I am writing to reply to Gene Mikolajczyk’s uninformed and misleading attack on me in last week’s Times (Wonderland.)

Mikolajczyk extracted a quote from my interview (interrogation) on a recent CNN news show where I said that Republicans are passing election security bills regardless of whether there was actual fraud or nonexistence (sic) fraud.” Specifically, he attacks me for supporting voter security laws based upon nonexistent fraud. Why not? As chairman of the House Government and Elections Committee, I looked into many complaints about election irregularities, not all based upon founded allegations of fraud. I corrected all problems found, and not just those stemming from fraud allegations.

For example, people feared that voting machines might have been compromised by people inserting thumb drives into unsecured external data ports. I spoke to Maricopa County elections officials who said that their machine ports were locked as a matter of best practice, but not all counties did so. I passed a law with unanimous bipartisan support and that the governor signed requiring that all machines have security locks.

Mikolajczyk calls that voter suppression. It’s not.

Likewise, constituents complained that when the voting machines rejected their ballots at the polling place, they were told to just hit the button and it would be accepted but they were not told that errors on some office votes would not be counted and that they could instead fill in a new ballot to fix the problems. So, I passed another bipartisan law to require that instructions be posted. That’s now law and it’s not voter suppression.

Likewise, I do not support literacy tests for voters, as Times letter writer Bob Wilson suggests (Jim Crow) but, based upon the misinformation some are disseminating, maybe The Times should require literacy tests for its letter writers.