Perspectives; Thoughts; Comments; Opinions; Discussions

Posts tagged ‘Elections’

Elections Have Consequences: Why the Shutdown Is More About Leverage Than Leadership

By Jimmy Parker | October 16, 2025

I’m tired of the political hyperbole. While I’m a strong conservative and have no problem calling out bad policy when I see it, I’m also exhausted by the endless political theater coming from both sides. Still, let’s be honest: most of the over-the-top spin seems to come from the left, and that’s part of why I lean conservative. But this piece isn’t about taking cheap shots — it’s about cutting through the noise. When Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared at a CNN town hall event Wedn to discuss the ongoing government shutdown 2025, the conversation quickly became another round of finger-pointing. When a Republican student asked Sanders to explain Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s leadership during the crisis, Sanders dodged, shifting the blame to House Speaker Mike Johnson and President Donald Trump. It was a perfect snapshot of how real policy debates get lost in the rhetoric.

The Reality Behind the Shutdown

The current shutdown isn’t really about keeping the government open—it’s about who sets the priorities for federal spending. Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the White House, meaning the voters have already chosen the policy direction. But Democrats are using the shutdown as leverage to hold on to parts of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) spending structure that were designed under their leadership. Specifically, they want to preserve extended ACA tax credits and protect state-level programs that offer healthcare benefits to individuals who aren’t legally in the country.

What’s Actually Being Argued

Democrats argue that scaling back these programs would harm low-income families and vulnerable populations. Republicans counter that it’s about accountability—ensuring that taxpayer money goes only to those eligible under federal law. The key point: illegal immigrants are not eligible for federal healthcare programs like Medicaid, Medicare, or Obamacare subsidies. But some blue states use their own budgets—and sometimes overlapping federal grants—to cover those individuals. Republicans want that practice stopped, arguing that it violates the intent of federal law.

The $1 Trillion Talking Point

Sanders keeps repeating that the GOP “gave $1 trillion in tax cuts to the rich while cutting healthcare.” That number refers to the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which reduced taxes for corporations and individuals across all income levels. The top earners saw the largest dollar savings because they pay the most taxes, but the middle class also benefited from lower rates and a doubled standard deduction. As for “cutting healthcare,” no program was directly reduced by that legislation. The only major healthcare change was the removal of the Obamacare individual mandate penalty. In other words, Sanders is describing a hypothetical outcome, not a literal cut.

The Real Issue: Federal Leverage and Political Optics

The government shutdown isn’t about immediate healthcare funding—it’s about control. Democrats are using the shutdown to pressure Republicans into preserving programs that benefit their voter base, especially in states that expanded coverage to noncitizens. Republicans see this as a constitutional question: if the GOP controls Congress, its budget priorities should reflect the voters’ choice. That’s not cruelty; it’s how representative government works.

The Consequence of Power

Elections have consequences. As President Obama himself once reminded Republicans after his 2008 victory, winning control of government means you set the policy agenda. When Democrats held power, they passed expansive social programs and regulatory initiatives. Now that Republicans hold the majority, the legislative balance naturally shifts. Shutting down the government to protest that shift doesn’t change the law—it only hurts ordinary Americans who rely on steady governance. The real path forward is negotiation, not obstruction. Democrats can fight for their policies at the ballot box in 2026. Until then, the government’s direction follows the majority elected by the people.

A Shutdown Fueled by Political Theater

Bernie Sanders and AOC are using the cameras and the headlines to suggest that Republicans are “taking away” healthcare or “attacking” the poor. But the reality is simpler: the shutdown continues because Democrats refuse to pass a spending bill that reflects the results of the last election. It’s not about compassion or cruelty—it’s about political leverage. The sooner Washington stops treating every budget negotiation as a campaign rally, the sooner the government can reopen.

What Comes Next

Unless one side gives ground, the shutdown will likely continue until late fall. Republicans have little incentive to fold when they hold both the legislative majority and the presidency. Democrats, meanwhile, are hoping public frustration will eventually shift the blame their way. But with a nationwide “No Kings Rally” planned for this weekend—a grassroots event organized by progressive activists to protest Republican control—there’s virtually no chance Democratic leaders will concede before then. They’ve spent weeks energizing a base that expects confrontation, not compromise. Standing in front of that crowd and admitting political reality would be unthinkable for them right now. Still, most Americans understand that governing isn’t about tantrums—it’s about responsibility. The law stands until voters change it, and for now, that law is in Republican hands.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

208 Democrats Vote Against Legislation To Keep Noncitizens Out Of Elections

By: Brianna Lyman | April 10, 2025

After sitting back for four years while the leader of the Democrat Party allowed millions of illegal aliens to invade the country, 208 Democrats voted against legislation Thursday that would keep foreign nationals out of American elections.

