Election deniers' win overturned as new trial ordered for voter intimidation

A federal appeals court overturned a victory for three Colorado election deniers accused of sending armed canvassers to voters' doors to intimidate them over the 2020 election.

Shawn Smith, Ashley Epp, and Holly Kasun — co-founders of the United States Election Integrity Plan — had won at trial. The Tenth Circuit reversed that ruling on Monday and ordered a new trial against all three, as well as USEIP itself.

USEIP volunteers — sometimes armed and wearing badges designed to look official — went door-to-door across Colorado targeting minority communities, demanding voters explain how they cast their ballots in 2020.

The case centers on what the court called "alleged voter intimidation by private citizens investigating claims of election fraud following the 2020 presidential election."

The original lawsuit said canvassers sometimes claimed to be from "the county" while falsely accusing residents of casting fraudulent ballots.

Rather than confronting voters at polling places, the complaint argued, USEIP targeted voters "in the place where voters should feel safest — their own homes."

"I think if you are involved in election fraud then you deserve to hang," Smith allegedly said at a February 2022 church event in Castle Rock. "Sometimes the old ways are the best ways."

Smith, a retired Air Force colonel, was employed by MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, one of the leading backers of President Donald Trump's stolen-election claims. The group also had ties to QAnon, which the FBI has identified as a domestic terror threat, and to the January 6, 2021, Capitol attack.

USEIP's internal "Playbook" — drafted by Kasun and Epp — laid out the group's canvassing tactics, which the lawsuit said amounted to "threatening and intimidating voters in order to support debunked claims of election fraud," according to the lawsuit.

In its chatrooms, USEIP members "regularly offer advice on effective weapons and where to purchase them," the complaint said.

The lower court had thrown USEIP out of the case entirely — a legal error, the appeals court ruled, that prevented the trial judge from seeing the full picture of the group's conduct.

"Unincorporated associations are capable of 'intimidat[ing], threaten[ing], or coerc[ing]' just as living individuals can do the same," the court wrote.

The ruling found that the Voting Rights Act must be read to provide "the broadest possible scope" in combating racial discrimination.

The case now returns to a lower court for a new trial against all defendants, USEIP included.