Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen has discovered more than 3,000 potential noncitizens registered to vote in the state. His office is now taking steps to remove noncitizens from the rolls.
“I will not tolerate the participation of noncitizens in our elections,” Allen said in an Aug. 13 press release. “We have examined the current voter file in an attempt to identify anyone who appears on that list that has been issued a noncitizen identification number.”
Allen’s office found 3,251 registered voters with noncitizen ID numbers issued by the Department of Homeland Security, according to the release. His office is telling local administrators to “inactivate and initiate steps necessary to remove all individuals who are not United States citizens” from the voter file.
Allen worked with “other state agencies that collect noncitizen identification numbers” and checked them against voter registrations, Laney Rawls, Allen’s director of communications, told The Federalist. She said Allen has made this a “priority” since taking office in January 2023.
Some of these potential noncitizen voters may have become citizens after initially getting noncitizen ID numbers, according to the release. Allen’s office will inactivate these registrations and allow those who have since become citizens to update their registration with an Alabama driver’s license number, non-driver ID, or the last four digits of their Social Security number, according to Rawls. Allen’s office is still working to determine when the noncitizen ID numbers were issued, Rawls said.
The federal government has denied “repeated requests” to help with the investigation, according to the release. Allen began contacting the DHS’s Citizenship and Immigration Services division in November 2023, requesting a list of noncitizens living in Alabama to cross-reference with the state voter file, according to Rawls.
“The Office also contacted the White House administration for assistance in getting this data and our requests have been denied,” Rawls said. The “lack of cooperation” prompted Allen to try and solve the issue on his own.
“I am hopeful that in the near future the federal government will change course and be helpful to states as we work to protect our elections,” Allen said in the release. Allen’s office is sending the registrations at issue to Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall for “further investigation and possible criminal prosecution.”
“This is not a one-time review of our voter file,” Allen said. “We will continue to conduct such reviews to do everything possible to make sure that everyone on our file is an eligible voter.”
“Unfortunately, the federal government limits the power of states to require proof of citizenship at the time of registration,” Rawls said. Still, Allen has directed local boards of registrars to require an Alabama driver’s license number, non-driver ID, or Social Security number when registering voters.
“Allen has also demanded answers from state and federal agencies conducting these expanded voter registration efforts on how they plan to keep noncitizens from registering to vote in Alabama,” Rawls said.
Allen previously warned citizens of registering to vote through Vote411, citing concerns over data privacy. The Federalist reported that Vote411, which masquerades as a nonpartisan group, uses voter registration forms to shuttle users to a left-wing data harvesting operation.
In Tennessee, Secretary of State Tre Hargett’s election coordinator Mark Goins sent letters to more than 14,000 potential noncitizens in June, telling them to either update their information or request the state remove them from voter rolls.
Doug Kufner, communications director for Hargett’s office, told The Federalist at the time that Goins found these registrations after comparing voter registrations to data from the state’s Department of Safety and Homeland Security.
“This data indicates the person may not have been a U.S. citizen at the time of the transaction. The person could have been naturalized since applying for a driver’s license,” Kufner said at the time. “Tennessee law makes it clear that only eligible voters are allowed to participate in Tennessee elections.”
The letters instructed new citizens on how to correct their records, but that didn’t stop the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation from threatening to sue, according to The Associated Press. Hargett’s office sent follow-up letters, clarifying it would not remove registered voters who did not respond to the initial mailing.
Logan Washburn is a staff writer covering election integrity. He graduated from Hillsdale College, served as Christopher Rufo’s editorial assistant, and has bylines in The Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and The Daily Caller. Logan is originally from Central Oregon but now lives in rural Michigan.
Leftists bragged about how they “fortified” the 2020 election against Trump. Now the same “democracy is at stake” shills are flaunting their plans for 2024, and they sound awfully familiar.
Democrats are already sowing seeds of distrust — and perhaps projection — with an unnamed source whispering to Rolling Stone that Biden “has been worried … that Donald Trump is going to try to steal the election.”
“Biden and his inner circle have been drawing up meticulous plans and creating a large legal network focused on wargaming a close election finish,” wrote Rolling Stone’s Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley, citing undisclosed Democratic operatives who fret about a contested 2024 election. “Team Biden has been conducting war games, crafting complex legal strategies, and devoting extensive resources to prepare for, as one former senior Biden administration official puts it, ‘all-hell-breaks-loose’ scenarios.”
Biden’s legal team is reportedly “preparing legal strategies for scenarios involving recounts that would make, in the words of one Biden official, ‘make Florida in 2000 look like child’s play.’”
