Armed conservatives are watching ballot drop boxes from a distance in Arizona. To the Biden-Harris Justice Department, they are apparently worse than armed New Black Panthers, using racial epithets, standing literally in the doorway of an Election Day polling place.
The Biden DOJ is cracking down on behavior that is no more obviously against the law than behavior the Obama-Biden Justice Department refused to punish.
On Oct. 31, the department filed a “statement of interest” in support of a lawsuit by the League of Women Voters to stop what it calls “vigilantes,” some of them armed and in tactical gear, from observing and sometimes videotaping activity at otherwise unmanned early-voting drop boxes. On Nov. 1, Federal District Judge Michael Liburdi quite reasonably put some limits on the observers’ actions, ensuring that they must remain at least 75 feet away from the drop boxes — 250 feet if they are armed — and must not verbally engage with people depositing ballots.
Assuming he can cite proper legal authority for these specific restrictions, and assuming that people remain free to observe peacefully — and, yes, perhaps even to film from a distance — then the judge is well within bounds. Voter intimidation is rightly against the law.
“One of the wonderful things that separates America from thug regimes around the world is we can vote without seeing armed people at the polls,” said J. Christian Adams, president of the conservative Public Interest Legal Foundation and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “People supporting voting integrity need to … be observers, not participants. People with arms and tactical gear at the polls are on the knucklehead side of the political spectrum. To me, it borders on a criminal conspiracy.”
That’s why the Justice Department is right to weigh in. On the other hand, it would be nice if the department were as consistent as Adams has been on this subject, rather than creating such a brazen double standard.
Adams was the Justice Department official who was the whistleblower in the controversial case involving the two armed members of the radical New Black Panther Party, wearing paramilitary garb, who deliberately intimidated white voters at a Philadelphia polling place in 2008. Adams and colleagues actually had won a judgment against the Panthers, but the political appointees of the incoming Obama-Biden administration in 2009 obstinately refused to submit the necessary paperwork, so the Panthers escaped punishment.
Unlike the Arizona “vigilantes,” the New Black Panthers could not even claim they were safeguarding ballot integrity. The Arizona observers were across the street from drop boxes that feature no official poll commissioners and no official party-appointed poll watchers. They claim to be merely watching to see if anything looks like obvious fraud. The Panthers, on the other hand, were directly accosting voters in the very doorway of a polling place on Election Day itself, despite there being commissioners inside to safeguard the process. Their violation of Section 11B of the Voting Rights Act, which outlaws voter intimidation, was unambiguous.
The Justice Department is right to guard against voter intimidation. It should do so without fear or favor, though, rather than selectively to protect only one political side and crack down only on the other. Meanwhile, the observers in Arizona should ratchet down their activities considerably. One doesn’t need body armor, much less big guns, to watch people place ballots into street-corner boxes. As Adams said, that’s in the realm of thuggery, and it has no place in American politics.
