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Biden’s DHS Just Revealed How It Plans to Use Your Tax Dollars to Interfere in U.S. Elections


BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | MARCH 01, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/01/bidens-dhs-just-revealed-how-it-plans-to-use-your-tax-dollars-to-interfere-in-u-s-elections/

DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas speaks at “Conversation on Homeland Security” panel

In its latest attempt to interfere in the electoral process, the Biden administration announced on Monday that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is planning to award millions of taxpayer dollars to local governments throughout the country for so-called “election security” purposes.

In an agency press release, the department revealed its plans to provide “more than $2 billion in funding for eight fiscal year 2023 preparedness grant programs,” which it claims are designed to “help state, local, tribal, and territorial officials prepare for, prevent, protect against, and respond to” so-called “acts of terrorism.” Under Joe Biden’s presidency, DHS has routinely identified targeting “domestic violent extremism” as its top priority. Of course, such proclamations are never in reference to violence carried out by leftist groups such as Antifa or Black Lives Matter, but rather right-of-center people and organizations that threaten the regime’s narratives and policy goals.

Included in the new DHS press release are six “national priority areas” for the 2023 grants, with one of the priorities being what the department calls “election security.” Under the directive, grant recipients such as the agency’s “Urban Area Security Initiative” are required to spend at least 3 percent of their total grant money on so-called “election security” efforts. As even the left-wing Bipartisan Policy Center admitted, federal funding for elections has never been conducted this way.

While the press release doesn’t specify what the agency means by “election security,”separate report detailing the specifics of the 2023 grant program lists several vague “core capabilities” of election security, including “cybersecurity,” “operational coordination,” and “long-term vulnerability reduction.” The document also lists numerous examples of potential projects local election offices could invest their grant money in, such as “online harassment and targeting prevention services” and “physical/site security measures — e.g., locks, shatter proof glass, alarms, access controls, etc.”

Furthermore, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas has indicated these grants will be directed toward primarily urban areas, where voters routinely favor Democrat candidates over Republican ones. Recall how private funding from partisan actors such as Mark Zuckerberg was injected into government election offices primarily in the blue, urban areas of swing states, creating what amounted to a Democrat get-out-the-vote effort. As Mayorkas said:

This year, we are therefore expanding the reach of our more than $2 billion in funding by adding four additional urban areas as grant recipients: Austin, Texas; Honolulu, Hawaii; Jacksonville, Florida; and Nashville, Tennessee. This is in addition to the thirty-six urban areas we continue to support, bringing the total number of funded urban areas to 40.

The new directive is hardly the first example of Biden or his administration attempting to insert themselves into state and local election administration. In March 2021, Biden signed an executive order mandating that all federal agencies, and thus the partisan bureaucrats who staff them, “expand citizens’ opportunities to register to vote and to obtain information about, and participate in, the electoral process.” If past is prologue, these efforts will be concentrated in Democrat hubs, but the plans have been obscured.

Efforts by government watchdog groups to obtain documents related to the order have been met with resistance by federal agencies, which worked relentlessly in the lead-up to the 2022 midterms to cover up how they intended to follow the president’s directive.

Further attempts to insert the federal government into the electoral process continued into Election Day, when the Department of Justice (DOJ) deployed attorneys from its Civil Rights Division to mostly blue and swing counties to monitor polling locations “for compliance with the federal voting rights laws.” Among the localities the agency surveilled were Democrat strongholds such as Fulton County, Georgia, and Wayne County, Michigan.

The DOJ’s sensationalized pledge to “prohibit [the] intimidation of voters” came at the same time legacy media outlets were publishing story after story warning that GOP poll watchers were plotting to disrupt local election precincts on Election Day. Like most other media-manufactured narratives, the tale never came true.


Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood

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California Democrat Arrested, Charged With Mail-In Ballot Fraud


BY: VICTORIA MARSHALL | FEBRUARY 20, 2023

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/20/california-democrat-arrested-charged-with-mail-in-ballot-fraud/

Shakir Khan

A California city council member was arrested for allegedly committing election fraud.

Lodi City Council member Shakir Khan, a Democrat, was arrested on Thursday for multiple election fraud charges, including allegedly stashing 41 mail-in ballots at his home, falsifying voter registration documents, and pressuring residents to vote for him. Investigators claim, based partially on body cam footage of police interviews, that Khan registered 23 people to vote at his home address and used his phone number to register 47 people to vote.

These charges stem from the 2020 election, when Khan was elected to the District 4 seat for the Lodi City Council.

Khan also faces charges in a separate criminal case with his brother that include illegal gambling, money laundering, tax evasion, and unemployment fraud. He’s due in court for another arraignment on that case on Feb. 21. Related to the election fraud charges, Khan was released from jail on Friday but must wear a tracking device and stay within California.

Local news reports it’s unclear whether Khan has resigned from the city council over the allegations. Still, the charges he faces related to election fraud are serious. That investigators allegedly found 41 sealed and completed mail-in ballots when searching Khan’s home proves how easy it is for nefarious actors to fix elections when unsupervised mail-in balloting is legal.

As previously reported, mail-in ballots pose a huge risk for election fraud. According to data from the federal Election Assistance Commission, 28.3 million mail-in ballots are still missing across the country from elections conducted between 2012 and 2018. Because there is no way to track these ballots, there is no way of knowing whether they were used fraudulently.

federal Election Assistance Commission, 28.3 million mail-in ballots are still missing“..

Third-party partisan organizers can also take advantage of such a lax system by harvesting ballots (coaxing voters to fill out ballots on behalf of Democratic candidates, taking their ballots, and dropping them off at election offices), and they do. In fact, Khan allegedly engaged in ballot harvesting by pressuring District 4 residents to vote for him and filling out their ballots.

Requiring all voters who are able to cast their ballots in person would remedy many of the security weaknesses of mail-in balloting. If that were law in Khan’s case, he wouldn’t have been allegedly able to fill out 41 fraudulent mail-in ballots using fake names and addresses and deliver them to be counted. There would have to be actual people showing up at the polls, identifying themselves, and filling out each of their ballots.

Despite the obvious liabilities of switching to all-mail elections, California just became the eighth state to approve all-mail voting for its elections moving forward. As a result of such a disastrous change, expect more cases like Khan’s to spring up.


Victoria Marshall is a staff writer at The Federalist. Her writing has been featured in the New York Post, National Review, and Townhall. She graduated from Hillsdale College in May 2021 with a major in politics and a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @vemrshll.

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Explosive Pennsylvania Testimony Explains How Leftist Money Infiltrated Election Offices In 2020


REPORTED BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | APRIL 08, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/08/explosive-pennsylvania-testimony-explains-how-leftist-money-infiltrated-election-offices-in-2020/

Governor Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania

This evidence should be enough for the Pennsylvania legislature to recognize there is a real problem when private money and private actors collaborate with election officials.

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The Democrat governor’s office in Pennsylvania colluded with left-wing activists to secure millions of dollars in private money to run get-out-the-vote efforts in blue counties in the swing state in 2020, new, explosive testimony revealed. The Pennsylvania legislature heard this testimony, backed up by email evidence, on Tuesday during the first public hearing on two new bills seeking to block private grants.

Tuesday’s public hearing began with statements by the respective primary sponsors of the bills that seek to ban dark money from elections, with Sen. Lisa Baker speaking in support of Senate Bill 982 and Rep. Eric Nelson encouraging passage of House Bill 2044. Pennsylvania investigative journalist Todd Shepherd then testified at length on the results of his extensive probe into the insertion of private funds into the 2020 election.

With a series of PowerPoint slides, Shepherd revealed to lawmakers that beginning in July 2020, consultants working for leftist organizations coordinated with local election officials and Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf’s office to lobby five blue counties to apply for these private grants. While the grants originated with the nominally non-partisan Center for Tech and Civic Life—an organization that Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s private foundation later infused with some $350 million in cash—emails reveal that a main consultant involved in targeting select counties, Marc Solomon, worked for the Center for Secure and Modern Elections, or the CSME.

