FIRM RECRUITS VETERANS TO GUARD POLLS IN MINN.
State’s attorney general warns move would violate law
A private security company is recruiting former U.S. military Special Operations personnel to guard polling sites in Minnesota on Election Day, an effort the chairman of the company said is intended to prevent left-wing activists from disrupting the election but that the state attorney general warned would amount to voter intimidation and violate the law.
The recruiting effort is being done by Atlas Aegis, a private security company based in Tennessee that was formed last year and is run by U.S. military veterans, including people with Special Operations experience, according to its website.
The company chairman, Anthony Caudle, posted a message through a defense industry jobs site this week calling for former Special Operations forces to staff “security positions in Minnesota during the November Election and beyond to protect election polls, local businesses and residences from looting and destruction.” He said in an interview earlier this week that he is planning to send a “large contingent” to Minnesota but did not specify the numbers.
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a Democrat, said in a statement Friday that he joined election officials in “strongly discouraging this unnecessary interference in Minnesota’s elections, which we have not asked for and do not welcome.”
“Federal law and state law are both clear: No one may interfere with or intimidate a voter at a polling place,” he said. “The presence of armed outside contractors at polling places would constitute intimidation and violate the law. I request this company cease and desist any planning and stop making any statements about engaging in this activity.”
Ellison added that “we don’t expect to have to enforce our laws against voter intimidation, but we will use every resource available to us and all the power of the law if we have to.”
Caudle did not respond to a request for comment Friday on Ellison’s statement.
The security guard recruitment drive comes as civil rights organizations have been warning that groups may turn up armed at the polls in an effort to patrol them and perhaps intimidate voters, encouraged by President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that the election will be rigged against him.
A Trump campaign spokesperson said the campaign had never heard of Atlas Aegis and that it was not involved in the effort.
Minnesota has been at the center of a national protest movement sparked by the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man killed by police in Minneapolis in May. Those protests led to the damage of hundreds of businesses amid the eruption of anger over his killing and that of other Black men and women at the hands of law enforcement.
The prospect of introducing armed guards at election sites during this sensitive moment alarmed election officials in the state. It is illegal in Minnesota for people other than voters and elections staff — or those people meeting the requirements to be a registered election “challenger” — to be within 100 feet of polling sites.
There are also laws against voter intimidation that could prevent armed civilians from being in the area even if outside the buffer.