ Social Security numbers, voting history, and party affiliation, even several Republican election officials balked at what voting-rights activists thought was a clear attempt at creating a voter-suppression data warehouse. Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann famously told the commission to “go jump in the Gulf.”

In public statements and in letters to state election officials, the commission indicated that the dataset would be used “for the Commission to fully analyze vulnerabilities and issues related to voter registration and voting.” Those statements were unclear as to how that analysis would proceed—although based on Kobach’s own previous statements, most assumed he would match the database against highly sensitive data in the Crosscheck system to search for people who’d voted in more than one state and the SAVE database to check for noncitizen voters. But original drafts of the follow-up letters sent to recalcitrant officials were more specific on that front, specifying that “for example, the Commission may compare voter rolls to federal databases of known noncitizens residing in the United States to identify ineligible noncitizens.” That language, and further language about comparing the database to federal databases, was dropped in successive drafts as scrutiny on the commission intensified, and as court orders blocked the original request.