Biden’s team has partnered with a “vast network of liberal attorneys and legal groups” that have already drafted pleadings and motions for any kind of election-related fight. Biden’s team is also reportedly working with local law firms to “actively monitor what is happening on the ground” in key swing states like Georgia, Arizona, and Pennsylvania — all of which Biden narrowly won just four years ago, and all of which saw their elections plagued by chaos, scandal, and a lack of transparency in 2020.
A representative for the Democratic National Committee told Rolling Stone the party has also set aside “tens of millions of dollars in a robust voter protection program to safeguard the rights of voters.”
Rolling Stone all but dismisses the possibility that Trump could defeat Biden outright in 2024 — making the bizarre claim that winning would be “almost irrelevant” to the Trump team’s goals — and instead treats a razor-thin Biden victory as the assumed scenario. Noticeably absent from the article is a discussion of what happens if Trump wins narrowly. Would Biden graciously concede? Rolling Stone appears to be telegraphing that he has no plans to.
Campaign Strategy: Bidenbucks and Lawfare
The Biden administration has been working overtime to tilt the balance of the electorate since taking office. One way they’ve done this is by funneling taxpayer dollars into initiatives meant to increase voter turnout — specifically voters who will likely vote blue.
Soon after taking office, Biden issued Executive Order 14019, which directs federal agencies to use taxpayer funds to interfere in elections, including by voter outreach targeted at likely-Democrat voters. The Department of Education, for example, recently released a “toolkit” that gives guidance to K-12 institutions recommending schools “determine if [their] state allows pre-registration for individuals under 18 years old and, if so, identify opportunities for high school students to do so.”
Meanwhile the Department of Health and Human Services’ Indian Health Service began collaborating with left-wing groups like the ACLU and Demos to register new voters, according to a report from The Daily Signal. As my colleague Shawn Fleetwood has noted, “voter registration efforts are almost always a partisan venture.”
Perhaps the cherry on top is Democrats’ use of lawfare to weaponize the justice system against Trump.
Both Trump and Biden have been accused of mishandling classified documents. The former, who can make an argument for having presidential power to declassify documents, has been dragged into court by the Biden Justice Department, which has the goal of putting him in prison at worst and draining his campaign of time and money at best. The latter, who apparently mishandled classified documents while senator and vice president, was allowed to skate after a special counsel declined to prosecute because “It would be difficult to convince a jury” to convict the memory-challenged Biden of “a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.”
Déjà Vu All Over Again
Rolling Stone’s glowing feature of the “superstructure” Biden is amassing to control the 2024 election aftermath should sound familiar. During the months leading up to the 2020 election, corporate media, Democrat lawmakers, and left-wing operatives conspired to influence the election, as Time Magazine’s national political correspondent Molly Ball glowingly acknowledged afterward.
There’s every reason to expect the same, and more, in 2024.
Ball acknowledged that when Trump pointed out the 2020 election was rife with election integrity issues, he “was right” that “there was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes.” She described the collusion as “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.” But, as my colleague Joy Pullmann pointed out, Trump was lambasted for raising these exact same points. A smear campaign continues to this day by Democrats who seek to use the nonsense pejorative of “election denier” to forestall Trump’s ability to call out their election rigging.
As Ball approvingly noted, members of the “conspiracy” “got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding” — e.g., hundreds of millions of dollars from billionaire Mark Zuckerberg that were funneled into election offices by left-wing groups. They “recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time,” Ball bragged.
But the mass mail-in balloting scheme was rife with risks that even the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) acknowledged. CISA warned of “major challenges” associated with mail-in voting including the “process of mailing and returning ballots,” “high numbers of improperly completed ballots,” and “the shortage of personnel to process ballots in a prompt manner.”
Then there was Big Tech actively working to stifle negative coverage of Biden, most infamously by censoring the bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story just weeks before Election Day. One study found some Democrat voters in key swing states would not have voted for Biden had they had access to the story alleging Biden’s involvement with his son’s corrupt business dealings.
Ball seemed to applaud this effort, writing how the conspiracy “successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.”
Meanwhile Big Tech companies like Meta — the parent company of Facebook — are discussing ways to “protect” the electoral system by manipulating algorithms, newsfeeds, and recommendations to users. In 2020, Facebook throttled circulation of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
In addition to peddling lies about Trump and blacking out the bombshell evidence implicating Biden that was discovered on his son’s laptop, corporate media also played a role by being a conduit for Democrat operatives’ narrative that election results should not be expected on election night. Privately, Biden’s operatives had polling data suggesting mainstream polls were not reflecting Trump’s true support amongst voters — indicating that Trump would be decisively winning on Election Day. A top “conspiracy” leader reportedly warned “everyone he knew that polls were underestimating Trump’s support,” Ball explained.
