Trump and GOP sued for breaching KKK act with ‘coordinated conspiracy to disenfranchise Black voters’

NAACP accuses president and his campaign of relying on ‘baseless, racist claims’ to overturn 2020 results

Donald Trump’s administration, the president’s re-election campaign and the Republican Party are targeted in a civil rights lawsuit alleging a “coordinated conspiracy to disenfranchise Black voters” through a spurious legal bid to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and “intimidation and coercion of election officials and volunteers.”

 An amended lawsuit filed by civil rights organisation the NAACP accuses the president and his allies of violating both the Voting Rights Act and Ku Klux Klan Act, a Reconstruction-era law prohibiting the use of “force, intimidation or threat” against “any citizen who is lawfully entitled to vote" in a presidential election.

The lawsuit was initially filed last month on behalf of the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization and three Detroit residents following the president’s attempts to undermine election results in the state.

An amended filing on Monday night added the KKK Act allegations and the Republican National Committee to the list of defendants.

“President Trump and his allies have repeatedly and unsuccessfully tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election results and undermine confidence in our democracy,” NAACP president Derrick Johnson said in a statement on Tuesday. “Across the country – from Detroit to Milwaukee, and Atlanta to Philadelphia – they have targeted areas with large numbers of Black voters and made baseless, racist claims to attempt to not count their votes.”

The president, his legal team and supporters have filed more than 50 legal challenges, most of which have been withdrawn or dismissed for lack of evidence despite attorneys’ insistence that the election was marred by widespread voter fraud.

“We cannot sit back and let these actions go unaccounted for,” Mr Johnson said. "In order to protect the constitutional rights of millions of Black Americans, and ensure that our democracy is not delegitimised, we are bringing this lawsuit to protect the integrity of Black voters and the democratic process in which they participated and made their voices heard in record numbers.”

The KKK Act followed the ratification of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution guaranteeing equal protection under the law in 1868, amid racist violence from groups like the KKK and other white supremacist terror groups. The law provides that the president may intervene in former slave-holding states that continue to deny "any person or any class of persons of the equal protection of the laws, or of equal privileges or immunities under the laws.”