The New Black Panther Party planned on armed patrols near several polling sites in Georgia on Tuesday as voters headed to the polls to cast their ballots in the state’s Senate runoff election between Sen. Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker.
“No one will come and touch, harm, threaten, do anything to any person walking into that voting booth to exercise that right,” organizer Khallida Ramla Bastet said at a press conference Monday.
The New Black Panther Party, founded in 1989 in Dallas, Texas, is a black nationalist group that is not affiliated with the Black Panther Party founded by Bobby Seale and Huey P. Newton in Oakland, California, in the 1960s. The New Black Panther Party said on Monday that it is not backing either Democratic incumbent Warnock or his Republican challenger Walker in the race.
“This is a legal position that we are taking. We are in position so that if anything happens to anyone, we are here to offer you legal representation. We are here to offer you security. And that’s that. And may the best person win,” Bastet said.
In addition to the armed guards, the group Black Lawyers for Justice said that it will also have a presence at polling places to monitor for “white supremacist violence.”
The armed patrols were scheduled to take place between 7 a.m. and 11 a.m. and between 3 p.m. and 8 p.m. in parts of Brunswick, Savannah and metro Atlanta.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated the New Black Panther Party as a “hate group,” calling it a “virulently racist and antisemitic organization whose leaders have encouraged violence against whites, Jews and law enforcement officers.”
The Georgia runoff election is the final Senate contest of the 2022 midterm elections. Nearly 2 million ballots have already been cast during early voting in the Peach State, which set a number of single-day records leading up to Tuesday.