Anyone interested in a portrait of consummate public service need only look at Maine’s Secretary of State, Matthew Dunlap. Born and raised in Bar Harbor, Dunlap was first elected to the state’s legislature representing the 121st district in 1996.
An avid sportsman and environmentalist, Dunlap distinguished himself as the Chairman of the House Committee on Fish and Game, as well as the Joint Committee of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. Maine isn’t called the Vacation State for nothing; and right up there with tourism on the state’s economic ladder is fish and crustaceans. Assuring the vibrancy of both industries is a purely bipartisan mission, and that’s exactly the way Dunlap approached things during his tenure.
In 2004 the Legislature elected Dunlap Secretary of State, and with the exception of two years, when the GOP briefly gained control of the chamber in 2010, Dunlap has occupied the position with distinction, and a pronounced lack of controversy, quietly bringing Maine election infrastructure into the digital age. Perhaps his most notable achievement is the state’s Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act (MOVE), an initiative designed to expand access and participation of deployed military personnel in state and federal elections.
If there is a breathing opposite to Dunlap’s dramaless competency, it would be Kris Kobach, current Secretary of State and GOP gubernatorial candidate in Kansas. Although Kansas is near 85% white, it’s immigrant population has grown over the last decade to near 10% of the workforce, more than enough to cause unease among those given to obsess on such matters… Kobach’s primary constituency.
Not satisfied with beating up on Hispanic immigrants primarily working jobs white citizens have no interest performing, Kobach also traffics in anti-Muslim bigotry, promoting registries, lest they steal your first born or blow up your grain silo. Obama as Kenyan has also been a major Kobach preoccupation. But if general bigotry is the seed of Kobach’s politics, voter disenfranchisement is the tree in his yard. Baseless voter fraud claims and ever more restrictive voter ID initiatives are how he has earned his salary in Kansas. Tall and handsome, he never met a camera he didn’t want to be in front of, becoming a Fox/AM darling.
Indeed, Kobach spent thousands of Kansas taxpayers’ hard earned money on investigations into allegations he made up, and used to justify flying near 5000 miles in a private jet. Nine examples of double voting were eventually discovered, most by addled GOP seniors. But that was enough for Kobach to trumpet “the fraud in my state” when making the Fox/AM rounds heralding his state’s myriad of voter restrictions.
All of which brings us to the election of Donald Trump, despite his three million vote deficit in the national tally. Facts being a near constant nemesis of the President, he was determined from the outset to make sure they did nothing to undermine the legitimacy of “one of the biggest landslides ever.”
Illegal immigrants were the culprit, shrieked the President-elect, we’ll get to the bottom of this! Time for a commission. Get me that voter ID guy who agrees with me! You know, the one I’ve seen on Hannity! Thus, the Presidential Commission on Election Integrity was born in May of last year with Vice President Pence as its symbolic chairman and Kobach its Vice Chair, effectively it’s operational director.
Most of the commission’s remaining eleven slots went to fellow travelers of Kobach’s fact free conspiracy realm. Hans von Spakovsky, a George W. Bush recess appointee to the Federal Election Commission in 2006, eventually withdrawn after a bipartisan storm of opposition citing his enduring affection for disenfranchising minority voters, was typical of the commission’s bent. Indeed, von Spakovsky was vehement that Democrats and RINO Republicans should be excluded from the panel. How Dunlap was seated seems an oversight; perhaps it was assumed, since he hailed from Maine, the home of nihilist Trump booster and GOP Governor Paul Le Page, he could be counted on to at least look the other way as the group obediently followed the President’s narrative.
From the outset both red and blue states fully objected to Kobach’s demands for access to their voter rolls. Unwilling to indulge factless allegations which implied incompetence and corruption within their ranks, state secretaries throughout the country pushed back and refused to play along. By January of this year, after only two actual meetings, the group was disbanded, leaving a trail of distrust caused by its pursuit of a premise most, with the exception of the White House and Fox/AM thought absurd – nobody more than Matt Dunlap, who refused to move on, and just this week reigned fire and brimstone on the whole sorry farce.
In a blunt letter to both Pence and Kobach this week, Dunlap accused the White House and Kobach of “troubling bias” in support of Trump’s original lie that millions of illegal immigrants voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. After reviewing thousands of pages of commission documents he had to go to court to get publicly released, Dunlap categorically concluded zero voter fraud had been uncovered. Since Kobach refused to allow that conclusion in the commission’s report, Dunlap simply released the entire cache “so Americans can conclude for themselves that evidence…does not exist.”
In other words, after thousands of pages of effort by Kobach to jam the square peg of facts into the circular space of Trump’s baseless charge, not only did Kobach come up empty, but then abjectly refused to acknowledge reality within the panel’s findings. It was a lie from start to finish, costing god-knows how much in taxpayer funds.
That Dunlap’s best efforts will never result in either Trump or Kobach conceding the truth will surprise nobody, such is the despairingly normalized stream of falsehoods this White House and its supporters project. Yet and still, one can find real solace in Matt Dunlap and his ilk, priceless cogs in the machinery of our democracy, resisting with truth the lies determined to ruin us. In the age of Trump, utterly plain dedication to the public trust has never looked so good! BC