The Republican-led House passed the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act 220-208. The legislation, introduced by Texas Rep. Chip Roy, would require documentary proof of citizenship in order to register to vote.

“Despite the ridiculous attacks and purposeful misinformation spread about the bill, I am pleased to see that the House of Representatives once again passed the SAVE Act on a bipartisan basis to ensure only U.S. citizens vote in federal elections,” Roy said in a statement to The Federalist.

“In order to preserve this republic, we must uphold what it means to be able to vote in a U.S. election,” Roy continued. “I am grateful that my colleagues answered the call and passed the SAVE Act, as this serves as a critical first step to ensure that we maintain election integrity throughout our country. It is now up to the Senate to take up, pass, and send this important bill to President Trump’s desk.”

Four Democrats — Rep. Ed Case (HI); Rep. Henry Cuellar (TX); Rep. Jared Golden (ME); and Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (WA) — voted alongside Republicans to pass the SAVE Act.

Democrat Reps. Vicente Gonzalez Jr. of Texas and Don Davis of North Carolina previously voted in July to pass the SAVE Act but voted in opposition to the legislation on Thursday. The previously legislation passed in July, 221 to 198, after Democrats stated noncitizen voting is already illegal.

But just because noncitizen voting is already illegal doesn’t mean it’s not happening — or that current law does anything to prevent it. Current law prohibiting noncitizens from voting is largely toothless, with prospective voters simply checking a small square box on a federal registration form attesting under penalty of perjury that they are a citizen.

The SAVE Act would amend the 1993 National Voter Registration Act to make documentary proof of citizenship a requirement to register to vote. The legislation would add the additional, necessary layer of protection to keep foreign nationals out of U.S. elections. Under the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), states are required to check information about newly registered voters in federal elections against information stored in the state’s motor vehicle administration database. Individuals who do not have a driver’s license identification number can instead provide the last four digits of his Social Security number. But foreign nationals can obtain both of those documents, so neither one really confirms citizenship.

In California, prospective voters who lack both a driver’s license identification number and a Social Security number can instead provide proof of identity — not citizenship — using low-security identification like a gym membership, utility bill, or credit card.

Such a vulnerable system has enabled 11,198 noncitizens to register to vote in Pennsylvania despite, as Democrats have made clear, it being illegal, according to the Washington Times. Oregon’s Secretary of State meanwhile found nine noncitizens who had voted in past elections after discovering “more than 300 noncitizens were erroneously registered to vote,” as reported by The Federalist’s Logan Washburn. Similarly, a Georgia audit found 20 noncitizens registered to vote — nearly half of which cast a ballot in previous elections, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The SAVE Act now heads to the Senate for a vote.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2

Author Brianna Lyman profile

Brianna Lyman

Visit on Twitter@briannalyman2

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Europe’s Latest Attacks on Free Speech and Free Elections Prove Vance’s Munich Warning Right

By: Elle Purnell | April 02, 2025

Graphic depicting Marine Le Pen and a Facebook page with caution tape — Vance warned that shutting down speech destroys democracy. European leaders have apparently taken his statement as an instruction manual.

Author Elle Purnell profile

Elle Purnell

Visit on Twitter@_ellepurnell

It’s been a banner week for authoritarians in Europe, and it’s only Wednesday.

On Monday, a French court banned Marine Le Pen, the leader of the right-wing National Rally party and the frontrunner in the 2027 presidential election, from seeking public office for the next five years. The same day, The Telegraph reported that a toddler had been booted from a U.K. preschool for being insufficiently supportive of LGBT politics. Over the weekend, a British couple revealed they had been arrested based on complaints they expressed in a WhatsApp chat about their daughter’s public school.

This is exactly the kind of crackdown on free expression that Vice President J.D. Vance chastised complicit European leaders about in February, in an address at the Munich Security Conference. This week’s insanity further proves Vance’s dire warnings were right.

