Government

Mike Lindell Group Protects Election By Sending Armed Volunteers Out To Harass Minority Voters In Their Homes

For America!

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Concept of protecting against voter fraud with firearm and voting stickerMike Lindell has taken time out of copulating with that 2020 election chicken twelve hours a day to make time for a new chick. He and his money are now getting frisky with the 2022 election via a new outlet called the U.S. Election Integrity Plan.

USEIP aims to enlist citizens to patrol their own communities for the vote fraud they are convinced is running rampant and was determinative in the last presidential election, despite ample evidence to the contrary.

“The Republic is at stake if we don’t first fix our elections. It’s up to us to create change at the local level,” reads the group’s website. “Now, We Are The Plan.”

USEIP and its leadership has been linked to supporters of the Qanon conspiracy theory. It could be a coincidence that their website echoes the Qanon motto “We are the storm.” Or not.

USEIP has dispatched cadres of armed agents to harass Colorado voters, particularly in minority communities, according to a federal lawsuit flagged by Salon. The NAACP, League of Women Voters of Colorado, and Mi Familia Vota allege that USEIP is engaged in a “door-to-door voter intimidation campaign … often targeting high-density housing, communities experiencing growth among racial minority voters, and communities in which a high percentage of voters supported Democratic candidates in the 2020 election.”

Sometimes armed and donning badges to present an appearance of government officiality [sic], USEIP agents interrogate voters about their addresses, whether they participated in the 2020 election, and—if so—how they cast their vote. It is reported that multiple agents have claimed to be from “the county,” and have, without any evidence, falsely accused the residents of casting fraudulent ballots.

According to the plaintiffs, armed USEIP representatives are fanning out to take pictures of voters homes and accuse them of committing election fraud, both of which are “particularly intimidating for Black and Latino voters because of the extensive history in these communities of frequently violent, voter intimidation and vigilante interference in their own homes.”

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The plaintiffs, who notably do not include any individual voters (a possible standing issue), are seeking declarative and injunctive relief under Section 11b of the Voting Rights Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. They accuse the USEIP of conspiring to “intimidate, threaten, or coerce voters” and prevent them from participating in the 2022 election.

Much of the relief requested would patently violate the First Amendment, such as the demand that the court “Order Defendants to stop taking photographs and stop maintaining databases of voters, their residences, or their vehicles; to make no attempt to access or use their copies of existing photographs or databases of voters, their residences, or their vehicles; and to delete their copies of existing photographs or databases of voters, their residences, or their vehicles and to submit an affidavit to the Court attesting to the deletion of the same.”

The case is not yet assigned to a judge, as of this writing. But even if it goes absolutely nowhere, it’s a useful sign of what’s coming in the next seven months. Because Lindell may be a charlatan who files hilariously inept lawsuits — or promises for months to file them, and then doesn’t — but his passion project is the destruction of American democracy, and he’s got an apparently inexhaustible pile of cash to throw at it.

A democracy, if you can keep it.

Colorado Montana Wyoming State Area Conference of the NAACP v. United States Election Integrity Plan [Docket via Court Listener]

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Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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