Lawsuit invokes KKK law to stop election deniers - The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel
DENVER — A coalition of civil and voting rights organizations invoked the 19th-century Ku Klux Klan Act in a lawsuit filed Wednesday seeking to stop a group of Donald Trump supporters from going door-to-door in Colorado in a search for already-debunked voter fraud.
The lawsuit against the U.S. Election Integrity Plan, which has its roots in Mesa County, alleges that the group’s activities include photographing voters’ homes and “door-to-door voter intimidation.” The group was founded after Trump lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden and made false claims of mass voter fraud.
Shawn Smith, a retired Air Force colonel who runs the group from Colorado Springs, did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent to Cause for America, a separate “election integrity” group he runs. USEIP has no listed phone number or email.
The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado on behalf of the state chapter of the NAACP, the League of Women Voters and Mi Familia Vota.
The move represents a high-profile push against a new method that election deniers have used to advance claims of voter fraud that have been roundly dismissed. Repeated audits and investigations — including by Trump’s own Department of Justice — found no significant fraud in the 2020 election, and Trump backers lost more than 50 lawsuits trying to overturn the vote.
Almost weekly for nearly a year, the group has claimed to be ready to release its findings, but to date has not.
Preliminary results turned over to the Mesa County Board of Commissioners in April, however, revealed no irregularities.
Last December, Commissioner Janet Rowland said Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters and Garfield County resident Sherronna Bishop, a conspiracy theorist who along with Peters and others are being investigated by the FBI for possible wire fraud, provided the county in April a list of suspected irregularities from the group’s initial canvassing.
“In every single case, whatever the voter said they had done — vote or not vote — is what our records showed,” Rowland said at the time. “Where they got the information that was incorrect, I don’t know, but our records reflected what the voters said every single time.”
That same board meeting also caught the ire of Commissioner Cody Davis, who has repeatedly met with anyone in the county who has election concerns and continues to do so.
“I’ve been told several times that this data exists and there’s rampant fraud out there, but to this date zero data has been presented to us. Zero,” Davis said at that same commissioner meeting. “It’s one thing to make a claim, it’s another thing to present us with the data so that we can confirm that. Not one person has given us one shred of data with this.”
The lawsuit relies in part on the KKK Act, which was passed after the Civil War to prevent white vigilantes from using violence and terror to stop Black people from voting.
The civil and voting rights groups allege that USEIP members sometimes carry firearms and badges during visits to voters’ homes, even though they do not work for the government.
“They’re sending a very clear message that if you vote in the future in Colorado, you can expect an armed agent showing up at your door,” said Courtney Hostetler, an attorney at the legal nonprofit Free Speech For People, which filed the case.
USEIP thanks Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow and a major supporter of election deniers, in its organizing manual. Smith attended a meeting that Lindell organized on election conspiracy theories last August along with Peters, who was indicted by a grand jury Wednesday for her role in copying confidential election data that appeared on conspiracy websites after the event.
The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office says Smith was on the telephone with a clerk in Elbert County as he made copies of information from his own election system and gave it to two people not authorized to view it. Last month, at a gathering of election conspiracy theorists, during a discussion of Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, Smith said, “If you’re involved in election fraud, then you deserve to hang.”
Smith has appeared at numerous events in Mesa County alongside Peters, but his involvement in the indictments against her and Deputy Belinda Knisley, if any, are unknown.
In late November, Lindell hired Smith to run Cause of America. In an interview on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s podcast, Smith said the new organization would “help coordinate the election integrity efforts of citizens across the country.”
Lindell did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
The group says on its website that it plans to expand to other such states.
— Staff writer Charles Ashby contributed to this report
source: https://www.gjsentinel.com/news/western_colorado/lawsuit-invokes-kkk-law-to-stop-election-deniers/article_7c4d62fa-a095-11ec-aabd-f33ef0a0b931.html
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