The unnamed individual reportedly went to corporate media networks and got them to push the narrative that election results should be expected to be delayed, which conveniently laid the groundwork for a “surge” of mail-in ballots counted late at night and after Election Day to push Biden over the edge.
“Election night began with many Democrats despairing,” Ball wrote. “Trump was running ahead of pre-election polling, winning Florida, Ohio and Texas easily and keeping Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania too close to call.”
But Ball said the “conspiracy” leader was unphased about the nail-biter results: “he could tell that as long as all the votes were counted, Trump would lose.”
As Pullmann wrote, “Amazing projection skills, right?”
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
North Carolinians who didn’t present a photo ID when voting during the presidential primary last week were still permitted to cast a ballot, thanks to exceptions that Soros-backed groups supported including in the state’s voter ID law.
On March 5, more than 1.7 million North Carolina voters were asked to show a photo ID to vote in the presidential primary, in the first major election since the law went into effect. Most of those voters appeared to successfully present an ID and cast a ballot. Still, according to preliminary counts, more than 1,000 voters cast what is known as a “provisional ballot” due to “ID not provided,” according to the state’s election board (NCSBE). Of those more than 1,000 voters, 546 later returned to show their IDs. But another 607 voters never showed a photo ID, instead simply signing a form claiming that a “reasonable impediment” prevented them from presenting an ID.
The Law Doesn’t Actually Compel Voters to Show Photo ID
The North Carolina general assembly initially passed a series of election-related laws in 2013. After facing legal challenges to the voter ID requirement, the state legislature presented a revised voter ID law in 2015 that included the “reasonable impediment” exception, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit nevertheless struck down the voter ID requirement in 2016. Republicans spent the next several years fighting in the courts to pass some type of voter ID laws while North Carolinians voted in 2018 to approve a state constitutional amendment establishing a photo ID requirement.
Most recently, the North Carolina Supreme Court — which had flipped from a Democrat-majority to a Republican-majority — overturned a past decision by the same court and thus permitted the photo ID requirement to go into effect.
The current version says that a voter who does not present a photo ID due to a “reasonable impediment” may still cast a provisional ballot so long as he provides “a current utility bill, bank statement, government check, paycheck, or other government document,” his voter registration card, or the last four digits of his Social Security number and birth date.
If a voter still fails to present any of those documents, the law says he can simply complete a declaration stating that he is who he says he is — aka the “honor system.” He must also designate on the form that a “reasonable impediment” — such as disability or illness, lack of transportation, lack of birth certificate or other documents needed to obtain a photo ID, work schedule, or family responsibilities — has prevented him from providing an ID. Other acceptable reasons include a voter having lost his ID or simply “not know[ing] photo ID was required for voting.”
The ID exception form is also accepted for mail-in voters who cannot include a copy of their photo ID with their ballots, according to voting instructions posted by the Mecklenburg County government.
‘Nobody Will Be Turned Away’
Thirty-six other states currently mandate some form of voter ID, but Republicans who have worked on election integrity efforts say North Carolina’s law is the “weakest” of them all.
“You can literally put any kind of excuse you want on the ‘Reasonable Impediment’ form and be given a ballot. It’s not hard at all to vote,” Chairman of the Lee County Republican Party James Womack told The Federalist.
“This ‘Reasonable Impediment’ thing is really a weakness in the law, it’s the weakest voter ID law in the country when you consider almost anyone can walk in and say ‘Oh, I lost my ID’ and cast a provisional ballot,” Womack continued. “They really didn’t make an attempt this year, in Senate Bill 747, to update anything that was in the case of ‘Reasonable Impediment.’”
Executive Director of Voter Integrity Project of North Carolina Jay DeLancy wrote in 2015 after an earlier, similar version of the law was passed that it was a “stunning betrayal” to all state residents who wanted to see “real voter ID” laws. DeLancy said at the time that, while he did not believe Republicans in the legislature purposely gutted the photo ID provisions, “their inexperience in election fraud analysis leads them to believe the new loophole ‘won’t be a big deal’ in our state.”
Provisional ballots can theoretically be rejected, but those cast based on a “reasonable impediment” to providing voter ID can only be rejected if a county elections board unanimously finds that the information a voter gives in the ID exception form is false. It’s unclear, however, how a county board would be able to discern whether a person’s claimed impediment to obtaining an ID is genuine. Besides, Womack noted these voters likely wouldn’t be rejected due to a fear that lawsuits would be lodged alleging voter suppression.
“What they did, this law, neuters the ability of the board to reject those ballots no matter how ridiculous the excuse is that the voter uses,” DeLancy told The Federalist. “It defies common sense.”