Vance called out the U.K., Germany, Sweden, and the European Union for censoring and criminalizing the free expression of their citizens, citing police raids against Germans for comments posted online and the prosecution of a British man who dared to pray in silence outside of an abortion facility.

“[A]cross Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat,” he said. That may have been an understatement.

France isn’t the first country to bar political opposition candidates from its elections. In December, Romania’s highest court suspended its presidential election, blaming Russian interference. (Where have we heard that one before?) Calin Georgescu, who cast himself as a Trumpy “Romania first” candidate, took the lead in the country’s first round of voting before the court canceled the election and then barred Georgescu from running again.

Meanwhile, leftists in the German parliament have been threatening a ban on Germany’s prominent right-wing party, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). In January, lawmakers considered asking the country’s highest court to “examine whether the AfD is an anti-constitutional party,” which Politico characterized as the “first step toward legally banning it under German law.” Leftist lawmaker Carmen Wegge, one of the partisans behind the effort, claimed AfD posed “dangers to democracy” as she tried to ban the party from the democratic process.

Now, France is the latest in what Vance described as a disturbing trend of “European courts canceling elections and senior officials threatening to cancel others.”

In addition to her five-year ban on seeking office, Le Pen, who held a double-digit lead over the next closest candidate in France’s presidential election, was also slapped with a fine and a prison sentence for which she’ll likely be subject to two years of house arrest. Like U.S. President Donald Trump, Le Pen was accused of complex financial crimes that were alleged to have taken place years ago, with her opponents eagerly invoking the “rule of law” to defend their prosecution of political opponents. The similarities weren’t lost on Trump himself.

After the verdict was disclosed, Le Pen told reporters, “I am eliminated, but in reality, it’s millions of French people whose voices have been eliminated.”

She’s right, the voices of European citizens are being silenced — and not just by courts disenfranchising them by booting their preferred candidates from elections. From parents to preschoolers, Europeans are no longer free to express their views without fear of retribution from the government.

Since Britain’s “Online Safety Act” went into effect in October 2023, authorities have charged 292 people and convicted 67 under the anti-speech law. Among other things, the law criminalizes “false information intended to cause non-trivial harm” and targets “mis- and disinformation.” Months before the law went into effect, a mother posted footage of police arresting her autistic daughter for commenting that a female police officer looked like her lesbian grandmother. A spokesman for the West Yorkshire Police confirmed to the BBC that “a 16-year-old had been arrested on suspicion of a homophobic public order offence.”

On Sunday, the U.S. State Department’s Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Bureau issued a statement expressing concern “about freedom of expression in the United Kingdom.” The State Department drew attention to the case of Livia Tossici-Bolt, a 62-year-old woman who stood trial last month for holding a sign near an abortion facility with the words “here to talk, if you want.”

As U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer tries — so far, unsuccessfully — to escape imminent tariffs from the Trump administration, Britain’s authoritarian speech codes undermine Starmer’s case for special treatment from the United States. According to The Telegraph, someone “familiar with trade negotiations” said the U.K. deserves “no free trade without free speech.”

Things are no better in Germany, where 16 separate “online hate task forces” are tasked with tracking down online commenters who are accused of publishing false or “hateful” speech. Just one of those 16 units “works on around 3,500 cases a year,” according to a report from CBS.

German prosecutors readily admitted to CBS that in their country it is a “crime to insult somebody in public” or even to repost false information online. Germans whose speech lands on the wrong side of the statute may have their homes raided by armed police, be slapped with fines or imprisoned, and/or have their phones and laptops confiscated.

The European Union’s Digital Services Act, which took effect last year, ensures speech that authorities deem “hateful” can be punished across the continent. Trump’s Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr blasted the law as “incompatible” with the “free speech tradition.”

Jailing citizens for the expression of ideas and barring political candidates from elections are two sides of the same authoritarian coin. Neither is compatible with self-government.

“[S]hutting down media, shutting down elections, or shutting people out of the political process,” as Vance told European leaders in February, “is the most surefire way to destroy democracy.”

He was right. Unfortunately, European leaders appear to have taken his statement as an instruction manual instead of an urgent warning.

Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_ellepurnell.

