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Yesterday we told you about the federal judge who said it was very cool and very legal for armed vigilantes to stalk voters and take their pictures as they cast their ballots at drop boxes in Arizona. He’s a Trump appointee of course.
But lo and behold, after a hearing yesterday in which the plaintiffs demonstrated that the harms were no longer speculative but actually real and ongoing, Judge Michael Liburdi changed his tune and issued an injunction. Score one for the Deep State!
VERY COOL AND LEGAL! Trump Judge Rules Armed Vigilantes Filming Voters Is ‘Free Speech’
The case concerns a bunch of vigilantes who call themselves Clean Elections USA. Led by a loon named Melody Jennings who goes by @TrumperMel on Truth Social (obviously, duh!), these wackadoodles parked themselves near ballot drop boxes in Yavapai County and started filming anyone depositing more than one ballot — something which is entirely legal for family members and caregivers — taking down their license plates and reporting them to the police.
Originally, Judge Liburdi found that they were seeking to send a message that vote fraud is bad, that their menacing presence did not constitute a true threat in the legal sense, and thus that they could not be restrained on First Amendment grounds.
“There is no evidence that Defendants have publicly posted any voter’s names, home addresses, occupations, or other personal information. In fact, Jennings continuously states that her volunteers are to ‘follow laws’ and that ‘[t]hose who choose to break the law will be seen as an infiltrator intent on causing [CEUSA] harm,” he wrote in his denial of the requested injunction.
The plaintiffs, led by the League of Women Voters and the Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans, also demanded that the vigilante groups amend their public statements to quit telling people that anyone casting multiple ballots is a “mule.” To which @TrumperMel responded that she’s just a shitposter and can’t be expected to know the law, much less recite it accurately when she’s dispatching a herd of goons to harass voters:
To require that Defendant Jennings, a non-lawyer, correctly state both the rule and the exceptions and then to issue a prior restraint requiring that every time that she speaks about the law she must correctly state both the rule and the exceptions, does violence to the First Amendment by holding her, and all non-lawyers, to standards of discourse they cannot possibly meet when speaking about an issue that goes to the core of the First Amendment – the administration of elections.
But apparently the plaintiffs were able to demonstrate that the harms were real, because after yesterday’s hearing, they got their injunction. Either that or Judge Liburdi got the love note from Attorney General Merrick Garland telling him to RETHINK and decided he didn’t want the smoke.
The Washington Post reports that a witness testified that, after his family was harassed when they cast their ballots in Mesa, @TrumperMel did indeed post his photo online:
The man, who testified anonymously due to fears of harassment, said his wife was “terrified” when the couple went to drop off their ballots and found up to 10 election watchers with cameras waiting by the drop box.
He told the court that someone approached him and said, “we are hunting mules” — a reference to the discredited film “2000 Mules,” whichclaims drop boxes were stuffed with fraudulent ballots during the 2020 election. The founder of Clean Elections USA, Melody Jennings, later posted the man’s photo online, implying that his behavior by the ballot box had been suspicious.
And so, after yesterday’s hearing, Judge Liburdi entered a stipulated order, more or less agreed to by the parties, keeping the vigilantes 75 feet away from the drop boxes, barring them from approaching voters, and banning open carry within 250 feet of the boxes. He also ordered Clean Elections USA and @TrumperMel to post the actual law on on their websites and social media, and stop spreading the lie that it’s illegal to deposit multiple ballots in the boxes.
Which they did:
Everybody’s going to appeal, but barring an uncharacteristically fast response from the Ninth Circuit, this order is going to stand through Election Day. So … yay? Nicetimes?
We’ll take it!
[WaPo / Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans v. Clean Elections USA, Docket via Court Listener]
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