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Voter Fraud Panel Is Sued Again, This Time by a Member

Matthew Dunlap, a member of the White House voter fraud commission, sued the panel on Thursday, saying he had been denied information about its work.Credit...Darron Cummings/Associated Press

WASHINGTON — A Democratic member of the White House commission on election integrity filed a federal lawsuit against the panel on Thursday, saying that its claim of bipartisan cooperation “has been a facade” and that he had been denied information about its work.

The commission member — Matthew Dunlap, the Maine secretary of state — stated in the lawsuit that he had been unable to get any information on the commission’s activities since its last meeting in September. His request in mid-October for copies of all correspondence among the commission’s members since its formation in May was referred to legal counsel, the lawsuit stated, and a second request on Nov. 1 has gone unanswered.

The suit accused the commission of violating the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires such panels to operate transparently and to treat all members equally. Mr. Dunlap asked the court to force the commission to turn over the requested documents and provide any new ones in the future.

The panel’s vice chairman and day-to-day overseer — Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state — said in a statement that Mr. Dunlap’s suit was “baseless and paranoid,” and that he had not received any correspondence from the commission lately either.

Mr. Kobach said in the statement that the commission’s work had been slowed because it was defending itself in eight other lawsuits, and that “ironically, Dunlap’s lawsuit is only going to increase the workload.”

Asked about that on Thursday, Mr. Dunlap replied, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.”

In an interview, he said that a simple explanation of what the commission was doing — or if it was not doing anything, that its activities were delayed — might have satisfied him. But despite two letters and repeated emails, he said, “I never got that answer.”

The October request for correspondence, Mr. Dunlap said, was prompted by a text message from a journalist seeking his reaction to the arrest of a commission staff member on child pornography charges. He said he had been unaware of the arrest. Almost a month later, he added: “I still don’t know what happened. Is he still employed? Is he on leave? Terminated? On bail? I have no idea. This is a little unusual.”

The other suits against the panel, formally called the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity but commonly called the voter fraud commission, have largely been filed by critics who call the panel an arm of broader Republican efforts to make it harder for Democratic-leaning minorities, young people and the poor to register and vote.

Mr. Kobach angered some other commission members, including Bill Gardner, the New Hampshire secretary of state, by writing a column for the far-right website Breitbart News in September suggesting that Maggie Hassan, a New Hampshire Democrat, had won election to the Senate in November 2016 because of fraudulent votes. State officials and election-fraud experts called the claim baseless.

Since August, one panel member has died and a Republican member — Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation — was found to have lobbied to keep Democrats, mainstream Republicans and academics from serving on the commission.

The Government Accountability Office, a nonpartisan congressional agency, said in late October that it would investigate the commission’s activities in response to a request from three Democratic senators: Michael Bennet of Colorado, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Cory Booker of New Jersey.

Several of the Democrats on the 11-member commission have been increasingly critical of its direction, spurred in part by its focus on voter fraud, which academic studies and other inquiries have shown to be exceedingly rare.

On Thursday, Mr. Dunlap said in a statement that he filed the suit to “allow me and all of my fellow commissioners to fulfill our roles as full, participating members, and provide a meaningful report to the president.”

In an Oct. 17 letter to the commission’s executive director, Mr. Dunlap wrote that it had become “manifestly clear that there is information about this commission being created and shared among a number of parties, though apparently not universally.

“I am in a position where I feel compelled to inquire after the work of the commission upon which I am sworn to serve,” he wrote, “and am yet completely uninformed as to its activities.”

The lawsuit was prepared by a New York City law firm and American Oversight, a nonprofit watchdog group staffed largely by former Obama administration and Democratic officials.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 18 of the New York edition with the headline: Voter Fraud Panel Is Sued, This Time by a Member. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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