Last week, the “sovereign citizens of the Great State of Arizona” attempted to submit their electoral college votes early. They sent notarized documents to the National Archives in an attempt to give 11 electoral college votes to President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence. While this attempt failed, could this be signs of an increase in sovereign citizen activity over the next four (or more) years?
According to data a colleague and I are using for research on the sovereign citizen movement, 149 events (out of 165) of violent or non-violent reported sovereign activity occurred between 2008 and 2014. This is significant because these were the years when President Obama was in the White House.
As a quick background, I co-authored a publication regarding sovereign citizens and a structured professional judgment tool in 2018. The current research built upon the roughly 60 incidents for the previous paper, and it expanded the dataset to 165 events that occurred between 2004 and 2014 and involved known or suspected sovereign citizens.
The sovereign citizen movement usually involves individuals that believe in smaller government. At their core, they believe the current federal government is operating illegally. Sovereign citizens are able to then declare their sovereignty and not be concerned with the rules and regulations of the United States. That’s how they justify not paying taxes or maintaining proper vehicle registration/licensure.
With the administration changing from Trump to President-Elect Joe Biden, are we going to see a similar uptick in sovereign citizen activity over the next few years? If the past gives us indication for the future, then I would suggest that we will se an uptick. Time will tell.