Why am I not surprised?

Files contradict Trump claims of voter fraud, Maine official says
(Politico)
By REBECCA MORIN

     A review of nearly 2,000 documents from President Donald Trump’s now-defunct Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity contradicts claims of widespread voter fraud, Maine’s secretary of state said Friday.
     Matt Dunlap, who was a part of the commission’s board, said the files showed no evidence to support such assertions.
. . .
     In November 2017, Dunlap filed a lawsuit claiming that he had been denied access to the commission’s records and effectively frozen out of its activities. A judge later ruled that he had the right to the same information shared to other members of the commission.
. . .
     The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

New Documents Show Trump’s Election Integrity Commission Was Preparing Report on Voter Fraud Without Proof
(Mother Jones)

Kobach

     …Trump disbanded the commission in January as it faced a bevy of lawsuits from voting rights and government watchdog groups. One of those lawsuits came from one of the panel’s own members, Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap. A Democrat, Dunlap came to believe that he was being excluded from the work of the commission, which he suspected was being conducted almost entirely by [Kansas Secretary of State Kris] Kobach and a handful of other conservative voter fraud alarmists on the panel. Last November, Dunlap sued the commission for the materials that had not been shared with him. A federal judge ordered the government in June to turn over those records, even though the commission had ceased to operate. The government handed over more than 1,800 documents on July 18, and on Friday, Dunlap made them public.
     “Contrary to what we were promised, these documents show that there was, in fact, a pre-ordained outcome to this commission to demonstrate widespread voter fraud, without any evidence to back it up,” Dunlap said in a statement Friday.
     Among the documents turned over to Dunlap were outlines and a draft of a report to be issued by the commission. The draft, dated November 2017, included headings for evidence of “improper voter registration practices,” “instances of fraudulent or improper voting,” “instances of other election crimes” and “voter suppression.” But there was no evidence below these headings and sub-headings. “That the Commission predicted it would find widespread evidence of fraud actually reveals a troubling bias,” Dunlap wrote in a letter to Kobach and Vice President Mike Pence, the chair of the commission, that he also released Friday. “While individual cases of improper or fraudulent voting occur infrequently, the instances of which I am aware do not provide any basis to extrapolate widespread of systematic problems. The plural of anecdote is not data.”
. . .
     On Friday, Dunlap revealed that Kobach and two other commissioners considered requesting additional information federal court clerks, including “lists of individuals deemed ineligible or excused from federal jury service due to death, relocation, convictions, or lack of citizenship.” The draft of one such request to a clerk in San Diego, which was never sent, asked for the names, addresses, and “other identifying information” of individuals excluded from jury duty since 2006. The commission was in the process of building a database of names and other information that, by producing false-positive matches, would create the appearance of voter fraud and illegal voter registrations where few if any actual instances likely existed. The documents show some discussion of detailing a statistician to the committee from the Voting Section of the Justice Department to analyze the voter registration and other data collected by the commission.