In May, Hasen wrote a column for the Portland Press Herald warning Dunlap that he was being set up as a patsy.
“Dunlap’s participation just gives someone like Kris Kobach a cover to be able to claim that this is a bipartisan effort, when in fact it’s lopsided and seems aimed at some preconceived conclusions about where things are going to go,” he says.
And Hasen says he worries that the real agenda was to craft voting policies that could disenfranchise those who are not behind the conservative cause. He and others urged Dunlap not to legitimize the commission and boycott it altogether.
But Dunlap says he believes that by serving on the panel, he has a platform to call out irregularities in its work. That effort began with a public takedown of Kobach, the commission’s co-chairman, at a meeting in New Hampshire in September, when Dunlap challenged Kobach’s claim that the 5,000 people who registered to vote last year with out-of-state IDs and failed to later get in-state IDs, as required by N.H. state law, was evidence of voter fraud….
“It’s unfortunate, you know, the president wants to get something done, and all of these ‘resist’ people, which apparently now includes the Maine secretary of state, are trying to stop it,” he said on “Fox and Friends” last month.
Dunlap shrugs off the attacks, claiming that he has become a Trojan horse for the progressive resistance. He says he just wants to make sure the commission does its work transparently, and that whatever report it produces is shared and vetted.
Hasen says the odds of that happening are better now that a federal judge has ruled in Dunlap’s favor.
“I would much rather have people not participate in this sham commission than participate. But if someone is going to participate, they should be playing the watchdog role that Secretary Dunlap has been playing,” he says.