DeLancy told The Federalist he believes Republicans in the legislature thought they would be “clever” and include the “reasonable impediment” provision as a way to avoid having the voter ID law tossed.
Womack speculated that then-House Rules Chairman Rep. David Lewis included the last-minute “compromise language” to help the legislation pass. He noted Republicans had to work in bipartisan fashion since, at the time, they did not hold a supermajority in either state legislature and the Reasonable Impediment provision would alleviate concerns from the left that there would be an “undue burden on people who didn’t have photo ID.”
Womack said the provision likely didn’t get much attention since the legislation got stuck in the courts for years but argued that now that it has gone into effect “people are starting to expose its weaknesses.”
“There’s all kinds of excuses you can put on the form and you’ll still be granted the right to vote, nobody will be turned away,” he added.
DeLancy said the provision should be fixed ahead of November’s election “or else” it leaves the door open for potential abuse.
Soros-Linked Group Cheered ‘Reasonable Impediment’ Exception
When North Carolina’s 2013 law was challenged in court shortly after it was signed, the leftist groups behind the legal fight included the NAACP and the Advancement Project. The Advancement Project had received nearly $4 million between 1999 and 2012 from the Soros-funded Open Society Project. The Foundation to Promote Open Society contributed more than half a million to the Advancement Project between 2009 and 2012, according to Influence Watch. Later suits targeting the law were brought by other election-interference groups like the ACLU.
When Republicans proposed a revision adding the “reasonable impediment” exception to the law in 2015, the Soros-backed group Democracy North Carolina spent weeks “encouraging hundreds of citizens to attend and speak out” at hearings regarding the legislation and celebrated the inclusion of the “reasonable impediment” provision.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
None of Democrats’ witnesses in a congressional hearing Tuesday could say resolutely that they believe only citizens should be able to vote in a federal election.
During a Senate Judiciary Hearing on the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, Republican Utah Sen. Mike Lee asked the witnesses to provide a basic “yes” or “no” answer to a series of questions about non-citizens voting.
“Do you believe that only citizens of the United States should be able to vote in federal elections?” Lee asked each of the witnesses.
“We don’t have a position about non-citizens voting in federal elections, we believe that’s what the current laws are, and so we’re certainly fighting for everyone who is eligible under current law to vote,” Executive Director of The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law Damon T. Hewitt said.
“That’s a decision of the state law but I want to emphasize –” President of Southwest Voter Registration Education Project Lydia Camarillo said.
“It’s a decision of state law as to who should vote in federal elections?” Lee interjected.
“States decide who gets to vote in various elections, and in federal elections I believe that we should be encouraging people to naturalize and then vote,” Camarillo said.
“Okay but you’re saying that the federal government should have no say in who votes in a federal election?” Lee pressed.
“I don’t have a position on that,” Camarillo responded.
Director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project Sophia Lin Lakin told Lee, “Federal law prohibits non-citizens from voting in federal elections and our focus is on enabling all eligible voters to be able to vote and cast their ballot.”
Only two witnesses, counsel at Public Interest Legal Foundation Maureen Riordan and Manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative at the Heritage Foundation Hans von Spakovsky said they do not believe non-citizens should be able to vote. Both were Republican witnesses.
Lee then asked all the witnesses whether “people registering to vote should provide documentary proof of their citizenship in order to register to vote.” Hewitt replied the real question is how asking people to provide proof of citizenship affects them.
“I think your first question kind of answers the second. Based upon the applicable rules, federal or state elections, what have you, we know we have to follow those rules. The question is what is the impact of those rules?” He said in response.
Camarillo called the question “redundant” and said, “It’s already being asked.”
Current federal law stipulates voters must simply check on a form that they are a U.S. citizen, but they do not have to provide any proof.
Lakin flat-out argued asking people to prove they are U.S. citizens to vote amounts to discrimination: “Documentary proof of citizenship or requirements are often discriminatory,” she said.
Riordan and Spakovsky agreed voters should be required to prove they are citizens. Lee said he was troubled that not every witness could simply answer “yes” to both of his questions.
The John Lewis Voting Rights Act seeks to federalize all elections by stripping states and local jurisdictions from making changes to their elections without approval from federal bureaucrats. If the legislation is passed, the U.S. Justice Department could essentially take over an election if its left-wing allies claim minority voters are being harmed by something as simple as requiring an ID or proving citizenship to vote.
A federal judge recently ruled Arizona’s law requiring individuals to prove U.S. citizenship in order to vote in a statewide election is not discriminatory and could proceed after leftists lodged a series of suits.