Category:

Free Speech

Tagged with:

Sweeping Trump Order Overhauls US Elections, Including Citizenship Requirement

Tuesday, 25 March 2025 05:23 PM EDT

President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed a sweeping executive action to overhaul elections in the U.S., including requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections and demanding that all ballots be received by Election Day.

The order says the U.S. has failed “to enforce basic and necessary election protections” and calls on states to work with federal agencies to share voter lists and prosecute election crimes.

It threatens to pull federal funding from states where election officials who don’t comply.

The move, which is likely to face swift challenges from voting rights organizations, is consistent with Trump’s long history of railing against election processes. He has in the past alleged election rigging and has waged battles against certain voting methods since he lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden and attributed the outcome to widespread fraud.

Trump has focused particularly on mail voting, arguing that it’s insecure and invites fraud.

After signing, Trump said that more election actions would be taken in coming weeks.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

The SAVE Act Could Hit Filibuster Wall In New Republican-Led Senate

By: M.D. Kittle | November 19, 2024

View of the U.S. Capitol Building in November. — ‘The Democrats are not into compromising on issues that will cost them power,’ Rep. Glenn Grothman said of the election integrity bill.

Author M.D. Kittle profile

M.D. Kittle

Having clinched the federal government trifecta, Republicans have the opportunity in the next Congress to move through legislation they could only have dreamed of over the past six years. Will they squander this golden opportunity to pass conservative reforms?

In particular, can the SAVE Act, a key election integrity measure, be saved from the Senate filibuster? Perhaps, but there’s disagreement even among members of Wisconsin’s GOP congressional delegation on the fate of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act in the upcoming session. The bill requires individuals to show documentary proof of U.S. citizenship in federal elections, as it directs states to remove noncitizens from their voter rolls. The measure passed the Republican-controlled House in July along party lines, with a scant five Democrats voting for it. Dems insisted that the protections are unnecessary because it’s already illegal for foreign nationals to vote in elections. But current law is nothing more than an honor system without the ability to require proof of citizenship at the point of registration.

As The Federalist has reported, thousands of illegal immigrants and other foreign nationals have shown up on voter lists across the country.

The SAVE Act has languished in a Senate that had no interest in ensuring only U.S. citizens vote in elections. Attached to a stopgap government spending proposal in September, the bill died a miserable death in the House.

But Nov. 5, 2024, delivered a red wave, a sea change election that will put former President Donald Trump back in the White House, place Republicans back in control of the Senate, and allow the Grand Old Party to keep its majority in the House. Expectations are high — as they were in 2017 and 2018 when Republicans also held the trifecta with Trump in charge of the executive branch — that conservatives will be able to push through an array of government reforms.

Not so fast, some say.

‘Tool to Defend’

“Any election law is going to be tough in the Senate,” Rep. Glenn Grothman, told me Monday on the “Vicki McKenna Show” in Milwaukee. Grothman, who represents Wisconsin’s 6th Congressional District, said the filibuster, requiring 60 votes in the Senate to pass most legislation, will make it nearly impossible to get the SAVE Act, border security, and other bills through the august upper house.

It would seem there isn’t much appetite for ditching the filibuster, especially in a Senate run by newly elected Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., a longtime protege of Senate Republican Leader and 60-vote threshold defender Mitch McConnell. Fellow McConnell stooge Texas Sen. John Cornyn recently told NBC News that there’s “unanimity” among Senate Republicans on preserving the filibuster — even if President-elect Trump again calls for senators to dump it.

“Senators have a tendency to defend their power, just like everybody else does. I don’t know a lot of wimps in the United States Senate,” Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., told the news outlet. “I think we’ve all lived through the possibility of losing the filibuster as a tool to defend. And I would be surprised if there were enough Republicans who thought that we should change it now.”

‘On the Other Foot’

When Democrats controlled Congress and the White House, they pushed to bypass the filibuster to pass an election integrity nightmare “voting rights act,” but couldn’t quite get the 60 votes needed to suspend the rule. That was in January 2022, just days before Dems turned over control of the House to Republicans and saw their majority in the Senate diminished to a slim 51 seats. McConnell congratulated renegade Democrats, Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, for their “courage” to resist the pressure to loosen the rule. McConnell warned Democrats “that in the very near future the shoe might be on the other foot.” Nearly three years later, Manchin and Sinema are on their way out of the Senate and the “shoe” is definitely about to be on the other foot.

‘We Can Get There’

Grothman agrees the filibuster has “prevented a lot of horrible things from passing” under Democrat control, from packing the Supreme Court to statehood for the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. “So, I can’t say it’s horrible when the Republican senators say we’re going to require 60 votes for all policy changes, but it sure is going to be frustrating because I don’t think we can save the country unless we make changes in immigration law, and I don’t think we can save the country unless we make changes to election law.”

The Wisconsin congressman said there is no compromising with Democrats on either issue.

“I don’t think they’ll ever give us the SAVE act,” Grothman said. “The Democrats are not into compromising on issues that will cost them power. They just aren’t.”

Grothman’s colleague, Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, said the SAVE Act is a priority and can pass both houses, but it will take negotiations to get there. Fitzgerald, who represents Wisconsin’s 5th Congressional District, said he’d like to see the legislation move from the Senate to the House this time around.

“Even though [Republicans] are going to have the majority over there, there are going to be some specific senators that probably are going to need to get some of the things that were in the SAVE Act to agree to it,” the lawmaker told me last week on the “Vicki McKenna Show.” “That could become the negotiations between the houses to sign off from.”

Rep. Bryan Steil, Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District congressman, said Republicans have an opportunity to take election security and integrity bills previously passed in the House and get them to Trump’s desk. Steil, chairman of the House Administration Committee, acknowledges the filibuster may well be a challenge, but he sees the potential for some Senate Democrats to cross the aisle on bills that have the backing of the majority of voters.

“Obviously, President Biden had no interest in putting forward common-sense election integrity provisions,” Steil told me. “With a Republican Senate and a Republican House and President Trump in the White House, I’m of a view we can get there.”

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Democrat ‘Election Deniers’ in Pennsylvania and Iowa Refuse to Concede Races

By: M.D. Kittle | November 18, 2024

Pennsylvania Sen. Bob Casey on the campaign trail. — Democrat campaigns and their allies have no compunction about breaking election law to grab and keep power.

Author M.D. Kittle profile

M.D. Kittle

Funny how the times change.

Four years ago, Democrats and their pals in corporate media began painting then-President Donald Trump and Republicans who questioned the results of the troubled 2020 election as “election deniers.” Now, Democrats are doing all they can — including breaking election law — to challenge GOP victories in Iowa and Pennsylvania despite “insurmountable” odds. Even The Washington Post, part of the left’s corporate media public-relations team, sees the writing on the wall for Sen. Bob Casey, D-Penn. The entrenched incumbent lost to Republican challenger Dave McCormick by some 24,000 votes in a swing state election that helped Republicans take back the Senate with a comfortable majority. The Associated Press and other news outlets called the race for McCormick. But Casey and his party of election integrity deniers, led by Democrat political ambulance chaser Marc Elias (Hillary Clinton’s Russian dossier peddler), refuse to concede. Instead, Casey’s campaign has sought an expensive recount, and has no compunction about grinding election law under foot to tally enough votes to hold the seat.

‘Tipping the Scales’

“Sen. Casey just refuses to accept the fact that he’s lost this election, so he is costing taxpayers well over a million dollars” for a statewide recount, Linda Kerns, 2024 Pennsylvania Election Integrity Counsel for the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign, told The Federalist late last week on the “Simon Conway Show” in Des Moines.

If Sleepy Senator Bob Casey had put as much energy, resources, attention, & firepower into the needs of Pennsylvanians over the last 2 decades as he is putting into fighting the outcome of this election, maybe he would have gotten more votes. Congrats @DaveMcCormickPA.
— Linda A. Kerns 🇺🇲 (@lindakernslaw) November 9, 2024

The Democrat senator and his attorneys are pushing for invalid provisional and mail-in ballots not correctly signed or properly dated to be counted, contrary to a Pennsylvania court ruling. Democrats on some county boards dismissed the law and the court ruling in agreeing to accept suspect and invalid ballots.

“I think we all know that precedent by a court doesn’t matter anymore in this country,” Bucks County Commissioner Diane Ellis-Marseglia, a Democrat, said Thursday.

“People violate laws anytime they want,” she added. “So, for me, if I violate this law, it’s because I want a court to pay attention. There’s nothing more important than counting votes.” It was a troubling statement from a public official, and another in countless examples of why Democrats got their clocks cleaned in this month’s election. Voters have had more than enough of leftist-led lawlessness over the past four years.