“What’s important to know about CSME is that it is not a 501(c)3, but rather it is a fiscally sponsored project of the New Venture Fund,” Shepherd told the Pennsylvania lawmakers. In turn, “the New Venture Fund is managed by Arabella Advisors,” Shepherd continued, noting that “the ‘parent’ group of Arabella, New Venture Fund — they are part of what the Atlantic Magazine identified as ‘The Massive Progressive Dark-Money Group You’ve Never Heard Of.’” In fact, in January, The New York Times called out the New Venture Fund in its article headlined, “Democrats Decried Dark Money. Then they Won with it in 2020,” Shepherd added.

The CSME was not the only left-wing organization involved in lobbying blue counties to obtain grants. The emails also indicate that The Voter Project played a prominent role in this targeted cash giveaway: Following the 2020 election, the lead strategist in Pennsylvania for The Voter Project would brag that The Voter Project “was instrumental in signing up over 3.2 million people to vote by mail and leading the soft-side effort to win the swing state in 2020.”

How the Left Opened This Battlefront

A July 2020 email exposes the beginning of these efforts, with The Voter Project’s Gwen Camp introducing Delaware County’s Christine Reuther to CSME’s Solomon, saying they had “both been hearing about the other’s operations” and “want[ed] to get everyone together to talk about the potential for an official partnership.” According to the testimony, Camp copied Jessica Walls-Lavelle, a special advisor to the chief of staff on election reform in Wolf’s office, on that email, along with The Voters Project lead Pennsylvania strategist Kevin Mack.

In August, other emails show the governor’s staffer, Walls-Lavelle, reaching out to additional blue counties. Solomon passed the good news to his Delaware County contact, Reuther, telling her, “We’ve invited Chester, Montco, and Bucks to apply! They’re on it!”

Another email from August shows Camp, a consultant for The Voters Project, contacting a representative in Lackawanna County, telling the recipient that Camp is working with Jessica Walls-Lavelle, who is “with the Governor’s Office.”

Activists Push for Ballot Trafficking Dropboxes

All five counties lobbied by the left-wing activists, with an assist from Wolf’s office, ended up breaking heavily for Joe Biden, which likely explains why, when Solomon saw in August 2020 that Montgomery County had applied for a $1.2 million grant, he exclaimed, “the third largest county in the state, Philly suburbs!” Solomon then asked his colleagues whether they should turn this “into more of a plan.”

In an email response, Solomon’s cohort noted that the application “raised polling place consolidation as a possibility.” “We should ask what resources they need to make that not happen,” the email continued, suggesting: “Could we push them to use more than 5 drop boxes with more money? Maybe pointing out that Delaware County is using 10 times as many?”

While the right-to-know requests revealed the targeted lobbying of blue counties, there were no emails showing any outreach to core Republican counties until after September 1, 2020. That proves significant, according to Shepherd’s testimony, because when the summer-time targeting of Democratic strongholds took place, the Zuckbucks cash infusion to the CTCL had not yet been announced. Without that cash, there may never have been a chance for the red counties to obtain any funds. (Shepherd also questioned where the earlier CTCL funding came from—something apparently still unknown.)

But even after the new funds came in, the Democrat counties still received a substantially higher cut of the $22.5 million in grants spread across 23 counties, as Shepherd illustrated with powerful graphics, testifying, “Philadelphia had $8.83 cents that could be spent on each ‘Joe Citizen’ registered to vote there, while in Luzerne or Erie County, those counties had about 75 cents to spend on ‘Joe Citizen’ registered voter in those counties.”

Equal Protection Problems

Far from being an outlier, Pennsylvania’s experience matches the growing evidence seen in other states that the Zuckbucks and other leftist money funded state-run get-out-the-vote efforts for Biden. What makes Pennsylvania different, however, is that the emails connect the grant process to government actors and show the state’s collaboration with left-wing political activists to lobby Democrat-only counties. This evidence raises constitutional concerns under the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

The Supreme Court made clear in Bush v. Gore that “the right to vote is protected in more than the initial allocation of the franchise.” The Equal Protection clause requires both that the right to vote be granted on equal terms, but also that the state “not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person’s vote over that of any.” The emails highlighted in Tuesday’s hearing suggest that such “arbitrary and disparate treatment” occurred in 2020, with the governor’s office and select counties as willful participants.

Individuals representing the secretary of state’s office and Philadelphia County also testified at Tuesday’s hearing and attempted to downplay the disparity by stressing that large counties had different needs. Delaware County spent some $600,000 on “Bluecrest mail sorting equipment” one witness stressed, while an election official from Philadelphia county noted it expended huge sums of grant money to purchase modern machines to “open, sort, and tabulate” votes in that county.

But rather than support their “nothing to see here” response, Delaware and Philadelphia County’s purchase of the high-tech Bluecrest mail-sorting equipment highlights a second Equal Protection problem seen in the 2020 election.

As I reported shortly after the election, evidence shows that Philadelphia and other Democrat strongholds illegally engaged in pre-canvasing activities by inspecting mail-in ballots before election day. They did this by weighing the ballots on the Bluecrest sorting equipment to determine if the voter had enclosed the ballot in a “sleeve” as required by state law. Election workers in Philadelphia and other select counties then provided campaign workers the list of allegedly defective ballots—ones without a sleeve—allowing activists to contact the voters, telling them to cast a new vote.   

While the Bluecrest sorting equipment used in Philadelphia and Delaware County can detect which ballots are defective based on their thickness or weight, smaller counties without that sophisticated equipment could not conduct such pre-canvas inspections, which in any event violate the state’s election code.

Other Evidence of Vote Mismanagement

Referencing Delaware County’s expenditures proves ironic for a second reason: Whistleblower videos have exposed extensive evidence of systemic problems with the 2020 election in the large Pennsylvania county, including violations of election law and potentially corruption and fraud. Of course, mail-in voting itself is ripe for election fraud, and as the emails show Delaware County had 10 times the number of drop boxes planned over the even larger Montgomery County.

The whistleblower videos in Delaware County also captured election workers discussing the fact that some of the voting machines were missing V-drives, or the removable memory drive that records the vote tallies, and conversing on how to recreate the missing data, which a later video confirmed the county did. Yet, even with this video evidence, Delaware County council member Christine Reuther declared at a recent public meeting, “There were no missing drives. It’s been debunked. It’s been before the board of elections. It’s been addressed in court. There’s been testimony about it. There were no missing drives.”

Reuther is the same council member involved in the early lobbying for Delaware County to apply for private grants.

This evidence should be enough for the Pennsylvania legislature to recognize there is a real problem when private money and private actors collaborate with election officials, especially when they target select counties. But Tuesday’s hearing suggests Democrats don’t care, with one witness opposing the new legislation by framing the bills as part of “the big lie” that Trump won the election.

Without Democrats on board, the bill will be doomed even if it passes the legislature, as last year Wolf vetoed a similar ban on outside money. And we may now know why.


Margot Cleveland is The Federalist’s senior legal correspondent. She is also a contributor to National Review Online, the Washington Examiner, Aleteia, and Townhall.com, and has been published in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. Cleveland is a lawyer and a graduate of the Notre Dame Law School, where she earned the Hoynes Prize—the law school’s highest honor. She later served for nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk for a federal appellate judge on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. Cleveland is a former full-time university faculty member and now teaches as an adjunct from time to time. As a stay-at-home homeschooling mom of a young son with cystic fibrosis, Cleveland frequently writes on cultural issues related to parenting and special-needs children. Cleveland is on Twitter at @ProfMJCleveland. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

How No-Excuse Absentee Voting Allows Special Interests To Manipulate Voters


REPORTED BY: WILLIAM DOYLE | FEBRUARY 15, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/02/15/how-no-excuse-absentee-voting-allows-special-interests-to-manipulate-voters/

ballots

Signs outside every physical polling place forbid electioneering. Each state has some form of restriction on political activities near polling locations when voting is taking place. These restrictions are usually on the display of signs, handing out campaign literature, attempting to influence voters, or soliciting votes within a predetermined distance (typically 50 to 200 feet) of a polling place. A list of the specific electioneering prohibitions adopted by each state can be found here.

