Death for Trump voters and the family cat

OPINION:

Imagine getting a letter in the mail threatening your life if you vote for President Trump. That happened to scores of voters across suburban Philadelphia in October.

For good measure, the letter threatened to shoot the family cat.

So why haven’t the same old voting rights groups taken up the cause against voter intimidation? Why hasn’t Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro come out swinging against threats of political violence?

The answer is that some threats to democracy matter to them, and others don’t.

I saw this firsthand at the Justice Department when I brought the voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party in 2008. Then, uniformed New Black Panther Party members with weapons stalked a Philadelphia polling site and shouted racial slurs.

Not long after President Obama was sworn in, we were instructed to dismiss the case even though the defendants did not respond to the court filings.

The systems designed to protect the right to vote failed in 2008, and they are failing again.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation, of which I am president, is representing voters in a federal lawsuit in Pennsylvania who received death threats for supporting Mr. Trump for president.

The letters are chilling.

“We know where you live,” they say. “You are in the database. In the dead of a cold winter’s night, this year or next and beyond, there is no knowing what may happen. Your property, your family may be impacted, your cat may get shot. And more.”

These were sent to Philadelphia area voters who displayed signs of support for Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign.

“You tread on me at your peril, motherf—-er. We look forward to visiting in the future,” it says.

This month, the Public Interest Legal Foundation filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in federal court under the voter intimidation provisions of the Voting Rights Act, the same statute under which I sued the New Black Panther Party in 2008.

The bigger question is why, after 17 years, is the system still failing to stop threats of political violence if they come from the left?

If the violence is aimed at conservatives or Mr. Trump, why do the elites ignore it?

As I learned in the New Black Panther Party fiasco, if the elites aren’t ignoring it, they are mocking it. They want voter intimidation protections in the law to protect only their identity politics allies.

Worse, the leftist elites are stingy. They cannot tolerate their political foes benefiting from the civil rights laws. Those civil rights laws don’t belong to you and me, or to Mr. Trump’s supporters.

I heard these sentiments with my own ears, spoken by Justice Department attorneys, over and over.

Mr. Shapiro boasted on Instagram that he would “defend your constitutional right to cast a ballot on Election Day.” Under Pennsylvania law, anyone who threatens or intimidates voters could be charged with a felony, face a $15,000 fine and spend up to seven years in prison. So why hasn’t the Pennsylvania State Police arrested those responsible?

The lawsuit we filed seeks to do what the institutions in Pennsylvania have failed to do: get to the bottom of who did it and hold the perpetrators accountable.

Political threats against voters have no place in America.

The biggest hurdle in the lawsuit is finding out who sent the threats through the United States Postal Service.

Perhaps Inspector Clouseau now works for the United States Postal Inspector Service, the criminal investigative arm of the Postal Service. Surely, the FBI lab in Quantico has been working overtime for the last five months to figure out who mailed the death threats?

Perhaps not.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation is offering a $2,000 reward for information leading to the perpetrators.

Our lawsuit seeks records from the institutions that should have protected voters immediately after the threats were received in the mail.

The death threats were made seven months ago. The institutions charged with protecting voters have failed to hold anyone accountable.

Rhetoric about “threats to democracy” from Pennsylvania politicians sounds awfully silly after you’ve received letters threatening to kill the family cat and make you unwanted visits in the “dead of a cold winter night” — all because you voted for Donald Trump.

• J. Christian Adams is a commissioner on the United States Commission on Civil Rights and the president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation.