In a federal lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, billionaire Elon Musk and the political action committee he founded are accused of not paying a man in the suburbs of Philadelphia more than $20,000 for encouraging people to sign a petition supporting gun rights and free speech.

A lawsuit seeking class-action status claims that a man from Bucks County, known as John Doe, was hired to canvass before the November presidential election and was paid by the hour. However, he was not fully paid for the petition referrals he worked on. John Doe has repeatedly tried to get the money he is owed but has not been successful. He also says that others have faced the same issue. "There's been a lot of discussion and concern from people who were not paid what they understood they were going to be paid," Shannon Liss-Riordan, a lawyer for John Doe, said in a phone interview on Tuesday. The lawsuit was first brought by The New York Times.

Musk's America PAC promised to pay $100 to registered voters who signed the petition and an additional $100 to anyone who referred a registered voter who signed it. "America PAC is committed to paying for every legitimate petition signature, which is evidenced by the fact that we have paid tens of millions of dollars to canvassers for their hard work in support of our mission," America PAC spokesperson Andrew Romeo said in an email. "While we don't yet know who this John Doe' plaintiff is and can't speak to their specific circumstances, we can say that we are also committed to rooting out fraud and have the right to withhold payments to fraudsters." America PAC's website states that most of the checks owed to petition signers have already been mailed. However, some checks were flagged due to mismatched information and need to be reviewed before being sent.

"The answer is basically, we're working on it,' but I think that's been up there for a while," Liss-Riordan said. A lawsuit claims that Elon Musk, along with the PAC and Group America LLC, broke a contract and violated Pennsylvania's wage payment law. On Sunday, Musk handed out $1 million checks to two voters in Wisconsin, calling them representatives of a political group. This happened just before voters in the state were set to elect a Supreme Court justice on Tuesday. Last year in Pennsylvania, Philadelphia’s Democratic District Attorney, Larry Krasner, sued to stop a $1 million voter sweepstakes organized by Musk. However, a judge ruled that Krasner didn’t provide enough evidence to prove it was an illegal lottery, so the sweepstakes was allowed to continue.