Opposition to electioneering is the main reason election integrity advocates oppose allowing political activists to provide food and water to voters waiting in line at polling places. What has been portrayed as a measure to starve and dehydrate suffering voters is really a commonsense prohibition against electioneering. Allowing such practices would allow anybody with a few water bottles or a bag of sandwiches an opportunity to harangue, harass, or otherwise intimidate voters who are waiting in line to cast their ballots.

But nobody has yet come to terms with a new type of electioneering that goes hand in hand with universal absentee voting. We call it “remote electioneering” and define it as an attempt to influence or solicit votes among absentee voters between the time they receive their absentee ballot and the time they submit it to their election office. Obviously, the opportunities for what in normal circumstances would qualify as illegal electioneering multiply considerably with absentee voting, since there is no way of knowing the extent to which partisan activists attempt to influence the behavior of absentee voters.

CTCL’s Goal Was to Influence Absentee Voters

But we have a glimpse of the attitudes of Democrat election activists toward electioneering with absentee ballots through Center for Technology and Civic Life (CTCL) documents, which outline the actions that the major recipients of their Covid-19 Response Grant Program would have to fulfill as conditions of keeping their grant money. By the admission of the activist election officials in Wisconsin who were funded by CTCL in 2020, absentee ballot electioneering was one of their major goals. Grant recipients were required to “Encourage and Increase Absentee Voting (By Mail and Early, In-Person),” mainly through providing “assistance” in their completion and the installation of ballot drop boxes. They were also to “dramatically expand strategic voter education & outreach efforts, particularly to historically disenfranchised residents” in states such as Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which in 2020 were flooded with no-excuse absentee ballots for the first time ever.

We know that absentee ballot electioneering occurred in areas in these states where CTCL had a substantial presence because it was part and parcel of CTCL’s requirement that absentee voting be promoted, assisted, and increased. Ongoing contact between activist election officials and millions of new absentee voters was not only encouraged in areas that received big CTCL money, it was required.

Wisconsin Illustrates Extravagant Plans

The Wisconsin Safe Voting Plan, which served as the basic template for CTCL’s nationwide efforts during the 2020 election, provides documentation of their extravagant plans to use key election offices to electioneer the absentee vote that they were so intent on promoting.

Election officials in Wisconsin who were “on the street” had enough contact with voters to bemoan the fact that “countless [individuals]” in their municipalities attempted to submit cell phone “selfies” as valid photo ID. Explaining to them that this was not a valid form of photo ID and instructing them on how to properly submit valid ID reportedly “took considerable staff time and resources.”

If election officials had such knowledge, they must have had extensive contact with such low-information absentee voters while they were in the process of completing and submitting their ballots. If this were at the polling booth, it would qualify as illegal electioneering because election officials had “extensive contact” with in-person voters who were completing and submitting their ballots.

A great deal of concern was expressed about “Voters who, understandably, were completely confused about the timeline and rules for voting in the midst of a pandemic and required considerable public outreach and individual hand-holding to ensure their right to vote.” Figuratively “holding someone’s hand” as they cast a vote — whether absentee or in person — seems to be the very definition of electioneering.

The city of Green Bay planned to spend $45,000 to employ bilingual “voter navigators” to help residents properly upload valid photo ID, complete their ballots, comply with certification requirements, and offer witness signatures.  But it would be illegal for poll workers to help voters complete their ballots when voting in person. Why should it not be illegal for partisan activists to help people complete their absentee ballots?

The city of Racine wished to create a corps of “vote ambassadors.” Racine officials said they would recruit, train, and employ such paid ambassadors to set up at the city’s community centers to assist voters with all aspects of absentee ballot requests. But how do we know that the diplomatic efforts of such “ambassadors” would not be exercised exclusively on behalf of their own partisan interests when “assisting” in the completion of absentee ballots?

Violating Voting Booth’s Sanctity

The sanctity of the voting booth used to be considered one of the sacred traditions of American democracy, as it protects the right of individuals to determine who will represent them in government. But the kind of Democracy™ that involves the indiscriminate mass mailing of no-excuse absentee ballots is a top-down endeavor, where most of the power, initiative, and agency is on the side of Democrat politicians and leftist election activists rather than voters.

Their plan is to influence, cajole, and incentivize the least civically engaged, least informed, most apathetic individuals within their jurisdictions to fill out absentee ballots in a way that validates the consolidation of Democratic Party power. Absentee ballot electioneering is the key to a more modern way of “stuffing the ballot box” in an era where activists have convinced a significant number of people that their voting rights have been fatally compromised if they are not permitted to cast a ballot in whatever way is most effortless for them.

The fact that opportunities for electioneering are so few at the polling place, and so plentiful during the time that elapses between the receipt of absentee ballots and their submission, suggests another reason those who wish to find new ways to interfere in legitimate elections are the most strident advocates of universal mail-in voting. It also provides yet another reason why people who believe in free and fair elections should spare no effort to resolutely oppose no-excuse absentee voting in 2022.


William Doyle, Ph.D., is principal researcher at Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute in Irving, Texas. He specializes in economic history and the private funding of American elections. Previously, he was associate professor and chair in the Department of Economics at the University of Dallas. He can be contacted at doyle@rodneyinstitute.org.

Pennsylvania Court Strikes Down Mail-In Voting Law As Unconstitutional


REPORTED BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JANUARY 31, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/31/pennsylvania-court-strikes-down-mail-in-voting-law-as-unconstitutional/

hands holding paper mail in ballot

On Friday, a Pennsylvania court declared the state’s statute authorizing no-excuse mail-in voting was unconstitutional. Within hours, Pennsylvania officials filed a notice of appeal with the state Supreme Court, putting on hold the lower court decision and thereby leaving in place the vote-by-mail option until the state’s high court rules.

With Pennsylvania Supreme Court justices elected on a partisan ticket and Democrats currently holding a 5-2 majority on the state’s high court, Democrats are predicting the no-excuse mail-in voting law will be upheld. That forecast seems accurate given the hyper-partisan approach to legal analysis seen since the 2020 election. It’s unfortunate because yesterday’s opinion in McLinko v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania reached the proper conclusion as a matter of constitutional analysis and controlling precedent.

The McLinko case consisted of two lawsuits consolidated by the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court. Both cases challenged the constitutionality of no-excuse mail-in voting. Doug McLinko, a member of the Bradford County Board of Elections, was the plaintiff in one case, and Timothy Bonner and 13 additional members of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives were the plaintiffs in the second case.

At issue in the consolidated case was Act 77, which, as the court explained in Friday’s opinion, “created the opportunity for all Pennsylvania electors to vote by mail without having to demonstrate a valid reason for absence from their polling place on Election Day.” The plaintiffs argued that provision violates Article VII, Section 1 of the Pennsylvania Constitution.

Article VII, Section 1 of the Pennsylvania Constitution provides (emphasis added):

Every citizen 21 years of age, possessing the following qualifications, shall be entitled to vote at all elections subject, however, to such laws requiring and regulating the registration of electors as the General Assembly may enact.

1. He or she shall have been a citizen of the United States at least one month.

2. He or she shall have resided in the State 90 days immediately preceding the election.

3. He or she shall have resided in the election district where he or she shall offer to vote at least 60 days immediately preceding the election, 10 except that if qualified to vote in an election district prior to removal of residence, he or she may, if a resident of Pennsylvania, vote in the election district from which he or she removed his or her residence within 60 days preceding the election.