“Arizona’s interests in preventing non-citizens from voting and promoting public confidence in Arizona’s elections outweighs the limited burden voters might encounter when required to provide” proof of citizenship, U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton ruled.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
The ACLU and First Liberty Institute are challenging the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s restrictions on advertising. Pictured: A train pulls into Metro Center in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 27, 2016. (Photo: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images)
The American Civil Liberties Union joined with the conservative legal group First Liberty Institute on Monday to challenge the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s restrictions on advertising as First Amendment violations. The two groups filed a lawsuit on behalf of WallBuilder Presentations, an organization that raises awareness about the “moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built,” after WMATA said the ads it wanted to display on buses violated its advertising guidelines.
WMATA restricts ads “intended to influence members of the public regarding an issue on which there are varying public opinions,” along with those that “promote or oppose any religion, religious practice or belief.”
“Though WMATA never identified the specific issue of public controversy that it believed the proposed advertisements addressed, it is apparent that WallBuilders was prohibited from advertising because its proposed ads sought to address issues of public importance from a religious viewpoint,” the complaint alleges.
The ads display depictions of Founding Fathers overlayed with the word “Christian?” and invite viewers to learn about the “faith of our founders” on the Wallbuilders website, according to the lawsuit.
“The case against WMATA is a critical reminder of what’s at stake when government entities exercise selective censorship,” Arthur Spitzer, senior counsel at ACLU-D.C., said in a statement. “The First Amendment doesn’t play favorites; it ensures that all voices, regardless of their message, have the right to be heard.”
The lawsuit includes multiple photos of ads WMATA did find permissible, though they appear to violate its guidelines. These include ads for “The Book of Mormon” musical, which “sharply lampoons” the religious practices of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, along with an ad by the Brennan Center for Justice demanding term limits for Supreme Court justices, a “source of substantial public debate,” according to the lawsuit.
Breaking: We're suing @wmata for unlawfully rejecting political ads in the D.C. Metro. The First Amendment bars the government from silencing speech based on specific viewpoints. This case seeks to expand free speech opportunities in the D.C. metro and beyond.
“ACLU defends these suits, regardless of whether it agrees with the underlying message because it believes in the speaker’s right to express it,” Spitzer continued. “The government cannot arbitrarily decide which voices to silence in public forums.”
Jeremy Dys, senior counsel for First Liberty, said in a statement that the First Amendment “grants all Americans the right to express their point of view, religious or secular.”
“Rejecting a faith-based advertising banner by labeling it an ‘issue ad,’ while accepting other ads such as those promoting a ‘Social Justice School,’ ‘Earth Day,’ and the highly controversial idea of terms limits for Supreme Court Justices, is clearly hypocritical, discriminatory, and illegal,” Dys said.
WMATA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Automatic voter registration (AVR) may sound obscure, but it’s a fast track to permanent Democrat power — so, naturally, activists are working around the clock to pass it in the states and Congress.
Modern elections are usually won by the party that turns out the bigger base. Left-wing strategists believe their victory hinges on astronomically high Democratic turnout. Whether that’s true or not matters less than their perception that it worked to oust President Donald Trump in 2020 and saved the left from catastrophe in the 2022 midterms, even when Republicans won the popular vote nationwide by a bigger percentage margin than Hillary Clinton won in 2016.
Under normal rules, eligible Americans must register to vote on their own initiative, usually at their county registrar or online through the state motor vehicle department. It’s a simple, fair thing to ask people to show an interest in voting and then verify their identity before they cast a ballot; that’s how our country has run elections for nearly 250 years.
AVR transforms that opt-in system into an opt-out mess by adding virtually everyone with a heartbeat to state voter rolls, instantly and dramatically expanding the pool of registered voters for the left to cynically tap into. Don’t want to be added to a publicly accessible list? Too bad — it’s on you to take the initiative to unregister, Democrats say.
How many voters are we talking about? 158 million ballots were cast in 2020. Yet Demos, the think tank of the far left and an AVR champion, estimates there are as many as 77 million eligible-but-unregistered individuals nationwide — folks who couldlawfully vote but may notuntil they’re registered to vote in their respective states. Not every one of them would support Democrats if registered, of course, but even winning a fraction would be enough to ensure Democratic presidential wins for a generation or longer. That’s why AVR is supported by the Brennan Center, the origin of the left’s most odious election “reforms,” and the Center for American Progress, which boasted in 2018 that AVR could add 22 million newly registered voters nationwide in just its first year. Note that Minnesota’s recent election law includes AVR alongside “non-English voting materials” and the pre-registration of 16-year-olds to vote. To hear leftists crow, you’d think the United States never ran a free election in centuries without AVR laws. The LGBT Movement Advancement Project, which dinks red states for their voter ID laws, considers AVR essential to the health of a state’s “democracy.”
