Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, a Democrat, is suing President Trump’s voter fraud commission in federal court and claims the panel has excluded him and other members from the work it’s doing.
Dunlap filed the lawsuit Thursday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. It argued that the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, led by Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act.
FACA requires membership of these sorts of commissions to be balanced “in terms of the viewpoints represented” and requires them to make all its materials available to its members. But Dunlap’s suit said the commission has blocked him and others from accessing documents that are available to all commission members, and prevented him from participating, even though he is one of four Democrats on the commission.
“President Trump (who established the Commission), Vice President Pence (the Chair of the Commission), and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (Vice Chair of the Commission) have attempted to afford the Commission and its prospective findings a veneer of legitimacy by making the Commission’s membership bipartisan,” the lawsuit said. “But by obstructing certain commissioners’ access to information and failing to allow substantive participation of commissioners with balance in terms of points of view, the Commission and its staff have compromised the legitimacy of any findings that may emerge from this process.”
Dunlap said he hasn’t received any correspondence from the voter fraud commission since it met on Sept. 12.
The panel did, however, acknowledge it received an information request Dunlap submitted to it last month, which said he worries about a “vacuum of information from the leadership or staff.”
“My goal in filing this lawsuit is to bring the commission into full compliance with FACA, which would allow me and all of my fellow commissioners to fulfill our roles as full, participating members and provide a meaningful report to the president upon concluding our work,” Dunlap said in a statement.
The lawsuit names Pence, Kobach, and the Executive Office of the President, which staffs the commission and maintains its records, among others, as defendants.
Trump created the voter fraud commission in May after alleging he lost the popular vote because millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 election. But the panel has been steeped in criticism for its lack of transparency and concerns it was created to suppress voter turnout.
The Government Accountability Office said last month it would investigate the voter fraud commission after three Democratic senators requested a review of it.