The key language in Section 1, the plaintiffs argued, and the court held, was “shall offer to vote,” which the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had previously interpreted in Chase v. Miller, a case from 1862. At issue in Chase was whether 420 votes received from Pennsylvania soldiers fighting in the Civil War, who had cast their ballots by mail, were valid. While Pennsylvania’s legislature had authorized absentee ballots for military members, the state Supreme Court held the Military Absentee Act of 1839 violated the state’s constitution because “offer his vote” required in-person voting, explaining:

To ‘offer to vote’ by ballot, is to present oneself, with proper qualifications, at the time and place appointed, and to make manual delivery of the ballot to the officers appointed by law to receive it. The ballot cannot be sent by mail or express, nor can it be cast outside of all Pennsylvania election districts and certified into the county where the voter has his domicile.

We cannot be persuaded that the constitution ever contemplated any such mode of voting, and we have abundant reason for thinking that to permit it would break down all the safeguards of honest suffrage. The constitution meant, rather, that the voter, in propria persona, should offer his vote in an appropriate election district, in order that his neighbours might be at hand to establish his right to vote if it were challenged, or to challenge if it were doubtful.

In other words, “to offer his vote,” required a qualified elector to “present oneself. . . at the time and place appointed” and to make “manual delivery of the ballot.” The fuller discussion in Chase, however, provides a helpful reminder of the long-understood danger of absentee voting: “a break down” of “the safeguards of honest suffrage.”

Pennsylvania’s constitution was later amended to permit electors in military service to vote by absentee ballot. Then in 1923, the state legislature again attempted to expand absentee voting to allow non-military citizens, “who by reason of his duties, business, or occupation [are] unavoidably absent from his lawfully designated election district, and outside of the county of which he is an elector,” to cast an absentee ballot in the presence of an election official.

Another election dispute, however, resulted in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in 1924 In re Contested Election of Fifth Ward of Lancaster City, declaring the 1923 Absentee Voting Act unconstitutional. The Lancaster decision again concluded that the “offer to vote” language of the Pennsylvania state constitution requires in-person voting. Because at that time the constitution only authorized absentee voting for individuals absent by reason of active military service, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court held the 1923 Absentee Voting Act unconstitutional.

“However laudable the purpose of the [1923 Absentee Voting Act], it cannot be sustained,” the Pennsylvania Supreme Court explained, adding: “If it is deemed necessary that such legislation be placed upon our statute books, then an amendment to the Constitution must be adopted permitting this to be done.”

In Friday’s decision in McLinko v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the three-judge majority opinion found Chase and Lancaster City controlling and struck down Act 77’s authorization of no-cause mail-in voting. In holding Act 77 unconstitutional, the McLinko court rejected the acting secretary of state’s argument that Article VII, Section 4 of the Pennsylvania Constitution granted the state legislature authority to allow mail-in voting for any reason. That constitutional provision provides: “All elections by the citizens shall be by ballot or by such other method as may be prescribed by law: Provided, That secrecy in voting be preserved.”

The court rejected Pennsylvania’s argument, noting that when Lancaster City was decided, the Pennsylvania high court had quoted the entire text of Article VII, Section 4, and yet held that the “offer to vote” language required in-person voting unless the constitution expressly authorized absentee voting. Friday’s decision explained that Section 4 merely authorized the state to allow mechanical voting, as opposed to voting by ballot. (Two judges dissented from the McLinko decision, reasoning that mail-in voting is not a subset of absentee voting but a new method of voting the legislature may be approved under Section 4.)

Pennsylvania’s acting secretary of state’s argument that Section 4 of the state constitution authorizes the legislature to permit no-fault mail-in voting defies logic. As the McLinko court explained, if Section 4 gave the legislature that power, then there was no need for the state’s constitution to be amended in 1997, to add as a permissible basis for absentee voting, “observance of a religious holiday or Election Day duties.”

While concluding it was bound by Chase and Lancaster City, the majority in Friday’s decision in McLinko added that “no-excuse mail-in voting makes the exercise of the franchise more convenient” and that, “if presented to the people, a constitutional amendment to end the Article VII, Section 1 requirement of in-person voting is likely to be adopted.” “But a constitutional amendment must be presented to the people and adopted into our fundamental law,” the court in McLinko concluded, “before legislation authorizing no-excuse mail-in voting can ‘be placed upon our statute books.’”

The majority’s detailed analysis in McLinko was correct, both as a matter of constitutional interpretation and precedent. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, however, will not be bound by its decisions in Chase and Lancaster City, even though the principal of stare decisis should caution the justices against overturning that precedent.

That prudential principle is especially relevant here, where the “offer to vote” language “has been part of the Pennsylvania Constitution since 1838 and has been consistently understood, since at least 1862, to require the elector to appear in person, at a ‘proper polling place’ and on Election Day to cast his vote.”

A decision by the Democratic-controlled Pennsylvania Supreme Court abiding by that precedent and reminding its citizens that the constitution controls notwithstanding the passions of the day would also go a long way toward healing a divided populace.

Further, striking Act 77 now, when no votes have been cast and no citizens would be disenfranchised, would do no harm to Pennsylvanians. That was the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s justification in Kelly v. Commonwealth, for refusing to consider the constitutionality of Act 77 as part of a challenge to the results of the November of 2020 based on the equitable doctrine of “laches.”

“At the time this action was filed on November 21, 2020, millions of Pennsylvania voters had already expressed their will in both the June 2020 Primary Election and the November 2020 General Election,” the state Supreme Court explained in Kelly v. Commonwealth and striking the state statute at that point, “would result in the disenfranchisement of millions of Pennsylvania voter.”

There is no such danger, now, however. So, will the constitution control or will the partisan interests of the Democratic-majority of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court supplant the rule of law? Sadly, that latter danger is everpresent.


Mollie Hemingway Op-ed: GOP’s Old Guard Out of Touch with Their Voters on Election Integrity


Commentary BY: MOLLIE HEMINGWAY | JANUARY 13, 2022

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/13/gops-old-guard-out-of-touch-with-their-voters-on-election-integrity/

President Trump and Mitch McConnell

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden gave a speech asserting that people who oppose his plan for a federal takeover of elections are domestic enemies and racists.

“Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?” Biden asked in his speech falsely claiming that the “right to vote” was in doubt throughout the country.

Biden is lobbying to end the Senate’s legislative filibuster in order to push through his plan for a radical takeover of elections. The election bill would unconstitutionally empower the federal government to control state election procedures, and help make permanent the decreased election safeguards that caused so many problems throughout the country in 2020.

The response of the old guard of the Republican Party this week has been to wholeheartedly endorse the media narrative that the 2020 election had no significant problems, while also opposing Biden’s plan to run elections. It’s a politically insane approach.

The 2020 election was riddled with problems. Voters know this. Republican voters know this very well. Time Magazine described what happened with the election 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.” They added that it was a “revolution in how people vote.”

The rigging of the election included changes to hundreds of laws and processes in the months prior to election day, flooding the system with tens of millions of mail-in ballots even as scrutiny of those ballots was decreased. Mark Zuckerberg spent $419 million to finance the private takeover of government election offices — primarily focused on the blue areas of swing states — to enable Democrats to run their Get Out The Vote operations from government offices. The funding was significant enough to affect the outcome of races, independent analysts have concluded. And that’s to say nothing of Big Tech’s election meddling in the form of censorship and algorithmic persuasion nor of corporate media’s move into straight-up propaganda.

On Sunday, George Stephanopoulos — formerly President Bill Clinton’s press secretary — asked in his usual biased way for Republican Sen. Mike Rounds to opine against election integrity:

STEPHANOPOULOS: You voted to certify the election last year. You condemned the protest as an insurrection. What do you say to all those Republicans, all those veterans who believe the election was stolen, who have bought the falsehoods coming from former President Trump?

Even the dumbest Republican should have been able to answer this question without accepting the premise of the biased Democrat reporter. Knowing that the filibuster and election integrity are on the line, even a lowly, distracted Republican precinct person should have been able to respond by talking about fighting the federal takeover of elections, fighting the private takeover of government election offices, fighting the unconstitutional changes of voting laws, and fighting the second-class treatment of Republican voters by the media and Big Tech.

Instead, Rounds made bizarre claims about looking at “accusations” in “multiple states,” saying that while there were “some irregularities,” none were significant. Then he claimed — ludicrously — “The election was fair, as fair as we have seen.”

I mean, heck, if the election was as fair as any in history, why not join with Democrats in their push for a federal takeover of elections to make permanent the “revolution in how people vote”? But also, why say something that is not true?

The 2020 election was not the fairest in history, not by a long shot. It was riddled with problems, whether it’s the Zuckerberg funding or the coordinated Democrat campaign to weaken election security. The man who ran that coordinated effort was Marc Elias, the same man who ran the 2016 Russia collusion hoax. His partner was recently indicted by John Durham for just some of his lies associated with that hoax that did so much damage to the country and which itself was an attack on the 2020 election’s fairness.

As soon as Rounds showed himself subservient to Stephanopoulos, the Democrat media went wild. They amplified his comments, knowing how helpful they were to their cause of decreased election security and opposition to Republican victories.

One corrupt media outlet that excitedly amplified Rounds’ comments and used them to advance their political agenda was CNN. Russia hoax co-conspirator Manu Raju, known for pestering Republicans to get them to support Democrat narratives, wrote an article gleefully headlined “Top Republicans stand up for Rounds after Trump’s attack: He ‘told the truth’.” Some lowlights:

  • “I think Sen. Rounds told the truth about what happened in the 2020 election,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told CNN on Tuesday. “And I agree with him.”
  • Sen. Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota Republican who contended Democrats took advantage of more voting rules eased during the pandemic. “I’ve moved on a long time ago, and most members of Congress have, including Mike.”
  • Other Republicans said it was time to focus on something other than 2020. “I say to my colleague, welcome to the club,” Sen. John Thune, the senior South Dakota Republican, said of the Trump attack on Rounds — something he has endured himself in the past. “I don’t think re-litigating or rehashing the past is a winning strategy. If we want to be a majority in 2023, we’ve got to get out and articulate what we’re going to do with respect to the future the American people are going to live and the things they’re going to care about when it comes to economic issues, national security issues.”

It is absolutely charming that Cramer has the luxury of “moving on” from the important election integrity battle, but Biden sure hasn’t moved on. Pelosi hasn’t moved on. Chuck Schumer hasn’t moved on. The entire corporate media hasn’t moved on. Why has Cramer moved on?

North Dakota is a state that voted for Trump in 2020 by 33 points. Its senator should probably be able to use some of his political capital to tackle the top issue of the week for American voters.

Thune says the politically wise thing to do is to not relitigate the past but work on issues people are going to “care about.” Someone should tell him that one of the top issues Republican voters care about is … election integrity.

The Washington Post this month reported that at least 69 percent of Republicans are seriously concerned about the 2020 election. Perhaps the worst thing a party could do if it cared about serious political power would be to signal that the issue means so little to them. This pathetic cowardice and incompetent weakness are exactly what Republican voters are sick to death of.

In previous months, Biden has falsely claimed that the country is experiencing “Jim Crow” resistance to the right to vote. He asked corporations to boycott the state of Georgia after Georgia’s legislature passed a bill to mildly improve its election security. Some of them bowed to the pressure. Major League Baseball, for instance, pulled its All-Star Game from Atlanta in response to Biden’s request, causing untold economic damage to the Peach State.

All of this is clearly an effort to keep Republicans from stopping Democrats’ 2020-style assault on election security. It works precisely because too many Republicans are too scared to fight. What if instead of Stephanopoulos easily pressuring Rounds into spouting Democrat talking points, Rounds had instead fought hard against these attacks on election security? What if he knew the facts about what actually happened enough to speak knowledgeably about what Republican voters want their leaders to advocate for?

What if establishment Republican politicians put away literally any thoughts about Trump — much less their anger or petulance about him — for a minute to think about the importance of election integrity and how to obtain it?

What if Republicans stopped running interference for what Democrats did in 2020 at the same moment that Dems are trying to take over the entire country’s election system? This isn’t merely academic. Old-guard Republican cowardice and fecklessness could lead to Pelosi becoming America’s election czar.

In general, Republican voters deserve a far better class of politician than what the old guard of their party has been forcing on them.


Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is a senior editor at The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College. A Fox News contributor, she is a regular member of the Fox News All-Stars panel on “Special Report with Bret Baier.” Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, CNN, National Review, GetReligion, Ricochet, Christianity Today, Federal Times, Radio & Records, and many other publications. Mollie was a 2004 recipient of a Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship at The Fund for American Studies and a 2014 Lincoln Fellow of the Claremont Institute. She is the co-author of Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court. She is the author of “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.” Reach her at mzhemingway@thefederalist.com

Democrats Are Using The Same 2020 Election Shenanigans To Overtake Virginia This Year


Reported By Hayden Ludwig | NOVEMBER 1, 2021

Read more at https://thefederalist.com/2021/11/01/democrats-are-using-the-same-2020-election-shenanigans-to-overtake-virginia-this-year/

Virginia’s hotly contested gubernatorial race is just days away, and with Republican Glenn Youngkin and former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe tied in the polls, the professional left isn’t leaving anything to chance. A McAuliffe defeat is largely considered a bellwether for congressional Democrats in the 2022 midterms.

So how do Democrats plan to ensure a McAuliffe win and a subsequent retention of power in the state and U.S. Senate? By using the same tactic they used in the 2020 national contest: profligate mail-in voting and fake grassroots get-out-the-vote efforts funding by philanthropies and wealthy leftists, a strategy revealed through Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s gift to the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL).

And it’s a smart strategy. Joe Biden voters were twice as likely as Donald Trump voters to vote by mail in 2020, for example; and we know the effect of Zuckerberg’s millions on the 2020 election. The Capital Research Center specializes in exposing the activists behind these efforts. Here’s what we’ve discovered about the funding and activists behind them.

Getting Out the Vote for Democrats

Vote Forward is one of the get-out-the-vote (GOTV) groups swamping Virginians with a letter practically begging them to vote early. Here’s my copy:

Vote Forward is ostensibly nonpartisan—until you look at its original website from 2018, which reads “Flip the House Blue: Send letters to unlikely voters.” Elsewhere, the group admits it was founded to send “get-out-the-vote” mailers to “traditionally underrepresented communities,” code for Democrat-leaning constituencies.

The New York Times praised Vote Forward’s goal of boosting Democrat turnout just one week before the 2020 election. An old FAQ states that many of its campaigns “typically target low-propensity voters who we believe are likely to vote for Democrats when they do cast a ballot.”

In 2020, that target was 10 million voters. To make that happen, Vote Forward sued the U.S. Postal Service, accusing Postmaster General Louis DeJoy—a Trump nominee—of “undermin[ing] USPS’s ability to ensure the on-time delivery of mail ballots” in the 2020 election. The details of their settlement remain unclear, but USPS agreed to deliver mail-in ballots in time for Georgia’s January special election, the result of which ultimately handed Democrats control of the U.S. Senate.

Like many organizations that present themselves as more interested in voting than election outcomes, Vote Forward is part of the Left’s Voting Machine: A massive web of interconnected GOTV nonprofits commanding tens of millions of dollars, mostly gifted by ultra-wealthy institutions like the Ford, Gates, and Rockefeller Foundations.

We’ve traced more than $600,000 flowing to Vote Forward from the Hopewell Fund, part of a $731 million “dark money” network run by the consultancy Arabella Advisors in Washington, DC. After studying this network for years, it’s become clear to us that wherever Arabella is involved, one is sure to find the left’s top operatives as well.

For example, Vote Forward’s board includes Ezra Reese, a partner at Perkins Coie and its Marc Elias-led spin-off (the Elias Law Group) “focused on electing Democrats, supporting voting rights, and helping progressives make change”—a fact you won’t find advertised on the “nonpartisan” group’s website. Perkins Coie is the left’s law firm of choice. Elias was general counsel to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and a partisan operative whose past dealings include George Soros-funded efforts to abolish voter ID laws.

A Flood of Mail-In Ballots

In September, I reported on a new wave of 2 million applications for Virginians to register for absentee ballots in 2021. These applications weren’t sent out by state or local elections officials, but by politically active nonprofits: the Voter Participation Center and Center for Voter Information (collectively “the center”). An internal memo details the spots they planned to cover most aggressively, many of which parallel Biden’s performance in 2020.

The center explicitly targeted the “New American Majority,” another code for likely Democratic voters that they define as “young people, people of color and unmarried women.” That bloc contains 73 percent of all unregistered voters nationwide, which is why the left-wing strategists at the Democracy Alliance consider their turnout “central to progressive long-term success.”

The IRS requires all nonprofits be officially nonpartisan in order to be tax exempt. In the center’s case, nonpartisanship comes in the shape of a fig leaf—as liberal journalist Sasha Issenberg explains in his 2012 book, The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns: “Even though the group was officially nonpartisan, for tax purposes, there was no secret that the goal of all its efforts was to generate new votes for Democrats” (emphasis added).

The center sent out 15 million vote-by-mail applications in 2020 and registered 4.6 million new voters. Time credits the center’s partisan registration efforts as central to the “shadow campaign that saved the 2020 election” for Biden. No surprise that the center is heavily funded by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), AFL-CIOSierra ClubLeague of Conservation Voters, and Tides Foundation.

Will Zuck Bucks Continue?

We were among the first to report in-depth on how billionaire Zuckerberg and the little-known Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) spent $350 million to effectively privatize the 2020 election in battleground states, helping turnout for Biden in the name of COVID-19 “relief.”

Overnight, this little nonprofit’s revenues grew by more than 12,000 percent from $2.8 million thanks to Zuckerberg’s cash injection—fueling its “nonpartisan,” “charitable” façade to elections officials and helping Democrat turnout in precisely the spots Biden needed to win the presidency.

Across nine states, our data shows that CTCL’s grants consistently ignored Trump counties in favor of big, Democratic-leaning spots like Philadelphia, Maricopa County, and Houston—all essential to Biden’s victory. In Georgia, for instance, Biden counties were two-and-a-half times more likely to receive CTCL funding than Trump counties.

Virginia received close to $4 million in Zuck Bucks, more than one-third of which went to populous Fairfax County to support in-person early votingand “vote by mail.” Fairfax County was Biden’s biggest vote-haul in the state and is the linchpin to McAuliffe’s strategy.

Nearly $970,000 paid for “temporary staffing support” to bolster Fairfax County’s elections agency. That may sound innocuous, but as CTCL expert William Doyle recently wrote at this site, that funding “supported the infiltration of election offices by paid Democratic Party activists.”

[CTCL] funded self-described ‘vote navigators’ in Wisconsin to ‘assist voters, potentially at their front doors, to answer questions, assist in ballot curing … and witness absentee ballot signatures,’ and a temporary staffing agency affiliated with Stacey Abrams called ‘Happy Faces’ counting the votes amidst the election night chaos in Fulton County, Georgia.

Fairfax County applied for an extension to its CTCL grant in January, but ultimately returned its remaining $187,709 in April, spokesman Brian Worthy told me. To his knowledge, the county has not applied for another grant for the 2021 election. That’s a good start, but to save the integrity of our elections, Zuck Bucks need to be banned. No exceptions.

There’s no faster way to destroy what remaining trust Americans have in their elections than by giving them to the highest bidder. Private funding of elections would take us back to the worst of the 19th century robber barons, when rich political machines won elections by buying public officials and intimidating voters. It also presents opportunities for foreign interests to manipulate our politics and undermine American sovereignty.

It’s unknown how much CTCL money remains in Virginia or if the group has continued to make grants here. Neighboring Fairfax City reports $14,175 in CTCL funds leftover for the 2021 election.

CTCL has been surprisingly mum about the ongoing election considering how loudly it advertised open-ended grants to Georgia counties in January. It’s possible that the dozens of exposés, hundreds of critical news articles, flurry of state Zuck Buck bans, and an inquiry from furious congressional Republicans silenced the leftists running CTCL.

Or maybe not. A recent CTCL statement calls lawsuits against its grants program “frivolous” and its funding “equitable,” particularly in small counties with small elections budgets.

Today’s left has cynically embraced Zuck Bucks out of short-term thinking, believing like NPR that “private money from Facebook’s CEO saved the 2020 election.” That’s a losing hand. Americans can see that the same leftists who’ve now embraced plutocracy were just yesterday crying eat the rich and abolish billionaires.” Close to a dozen states have already banned Zuck Bucks and grassroots groups are leading a national movement to audit the 2020 election and save the country.

Leftists believed the country would overlook their desperate indiscretions, claiming—as CTCL does—that Zuckerberg’s unprecedented spending spree somehow made 2020 “the most secure election in U.S. history.” We’ll know even more in December, when CTCL releases its IRS Form 990 filing to the public. If coming revelations are anything like observers expect, that claim will age about as well as milk.

Hayden Ludwig is an investigative researcher for the Capital Research Center in Washington, DC.

15 Insane Things In Democrats’ H.R. 1 Bill To Corrupt Elections Forever


On Wednesday, House Democrats passed an 800-page bill that would mandate insecure voting processes and subject voting tallies to partisan manipulation. It’s a slap in the face to the half of Americans, including many Democrats, who believe the 2020 election was riddled with fraud and errors, largely due to the rapid expansion of mail-in balloting and other suspensions of state election laws.

“It is difficult to imagine a legislative proposal more threatening to election integrity and voter confidence,” write 20 Republican attorneys general in a Thursday letter about the ridiculously named For The People Act of 2021, or H.R. 1. Democrats have made the bill their top priority this Congress to permanently cement their current unified control of the federal government.

The bill “would (among other things) implement nationwide the worst changes in election rules that occurred during the 2020 election; go even further in eroding and eliminating basic security protocols that states have in place; and interfere with the ability of states and their citizens to determine the qualifications and eligibility of voters, ensure the accuracy of voter registration rolls, secure the fairness and integrity of elections, and participate and speak freely in the political process,” says a Heritage Foundation analysis.

H.R. 1 broadcasts Democrats’ goals for unending electoral dominance through openly rigged voting processes. It would engineer an unconstitutional federal takeover of state elections for national office. No surprise, then, that Joe Biden says he will sign this legislation if it reaches his desk.

Here are just some of the unconstitutional, absurd, nakedly partisan, and crime-assisting provisions in this bill that 220 House Democrats voted for and every House Republican voted against.

1. Openly Breaks the Constitution

As the attorneys general note, “Under both the Elections Clause of Article I of the Constitution and the Electors Clause of Article II, States have principal—and with presidential elections, exclusive—responsibility to safeguard the manner of holding elections.” This bill would instead unconstitutionally give Congress primacy over state elections, in numerous ways.

Yet the Constitution expressly affords the states, not Congress, the power to determine how presidential electors are selected. Mandating mail-in voting, requiring states to accept late ballots, overriding state voter ID laws, and mandating that states conduct redistricting through unelected commissions all violate states’ constitutional authority in conducting elections.

2. Set Up Star Chambers to Intimidate Judges

The bill would establish a “Commission to Protect Democratic Institutions” that would have the power to force judges to testify before a panel of unelected federal bureaucrats. According to the bill on page 389, the commission, or any member or subcommittee of the commission, may “hold hearings and sit and act at such times and places, take such testimony, receive such evidence, and administer such oaths as the Commission considers advisable.”

This commission, the Heritage analysis finds, “would be given the authority to compel judges to testify and justify their legal decisions, threatening their independent judgment and subjecting them to political pressure and harassment.”

3. Mandate Mail-in Ballots, 10-Day Delay in Results

Rather than reject the 2020 electoral chaos caused by bureaucrats suspending state election laws to further unreliable mail-in voting and suspend legal deadlines for mailed ballots, H.R. 1 would mandate this electoral chaos forever.

The bill mandates universal mail-in balloting and requires states to wait ten days after election day for any outstanding tranches of ballots to be suddenly discovered in Democrat-run strongholds — oops, I mean, allow all ballots to arrive. The Heritage report notes that “no-fault absentee ballots” “are the tool of choice for vote thieves.”

Besides a recipe for chaos and partisan election manipulation, this is unconstitutional. The attorneys general note that “The exclusivity of state power to ‘define the method’ of choosing presidential electors means that Congress may not force states to permit presidential voting by mail or curbside voting.”

4. Eliminate Voter ID Election Security

“Perhaps most egregious is the Act’s limitations on voter ID laws,” write the attorneys general. “Fairly considered, requiring government-issued photo identification at the polls represents nothing more than a best practice for election administration.”

After a brief overview of this history of bipartisan support for voter ID laws, the letter continues: “Voter ID laws remain popular, with thirty-five states requiring some form of documentary personal identification at the polls. Yet the Act would dismantle meaningful voter ID laws by allowing a statement, as a substitute for prior-issued, document-backed identification, to ‘attest[] to the individual’s identity and . . . that the individual is eligible to vote in the election.’ This does little to ensure that voters are who they say they are. Worse, it vitiates the capacity of voter ID requirements to protect against improper interference with voting rights.”

5. Register Millions Of Criminally Present Foreign Citizens to Vote

By forcing states to automatically and duplicatively register all people to vote through government outposts such as motor vehicles, state universities, and welfare agencies, H.R. 1 would register millions of illegal migrants to vote in the United States. According to their own reports on surveys, millions of illegally present foreign citizens vote in the United States, and overwhelmingly for Democrats. Democrats including President Barack Obama have worked to prevent states from enforcing laws against foreign citizens voting in U.S. elections.

This bill would essentially create de facto voting rights for the tens of millions of non-citizens inside the United States. Under this bill, states must automatically register every adult and are legally prohibited from inspecting or checking whether anyone who votes is legally eligible to do so.

The bill also bans courts from enforcing any legal penalties on any foreign citizens who illegally vote in the United States (Section 1015). This bill’s provisions would thus allow anyone inside the United States to vote in its elections with no consequences, even if they are not citizens and have demonstrated contempt for our nation by breaking our laws to take advantage of our freedoms (for as long as they last).

6. Explode Opportunities for Election Cheating

“Adding to the threat of increased voter fraud, the Act would mandate nationwide automatic voter registration and Election Day voter registration,” write the attorneys general. “Such systems would provide too many opportunities for non-citizens and others ineligible to vote to register and cast fraudulent ballots before officials can take preventive action.”

Allowing people to register the same day they vote in 2020 contributed to suspiciously high — near or even above 100 percent — percentages of registered voters reportedly casting ballots in many precincts, often in key locations.

The bill would also “Prevent election officials from checking the eligibility and qualifications of voters and removing ineligible voters,” notes the Heritage analysis. It would require every ballot to be considered legitimate from the get-go, effectively banning provisional ballots.

Those are currently used, for example, when a voter shows up at the polls and records say he already voted or he is registered using incorrect information such as the wrong address. Under this bill, he could still vote without the error being cleared up, and with a regular, not provisional, ballot.

The bill would also eliminate any requirements that a witness sign an absentee ballot, and send absentee ballots for life to everyone who has ever used one. It would also effectively ban matching signatures on absentee ballots to government records of the voter’s signature, such as from a driver’s license record (Section 307).

Therefore, the bill eliminates almost every safeguard meant to protect against fraud and give voters confidence in election results.

7. Prevent Cleaning Up Voter Rolls

If the bill passes into law, “States could not use a combination of voter inactivity and unresponsiveness to maintain voter lists but may instead remove illegitimate voter registrations only where officials obtain some other unspecified ‘objective and reliable evidence that the registrant is ineligible to vote,’” write the 20 state attorneys general. “This attack on reliable methods that states have been using to maintain voters lists without specifying any reasonable permissible alternatives belies any actual interest in preventing voter fraud. The objective, rather, seems to be to prevent meaningful voter list maintenance altogether.”

Moreover, the bill threatens anyone, such as a local election official or poll watcher, who might undertake any questioning of any voter or attempts to establish his or her eligibility to vote. Section 1071 says: “It shall be unlawful for any person, whether acting under color of law or otherwise, to corruptly hinder, interfere with, or prevent another person from registering to vote or to corruptly hinder, interfere with, or prevent another person from aiding another person in registering to vote.” The maximum penalty for this would be up to five years in prison.

8. Unleash Mobs on Political Donors

If passed, the bill would require that political speakers and nonprofit organizations publish the identities of their donors. This would create blacklists for leftist activists to target to prevent their political opponents from the opportunity to speak in public, note the attorneys general.

In addition, the bill would require massive compliance costs for “candidates, citizens, civic groups, unions, corporations, and nonprofit organizations,” says the Heritage Foundation. “Many of these provisions violate the First Amendment, protect incumbents, and reduce the accountability of politicians to the public; its onerous disclosure requirements for nonprofit organizations would subject their members and donors to intimidation and harassment.”

Even the leftist American Civil Liberties Union expressed concern about these provisions in a letter to top House Democrats. These sections of H.R. 1 “could harm political advocacy and expose non-profit donors to harassment and threats of violence should their support for organizations be subject to forced disclosure,” the ACLU wrote.

9. Gerrymander Districts to Favor Democrats

The bill would establish a commission of unelected national bureaucrats to decide where the political boundaries for various districts will be, rather than state elected officials.

“At least when legislatures draw boundary lines voters may punish egregious behavior at the next election; not so with government-by-commission, which trades accountability for mythical expertise and disinterest,” complain the Republican attorneys general about this provision. “The republican form of government inherently rejects the idea that elites have some unique capacity to discern and implement the best policies. The American tradition instead embraces political accountability as the best way to advance the public interest. With respect to political redistricting, no ideal, perfectly balanced congressional boundaries exist, so we should let the people decide, through their elected officials, where to place them.”

10. Make Vote Hacking Easier

The bill’s mass forced voter registration of every person with a record in various state databases comprises “a recipe for massive voter registration fraud by hackers and cyber criminals,” the Heritage analysis finds. Government databases are notorious for breaches of private information by cybercriminals and foreign countries. This would also create numerous duplicate voter registrations that the bill bans state and local officials from cleaning up, potentially assisting individuals in voting multiple times.

11. Let Former Felons Vote Before They’ve Completed Their Sentences

The Heritage analysis says this bill would also “Require states to restore the ability of felons to vote the moment they are out of prison regardless of uncompleted parole, probation, or restitution requirements. Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment gives states the constitutional authority to decide when felons who committed crimes against their fellow citizens may vote again. Congress cannot override a constitutional amendment with a statute.”

12. Help 16- and 17-Year-Olds Vote Illegally

H.R. 1 “would also require states to allow 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds to register; when combined with a ban on voter ID and restrictions on the ability to challenge the eligibility of a voter, this would effectively ensure that underage individuals could vote with impunity,” says the Heritage analysis.

In Section 1091, the bill establishes a federal pilot program in public schools to register 12th graders to vote. This is a blatant attempt to push elections Democrat, as polls have shown for decades the younger people are, the more likely they are to vote Democrat.

13. Bans Keeping the Records Necessary for an Election Audit or Recount

In Section 1502, the bill would ban state and local officials from preserving the record of paper ballots that make trustworthy post-election recounts and audits possible. It states: ‘‘The voting system shall not preserve the voter-verified paper ballots in any manner that makes it possible, at any time after the ballot has been cast, to associate a voter with the record of the voter’s vote without the voter’s consent.”

14. Mandates Ballot Drop Boxes

In Section 1907, H.R. 1 would mandate that, beginning 45 days before an election, “In each county in the State, each State shall provide in-person, secured, and clearly labeled drop boxes at which individuals may, at any time during the period described in subsection (b), drop off voted absentee ballots in an election for Federal office.” This allows for the anonymous submission of absentee ballots outside of mail.

It is also a recipe for massive fraud, given that in 2020, when mail-in balloting was massively expanded, more than 26 million ballots were requested and never returned. Since this bill also requires all votes to be presumed valid, anyone could gather up any number of ballots that this law also requires to be mailed to all people listed in every government database, fill them out, and dump them in.

Tens of millions would be available for ventures like these. This bill would also legalize “ballot harvesting,” or authorizing one individual to collect such ballots and turn them in by the barrel.

Even if not one partisan in the entire United States is unscrupulous enough to take advantage of this big cheating opportunity, the mere existence of this possibility would seriously erode public confidence in elections. That should be reason enough for any honest person to oppose it.

15. Giving U.S. Territories Extra Democrat Seats in Congress and the Electoral College

H.R. 1 would form a commission to consider granting five U.S. territories voting rights, but not statehood. This is an open attempt to rig Congress and the presidency in favor of Democrats.

If these territories are granted House, Senate, and Electoral College seats, they could add as many as 10 senators and 18 new Electoral College votes, all almost assuredly filled with Democrats. Notice that at the current construction of the Senate, when a 60-vote majority is needed to pass most items of importance, this plan would give Democrats that insurmountable 60-vote majority to do whatever they want with no obstacles.

Since these remote islands are all welfare states that have chosen to remain dependent on U.S. taxpayer largess rather than developing self-government, they would be poor partners for the existing states, to say the least. Like usual, Democrats don’t even want to challenge them to self-governance. They just want to use them as dependents to expand their political power.

There’s a lot more in this bill, such as that its only limits on voting appear to be regarding absentee ballots for U.S. soldiers. This massive list is not a comprehensive examination.

It should suffice, however, to reveal how insane today’s Democrat Party is that every single House Democrat, save one, voted for this bill. This is a voting bill that only totalitarians seeking a uniparty nation could love.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Sign up here to get early access to her next book, “How To Control The Internet So It Doesn’t Control You.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” A Hillsdale College honors graduate, @JoyPullmann is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.

Today’s Three Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco


A.F. Branco Cartoon – Political Football

Many folks are accusing Dr. Fauci of continuously moving the science goalpost.

Fauci Moving the GoalpostPolitical cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Fatal Attraction

Many feel Biden, Harris and the Democrats have a lot to do with the failure with 2020 election security.

Election SecurityPolitical cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Trust But Don’t Verify

Democrats fighting against only legal votes being counted in the 2020 election.

Illegal VotesPolitical cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2020.
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A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.

How Pennsylvania Democrats Deliberately Stoked 2020 Election Chaos


Reported By Jennifer Stefano  9, 2020

I can’t tell you how many texts I’ve received this week from friends and acquaintances across the country asking—usually in all-caps and peppered with profanity—what is going on in Pennsylvania? As a native Philadelphian, and from my current vantage in politically coveted Bucks County, I can see why Americans are demanding answers.

Ballots can be counted up to three days after Election Day? Mailed ballots with no postmark still qualify? Unsupervised drop boxes scattered across cities are entrusted to secure tens of thousands of votes?

Sadly, it’s all true. None of these practices inspires confidence that the standard of “one person, one vote” is being upheld. Nor were these practices valid in any prior general election in Pennsylvania.

Scratching your head as to why we chose the most consequential election in our lifetimes to run an experiment? Here’s what I’ve told my friends: the experiment was a wild success—once you understand that the chaos we’re witnessing was the plan all along, carefully orchestrated by Pennsylvania Democrats, including the governor, party activists, and the state Supreme Court. Here’s how it happened.

In Pennsylvania, Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf used the COVID-19 pandemic as cover for hurrying through new voting rules that bypassed reasonable deadlines or restrictions. The result? Many voters now have deep suspicion about wide-scale voter fraud in Philadelphia.

Republicans and Democrats have long understood the problems with mass mail-in ballots. The usual stages of ballot security are lost: unlike absentee ballots, some people are claiming they received unsolicited mail-in ballots, a practice Pennsylvania does not allow. Could it be ballots are being illegally sent or is it simply that voters forgot they signed up to get them?

Worse, it’s impossible to ensure the ballot is filled out by the voter or with her approval. And when the ballot is submitted, the chain of custody observing that ballot is broken. It’s a recipe for contested election results.

The seeds of public distrust were sowed in June, when Wolf decreed by executive order that mail-in ballots in the primary election could trickle in from certain counties for an extra week. The state Democratic Party followed up in July by suing to similarly extend the general election deadline for mail-in ballots. Their suit also sought to allow unprecedented “drop boxes” to collect mail-ins and to limit the number of election observers.

Wolf’s administration then asked the state’s elected Supreme Court, which is 5-2 Democratic-majority and has become notorious for partisan rulings, to grant all the Democrats’ requests—and they did on Sep. 17. The court went further than expected, granting the Democrats’ deadline extension, approving drop boxes and satellite “election offices” for ballot collection, and even ruling that postmarks could not be used to verify when ballots had been mailed.

In addition, the court removed the Green Party presidential candidate’s name from the state ballot over a technicality, a move that may have shifted Green Party votes to Joe Biden’s camp. In their decision, the justices acknowledged that the new deadline violated state law but claimed that “in light of the current COVID-19 pandemic” such laws could be dismissed.

It got worse. Sensing an opportunity, the Wolf administration pronounced that county officials “are prohibited from rejecting absentee or mail-in ballots based on signature comparison.” On Oct. 23, not long before Election Day, the court approved this last nail in the coffin of election integrity.

On Thursday, Republican Sen. Pat Toomey expressed concern about these unprecedented rule changes that fueled this week’s chaos, making clear that free and fair elections aren’t a partisan issue. Now, the U.S. Supreme Court will have to rule.

But on Oct. 28, the Supreme Court postponed any decision with a 4-4 ruling—excluding newly appointed justice Amy Coney Barrett—that returned the case to its court of origin. At the time, Justice Samuel Alito noted that it is likely “that the state Supreme Court decision violates the Federal Constitution,” opening a possibility that the justices will review the case post-election, with the potential outcome of eliminating thousands of illegal ballots.

On Friday, GOP state House Speaker Bryan Cutler, who noted that the election “confusion is a direct result of the court decisions,” called for a full audit before any certification of the results. Cutler also cited Pennsylvania’s 100,000 provisional ballots—cast when a voter’s eligibility is in question—that further indicated problems with the mail-in system.

Elections decided by the courts is a nightmare scenario for either political party. But Wolf refused to reform the state’s election procedures in concert with the legislature. In October, GOP lawmakers proposed compromise legislation, House Bill 2626, that included several, but not all, of the governor’s proposed changes to Pennsylvania voting laws. Wolf threatened to veto their bill in an all-or-nothing negotiation standoff.

To prevent a future election debacle in Pennsylvania, we need election integrity reform through the normal legislative process. Only legal votes should be counted, and controls should be put in place—like polling place verification and absentee ballot chain-of-custody at every stage.

But Democrats have resisted these reforms for years, creating the present chaos. The U.S. Supreme Court must respond accordingly and assure Pennsylvanians that their election was fair—regardless of the presidential outcome.

Jennifer Stefano is chief innovation officer and vice president at the Commonwealth Foundation, Pennsylvania’s free market think tank.

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