Conservatives have been too shortsighted to pay attention, but leftists have been tapping this goldmine for years. Of the 23 states with AVR laws, only three are consistently run by Republicans: Georgia, West Virginia, and Alaska. Michigan enacted AVR in 2018 after a lobbying campaign by the ACLU, Sierra Club, United Auto Workers, and socialist group Our Revolution. In my home state of Virginia, where legislators are capped on the number of bills they may introduce in a single session, Democrats made introducing AVR a top priority when they held total power in 2020. It passed on a partisan split.
Incoming congressional Democrats, fresh from retaking the House of Representatives in 2018, demanded Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi, D–Calif., “expand automatic voter registration across the country” as part of their “upcoming democracy bill.” They got their wish with the 2019 “Voting Rights Advancement Act,” then again with the 2021 “For the People Act” and “Automatic Voter Registration Act,” and most recently with the 2023 “Freedom to Vote Act.”
Recall that running elections and maintaining voter rolls are the duty of the states, not Uncle Sam, yet Democrats would force all 50 states to severely bloat their voter files. America’s voter rolls are already in bad shape, despite (mostly red) states’ best efforts to clean them up.
Georgia recently announced it removed 432,000 inactive voters from its rolls since 2021. Virginia removed 114,000 inactive voters in 2021; Oklahoma another 90,000 in 2019; Kentucky dropped 127,000 in 2023; Arkansas may remove 300,000 inactive voters this year; Pennsylvania dropped 180,000 in 2023; and Rhode Island removed another 60,000 inactive voters earlier this year. Texas and Mississippi are weighing bills that would allow them to more aggressively cull inactive voters from their rolls.
States are required by law to keep accurate voter files, to the left’s chagrin. Ohio, which culled 116,000 inactive voters from its rolls in 2021, knows best how much leftists loathe what they call “voter purges.” In 2017, then-attorney general Eric Holder tried to block Ohio from removing inactive voters as one of the last acts of the Obama administration — only to lose the next year in a landmark Supreme Court ruling.
The truth is obvious: Democrats don’t want accurate voter rolls; they want swollen voter rolls. Left-wing NPR admits as much. This is bad election policy, and it isn’t cheap. Nevada’s AVR policy cost taxpayers $4.8 million to implement, plus more to maintain it.
It’s no surprise that the left’s big-money donors are in on the action. We’ve traced hundreds of thousands of dollars since 2017 to implementing AVR in the states from the Tides Foundation, Pierre Omidyar’s Democracy Fund, the Joyce Foundation (whose board once included then-Sen. Barack Obama), and the Carnegie Corporation. One six-figure Carnegie grant to the University of Southern California is even tagged for studying “the state-level impact of automatic voter registration … [on] the national Latino electorate.”
For Republicans, fighting AVR is a no-brainer. To the detriment of election integrity, Congress and the states have already made registering to vote and casting a ballot extremely easy. What we need are cleaner voter rolls and more secure elections, not a public subsidy for the Democrats’ get-out-the-vote machine.
Hayden Ludwig is director of research for Restoration of America.
At least 50 high-powered law firms that went out of their way to defend foreign terrorists in Guantanamo Bay free of charge are nowhere to be found as hundreds of American citizens languish in prison for charges related to entering the U.S. Capitol building during the January 6 riot.
When foreign terrorists, including the accused mastermind who helped plan the 9/11 attack, were being held in the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, law firms from across the country volunteered to represent them pro bono. Now, nearly 600 Americans face an intense legal battle over their participation in the events of January 6, and these same firms are leaving them defenseless. Not one of the legal firms that assisted Gitmo terrorists have helped any of those charged with ties to January 6.
In 2009, the American Civil Liberties Union went so far as to create an entire group of lawyers ready to defend Gitmo detainees under the John Adams Project, to show their dedication to ensuring all have a top-notch defense.
John Adams, whose patriotism was proven in his instrumental legal role in helping found the American republic, defended British soldiers after the Boston Massacre in an American courtroom. Although undoubtedly a revolutionary hero, Adams felt convicted that the judicial system cannot be just if everyone doesn’t receive a quality defense. With popular opinion so staunchly against the soldiers, Adams risked his reputation to uphold this principle.
Attorney Steve Schaefer explained to me that a strong legal defense for all accused of crimes is necessary, as it is the only way to reveal the truth of what occurred before the court. If the facts don’t come to light, the American justice system is in jeopardy, as people are at the will of an arbitrary power. Schaefer said, that causes Americans to lose trust in the American experiment, so the importance of quality representation prior to adjudication in court can’t be overstated.
