Kris Kobach, the former vice-chair of President Donald Trump’s now-disbanded commission on election integrity, and Maine’s Democratic Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap have engaged in a public back and forth over the issue of voter fraud, with Kobach accusing Dunlap, a former member of the commission, of being “willfully blind to the voter fraud in front of his nose,” and Dunlap claiming that the commission failed to find evidence of widespread fraud.
But election experts say that Kobach’s claims are misleading and obscure the reality that voter fraud is rare in the context of the more than 1 billion votes cast since 2000.In a statement sent to CNN on Saturday claiming that Dunlap is “willfully blind,” Kobach, who serves as Kansas’ Republican secretary of state, said that the commission “was presented with more than 1,000 convictions for voter fraud since the year 2000.” Kobach further claimed that this finding was only a fraction of the total and said that the “commission was also presented approximately 8,400 instances of double voting in the 2016 election looking only at 20 states.”The statement did not cite sources for the numbers and Kobach’s office did not respond to a CNN request asking what evidence the information was based on.
Three election experts interviewed by CNN, however, cast doubt on the claims made by Kobach, a noted proponent of voter fraud theories and related policies. For example, in 2016, Kobach supported Trump’s false claim that “millions of people” voted illegally for Hillary Clinton in that year’s presidential election.