ACLU sues over alleged intimidation at Michigan polling places

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a federal lawsuit against six unidentified people, claiming they harassed voters at polling places in suburban Detroit by “registering voters at polling places,” following a woman to her car while left the polling station, and “made comments suggesting violence would happen to a voter’s child” if Kamala Harris won the election.

Police were called to several of the polling places in question but did not arrest the people who were filming, according to affidavits referenced in the lawsuit, which was filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan.

In one case, police told a woman who complained that “the group of people had not done anything illegal, and there was nothing the police could do ‘because it was free speech in a public place,’” according to court documents. although Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel had advised police departments to the contrary.

The ACLU asked the court to declare that intimidating voters — “including filming voters coming and going to the polls” and standing at the points where they enter and exit the polls — is unlawful.

In response, U.S. District Court Judge Terrence Berg on Tuesday issued a temporary restraining order against the unnamed defendants, ordering them to “cease the intimidation or intimidation of voters inside or outside the polls during the November elections 2024.”

An affidavit from a poll worker named Steven Raimi, who was not included in the complaint but referenced in Berg’s order, said he saw three men with cameras filming people leaving a polling place at Birmingham’s Derby Middle School. and went out. One wore a baseball cap that read: “Don’t annoy me, I’m a (expletive). My rights do not end where your feelings begin.”

Raimi told them they were not allowed to film people entering or leaving the polling place, according to the affidavit. Attorney General Dana Nessel had said this in an October letter to police departments across the state. The men responded that this was their First Amendment right.

People handing out flyers nearby told Raimi that the men had prevented a family from leaving the polling place, “despite the family asking them not to answer them,” according to court documents.

He later saw one of the same men and four other people at a polling place at the Oakland Schools Technical Campus Southeast in Royal Oak, where they continued filming despite being told by the county supervisor that it was not allowed, Raimi said, according to the court. documents.

A voter said in a separate affidavit that one of the men, wearing a mask, stood five feet away from her recording as she tried to vote and refused to step away when asked.

A third affidavit said that at a polling place at the First Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, a group of five men and a woman crowded the entrance so voters “nearly had to push past” and used phones on selfie sticks to film inside.

In issuing the order, Bern wrote that, without this order, “Plaintiffs will suffer irreparable harm by being denied their constitutional right to vote in the November 5, 2024 general election.”