“It’s indispensable to have to have a strong advocacy on behalf of criminal defendants — even if the allegations are unsavory — because our entire process hinges on a protection of the citizen and that the government has to meet the highest burden, which is beyond a reasonable doubt, in order to convict them of a crime,” Schaefer said.
Without a strong criminal defense, the government can take away individual rights without a clear demonstration of the guilt of the accused. The firms who trumpeted the right to a strong defense for everyone charged in the American legal system when it came to Guantanamo Bay are well aware of the need for a competent defense for citizens today, yet they have not allocated any resources to an equal defense for some accused of crimes.
The law firm Wilmer and Hale told The New York Times in 2008 that establishing a proper defense for Gitmo detainees “was about as important as anything we could take on.”
Despite widespread allegations of prosecutorial zealotry and differing standards of prosecution for the January 6 rioters compared to the thousands of rioters across the nation in 2020 who besieged the White House, federal courthouses, police precincts, national symbols, and small businesses, no similar defense fund or coordination has been provided for those charged in the January 6 riot.
Julie Kelly, a reporter covering dozens of January 6 defendants since their cases began, said the majority of those who have been charged have no prior experience navigating the legal system. Few have been charged with any crime before in their lives and now must rely on government-provided public defenders because they can’t afford anyone else.
“We have a Gitmo in Washington D.C.,” Kelly told me. “We have a prison that has been used solely to house and detain men arrested and charged — not convicted, just charged with offenses — related to January 6.”
Some of the nonviolent defendants were so misinformed by the FBI that they thought they were being questioned to help them find violent offenders, all while the FBI was gathering evidence against those being questioned, she said.
“These people are being treated in court as domestic terrorists. Dozens of them are held under pre-trial detention orders, which means they don’t even have a chance to make bail,” Kelly noted. “They are considered too dangerous to be let out of jail, awaiting trials which won’t start until the middle of next year at the earliest.”
Capitol rioter Paul Hodgkins’ prosecutor referred to him as a domestic terrorist in his sentencing, and FBI Director Christopher Wray has designated January 6 an act of domestic terrorism. Many who didn’t even know they were doing anything wrong, entering the Capitol as police opened doors for them, face detrimental charges threatening to turn them into convicted felons, revoking their right to vote and to own a gun for the rest of their lives.
While corporate media and other establishment institutions have long encouraged pro-bono legal representation of those held at Gitmo, they have discouraged it for those charged in the January 6 riot. Media and political figures argue those charged in the riot were violent insurrectionists seeking to overthrow the government. However, not a single person at the riot has been charged with inciting insurrection. They have instead been charged with obstruction of an official proceeding, which is the felony charge that the government is adding to mostly misdemeanor cases of trespassing.
The vast majority of those charged with ties to January 6 carried no weapons, harmed no one, vandalized nothing, and stole nothing, according to Kelly. Most walked through the capitol against no resistance at 2:40 p.m., took a selfie, and were out by 3 p.m. These defendants are also being tried in front of a jury in Washington, D.C., a city where more than 92 percent of the voters voted to elect Joe Biden last November.
Civil liberties advocates say the treatment of January 6 defendants reveals an alarming threat to American jurisprudence. Some blame intimidation from well-funded leftist groups for the lack of a competent defense. Lawyers who do exert effort in providing such a defense have been harrassed.
According to NPR, attorney Nabeel Kibria represented one of the first defendants in the investigation to plead guilty, after which point Kibria began facing attacks and death threats 48 hours after her client’s plea deal “from people … who you would think were on a whole different spectrum than what the Bustles [a married couple on trial] are in terms of political ideology or the people of the January 6 riots.”
Firms that consider themselves advocates for the least among us fail to uphold their convictions by abandoning people like Hodgkins. The system of justice that exists in this country, outlined in the Constitution in no uncertain terms, requires a strong defense.
“It is extremely frustrating and heartbreaking to see the Beltway’s legal and judicial system so heavily stacked against these people who have no means to defend themselves,” Kelly said. “And you have no lawyers on the right willing to step up and take these cases either pro bono, or even low bono, to help these people.”
One thing is clear: Those on the left put a lot of work into defending Afghan terrorists a decade ago, touting the need for providing a quality legal defense to those who were least likely to have quality, willing representation. Now, in the hour of need for Americans charged with much lesser crimes than mass murder, the same firms remain silent.
Allison Schuster is a research assistant for Hillsdale College in DC and a 2021 Hillsdale graduate, as well as a former intern for The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter @allisonshoestor.
More than 50 years after the Supreme Court ruled prayer in public schools was unconstitutional, the percentage of Americans who claim no religion is slightly higher than the two largest religious faiths. (Anna Nahabed / Shutterstock)
The Freedom from Religion Foundation and the ACLU must be high-fiving each other.
