U.S. Democrats sue to block alleged voter intimidation

Story by The Hill
Written by Reid Wilson

Lawyers representing state Democratic parties in four battleground states on Monday filed complaints against Republicans and Donald Trump in an effort to stop what they call concerted efforts to suppress votes among minorities.

The suits, filed in U.S. District Court in Arizona, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Ohio, accuse state GOPs of conspiring with Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee to encourage voter intimidation, especially in heavily Hispanic and black communities.

In the complaints, Democrats say Trump has encouraged voter intimidation at his rallies, including some tactics that are expressly banned by state law.

Arizona law, for instance, prohibits photography and video recording within a 75-foot perimeter around a polling place.

The state GOPs and Trump campaign “have called on supporters to descend on polling places in ‘certain areas’ — generally, the urban communities of color where they and their allies have stoked fabricated threats of massive voter fraud — in order to intimidate voters at the polls,” the Democratic complaint in Arizona alleges.

The complaints also name Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime political adviser, as among those “conspiring to threaten, intimidate, and thereby prevent minority voters in urban neighborhoods from voting in the 2016 election.”

The filings cite a Bloomberg News story from late last week, in which a senior Trump official said the campaign is trying to suppress voters in three separate ways. The Trump campaign later disavowed those comments.

The suits accuse Republicans of violating the Voting Rights Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act, an 1871 law that made voter intimidation illegal.

Democrats say Republicans are also violating a 1982 consent decree that requires national Republicans to use only established procedures to challenge voters.

Polls show Trump and Clinton running neck and neck in Ohio and Nevada.

Clinton holds a healthy lead in Pennsylvania, a state Trump needs to win in order to reach 270 electoral votes. Trump has told Pennsylvania supporters several times he worries about voter fraud in the Philadelphia area, which is heavily African-American — comments Democrats included in their complaints in all four states.

“The only way we can lose, in my opinion, and I really mean this, Pennsylvania, is if cheating goes on,” Trump said in Altoona, Pa., in August.

Both Democrats and Republicans see Arizona as a competitive battleground for the first time in two decades. Hillary Clinton’s campaign has invested about $2 million in television advertisements there, and both Clinton and running mate Tim Kaine will hold rallies in Arizona this week.

Trump’s campaign has not run advertisements in Arizona, but the candidate himself has visited the state seven times in the course of the general election campaign.