NAACP files suit accusing Trump, GOP of violating KKK Act

The NAACP is accusing President Trump and the Republican Party of violating the Ku Klux Klan Act with their efforts to overturn election results in key battleground states.

In an amended lawsuit filed Monday night, the civil rights organization added the Reconstruction-era law to their case against the president’s campaign that was filed last month.

“Defendants’ efforts to disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters — targeting cities with large Black populations, including Detroit, Michigan, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Atlanta, Georgia — repeat the worst abuses in our nation’s history, where Black Americans were denied a voice in American democracy for most of the first two centuries of the Republic,” the new lawsuit reads.

The NAACP filed the lawsuit last month on behalf of the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization and a group of Black Michigan voters, accusing the Trump campaign of violating the Voting Rights Act in seeking to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

The amended lawsuit added the Republican National Committee (RNC) as a defendant in the case and the allegations about the Ku Klux Klan Act.

The complaint accuses the campaign and the RNC of violating the 1871 law’s prohibition against “preventing by force, intimidation, or threat, any citizen who is lawfully entitled to vote, from giving his support or advocacy in a legal manner, toward or in favor of the election of any lawfully qualified person as an elector for President or Vice President.”

The RNC did not immediately respond when asked for comment, but Trump campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis said the case was without merit.

“Election integrity is about ensuring that every legal vote is counted and all illegal votes are not counted. This suit is baselessly attacking the Trump Campaign’s efforts to protect the integrity of the ballot for every American,” she said in a statememt.

The Trump campaign and its allies have filed a flurry of lawsuits seeking to decertify the election results in key battleground states in a long-shot effort to change the outcome of the election.

The legal effort has so far failed to take any electoral votes away from Biden’s total.

The NAACP in its new lawsuit alleges that the effort illegally targeted areas with predominantly Black cities.

“These systematic efforts–violations of the VRA and the Ku Klux Klan Act–have largely been directed at major metropolitan areas with large Black voter populations,” the lawsuit reads. “Defendants have not directed these efforts at predominantly white areas.”