DENVER — A federal judge has declined to dismiss a lawsuit that alleges a Colorado-based group's door-to-door canvassing amounts to illegal voter intimidation and a conspiracy to prevent people from voting.
Earlier this year, three civic groups filed a federal complaint asking that a judge order the U.S. Election Integrity Plan — a group that believes there were illegal votes cast in the 2020 election — to halt its alleged harassment of voters. The Colorado Montana Wyoming State Area Conference of the NAACP, the League of Women Voters of Colorado and Mi Familia Vota claimed that USEIP's activities violate the federal Voting Rights Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act's prohibitions on voter coercion.
On April 8, U.S. District Court Chief Judge Philip A. Brimmer rejected the plaintiffs' request for a temporary restraining order, finding no allegations that USEIP was currently intimidating voters in a way that required emergency action. However, Brimmer subsequently refused to dismiss the lawsuit outright, saying the plaintiffs had credibly claimed that USEIP's actions had harmed them directly.
Specifically, all three groups alleged they had to divert resources from their core mission of educating voters to instead monitor, strategize against and combat USEIP's activities.
"Any of the plaintiff organizations in these cases theoretically could have chosen not to devote resources to countering the defendants’ conduct and, in that sense, their drained resources were volitional. But courts have considered organizations in similar positions to have been 'forced' to act," Brimmer wrote in an April 28 order.
>9NEWS readers can view the full article at Colorado Politics.
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