Pence's voter suppression commission implodes, gets sued by one of its own members

Claiming that the White House’s so-called “Election Integrity Commission” is basically a sham operation and that many participants are left completely in the dark, one sitting member filed a lawsuit in federal court on Wednesday demanding that the task force operate in a legal and ethical manner.

Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap, a Democrat who was selected to sit on the commission, which is co-chaired by Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, filed the complaint.

Incredibly at this point, the waste-of-time, scandal-plagued voter suppression commission “has been sued more times (eight, including the new filing) than it has officially convened for meetings (two times),” ProPublica notes.

The task force has been lambasted from the outset, widely condemned as a right-wing, Fox News-loving witch-hunt to uncover a non-existent voting fraud crime wave in America, and conducted under the unwarranted and unearned auspice of the White House and the federal government.

The commission is investigating allegations of voter fraud even though election experts have spent years confirming the United States does not have a voter fraud problem. A Loyola University Law School professor conducted extensive research and found only 31 instances of possible voter fraud amidst one billion ballots cast between 2000 and 2014.

Now we find out that the commission doesn’t actually exist in any real or substantive way, according to Dunlap, who has not been contacted by the task force since September, and has not been told about plans for any future meetings. And Dunlap’s a sitting member on the council.

“We aren’t inviting the public to participate. We aren’t transparent. And we aren’t even working together at all,” he told ProPublica. “My real fear is that this commission will offer policy recommendations that have not been properly vetted by all of the commissioners.”

Specifically, Dunlap in his lawsuit charges that the commission violates the Federal Advisory Commission Act, which requires that advisory committees be bipartisan and that they meet transparency requirements for them.

Dunlap’s suit echoes one previously filed by the ACLU, which also accused the commission of conducting its business in secrecy and violating the Federal Advisory Committee Act.

Dunlap confirms that point, claiming he “has been, and continues to be, blocked from receiving Commission documents necessary to carry out his responsibilities,” despite repeated requests to be included. The complaints Dunlap has repeatedly voiced to the commission in letters have been ignored.

The whole charade is another Trump/Pence scam.