In a development that can’t be heartening to the millions of America’s faithful, new survey data shows the percentage of Americans who profess no religious belief is actually higher those who are part of the country’s largest faith traditions. The trends might not be looking good right now, but there’s a reason to hope.
According to the General Social Survey, which has been tracking American social trends since 1972, Americans who claim no religion — or “nones” — now outnumber Roman Catholics and evangelicals.
“’Nones’ have been on the march for a long time now,”Ryan P. Burge, a professor at Eastern Illinois University, told the National Catholic Reporter.
“It’s been a constant, steady increase for 20 years now. If the trend line kept up, we knew this was going to happen.”
According to the NCR, the percentage of American “nones” is now 23.1, up from 21.6 percent in 2016. That’s only slightly ahead of Catholics, at 23 percent, and evangelicals, which were 22.5, down from 23.9 percent in 2016. The percentage is so small, considering the millions of individuals involved, it’s probably statistically insignificant. The NCR calls the results “statistically tied.”
But there’s no denying it represents a change in American life — and the kind that could have a direct result on the country’s politics.
NCR cited exit polls from the 2016 elections that white evangelicals made up 26 percent of the voters even if their share of the voting population wasn’t that large.
“Evangelicals punch way above their weight,”Burge said told NCR. “They turn out a bunch at the ballot box. That’s largely a function of the fact that they’re white and they’re old.”
That’s one way to put it. One could also look at it like they’re patriotic, committed, intelligent and aware that — as Americans — they’re part of the rich history of a nation that’s truly exceptional in world history. In other words, they’re pretty much the opposite of the millennial America that is embodied by progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow Democrat freshmen representatives.
So let’s just stipulate that a future where the American electorate is made up of a lot fewer people like the voters who pushed Donald Trump over the top early on Nov. 9, 2016, and a lot more fans of AOC is likely to be a trying one for the country overall. But this has been coming for a long time. The General Social Survey numbers are almost to be expected if several factors are taken into account.
First and foremost, public schools have for decades been in the hands of an education establishment and leftist teachers unions that scorn traditional morality.
Secondly, our nation is saturated with an entertainment culture that celebrates individual narcissism and immorality while mocking virtually every expression of religious belief.
Finally, America’s political culture is such that one of its two major political parties has been virtually a religion-free zone.
Combine these factors with the lawfare practiced by the likes of the ACLU and the cranky atheists of the Freedom from Religion Foundation — which target even the most innocent endearing expressions of religious faith in public life – and it’s a wonder that numbers like this didn’t show up ages ago.
And as Michael Knowles pointed out at The Daily Wire, it’s probably no coincidence that the country is experiencing a level of social ills that it hasn’t seen before.
“As religiosity has declined, social ills have abounded. Nearly one in five American adults suffers from anxiety disorders, which now constitute the most common mental illness in the country,” Knowles wrote.
“One in six Americans takes antidepressant drugs, a 65% surge over just 15 years. The problem is particularly acute among younger Americans. While depression diagnoses have increased 33% since 2013, that number is up 47% among Millennials and 63% among teenagers. Coincidentally, suicide rates among American teenagers have increased by 70% since 2006. American life expectancy declined again last year, as Americans continue to drug and kill themselves at record rates.”
Does anyone think it’s just a coincidence that that happens when religious faith is failing? (And does anyone think it’s a coincidence that all of this happening less than 60 years after the Supreme Court ruled that prayer in public schools was unconstitutional. Three generations of Americans have grown up in the world that helped create.) Now, no one can believe the members of the American Civil Liberties Union wake up in the morning wondering how they can contribute to more American suicides than they did yesterday. And no one thinks the Freedom from Religion wackos in Wisconsin are consciously setting out to increase the mental and spiritual health of their fellow citizens. (Though at Christmas time, it can be hard to tell.) And one might even be able to give the benefit of the doubt to the American education establishment (though Hollywood and the teachers unions will never deserve it).
But even the most willfully obtuse, deliberately blind individual member of the cultural elite has to see the wreckage that’s being strewn across society by the large-scale abandonment of faith. And that might be a reason for hope.
The numbers might not be looking good at the moment, but it’s the job of conservatives to try to turn that trend around. The election of President Donald Trump was a start in that process — and the developments it made possible, like the gradual return of sanity to the United States court system, will help.
But this is the long fight — the longest fight there is — and conservatives have to be willing to get into it. If they are in the fight — heart and soul — a setback or two in the numbers of the faithful are largely irrelevant in the long run. Conservatives have taken on long odds before and won — the news out of the White House every day proves it. They can do it again.
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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