Even the Dem-friendly Washington Post editorial board can smell the desperation. The election lawlessness, too, now seems a bridge too far for the left-leaning WaPo board.

“Democrats would surely protest if a Republican commissioner made the same statement [as Ellis-Marseglia] to justify tipping the scales for their party’s Senate nominee — and they would be right,” the editorial board wrote in a piece headlined, “Democrats thumb their nose at the rule of law in Pennsylvania.” “Elections need rules, established in advance of the voting, and those rules must be applied equally and consistently.”

The same newspaper, of course, joined a chorus of accomplice media outlets chiding swing state Republican Senate candidates, Eric Hovde in Wisconsin and Kari Lake in Arizona, for not conceding closely contested elections. The conservatives have raised election integrity questions, but neither has asked election officials and courts to break the law to reverse their opponents’ election leads.

“Four years ago, many Republicans embraced Trump’s brand of denialism when he stoked far-fetched theories to try to undo his loss of the presidency. Now, they are largely staying silent amid scattered false claims of rigged elections in downballot races — and they’re calling on Sen. Bob Casey (D) to concede that he narrowly lost in Pennsylvania,” a team of leftist Washington Post reporters concluded in the piece — published a day before the editorial — that served as a defense of Casey’s recount call and a knock-on Republicans mulling their own legal options.

In Pennsylvania the math doesn’t look good for Casey, but he’s counting on the recount and a stack of invalid votes.

“But even if Sen. Casey wins on these, there’s still not enough for him to win this election so he’s just desperately hanging on,” Kerns said.

‘The Election Deniers are the Democrats’

It’s a similar situation in Iowa’s 1st Congressional District, where Democrat Christina Bohannan’s campaign on Thursday sought a recount of the votes in an election in which incumbent Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks won by less than 1,000 votes. The purple district saw Miller-Meeks win her first term in 2020 by a final recount tally of just six votes.

Bohannan’s path to victory appears unlikely, too, but the campaign said in a statement that a recount will ensure “that every voter is heard” and that they have “full trust in this process and will accept the results regardless of the outcome.” The Associated Press has yet to call the race.

Miller-Meeks said the vote count, as it stands, is “insurmountable” and that the districtwide recount is an unnecessary expense to taxpayers.

“In Iowa, all of the legal ballots have been counted, all of the provisional ballots and the military ballots have been counted. The counties have certified their election results, and we remain ahead. We gained votes on election night,” the congresswoman told The Federalist Friday on the “Simon Conway Show” on NewsRadio 1040 WHO in Des Moines. “So, it’s an insurmountable lead. But, yes, my concern is after the recount when we’re still ahead, which we will be, I’m very confident of that, they’re going to continue to deny the election and they may go on to do a contest and try to get ballots admitted that were illegal ballots.”

Republicans have already secured enough victories to hold the House, but Democrats are fighting tooth and nail to stave off defeat and a wider GOP majority in a handful of races yet to be called. Those include Iowa’s 1st Congressional District, two House races in California, and one each in Alaska and Ohio.

Miller-Meeks said the tables have turned in the “election denier” narrative.

“We’ve heard for four years how Republicans were a threat to democracy; they were going to overturn democracy. But really what is happening is that the election deniers, the people who are trying to thwart the rule of law, trying to thwart what a state constitution allows when it comes to elections, are the Democrats,” the Republican congresswoman said.

Beth Brelje is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. She is an award-winning investigative journalist with decades of media experience.

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.

Category:

corruption, Political

Tagged with:

By Massive Margins, Voters in Eight States Say Only Citizens Can Vote in Their Elections

By: M.D. Kittle | November 08, 2024

Signs point to where voters may drop off their ballots in Columbus.

Author M.D. Kittle profile

M.D. Kittle

As divided as America may be, this election showed there’s one thing most Americans agree on: Only U.S. citizens should vote in U.S. elections.

Voters this week in eight states — Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Wisconsin — overwhelmingly approved constitutional amendment ballot questions seeking to ensure noncitizens cannot vote in state and local elections. Foreign nationals are already barred from voting in federal elections.

“We’re so often told about how divided we are in the United States, but on Tuesday we had Republicans, Democrats and independents come together in overwhelming numbers declaring that only citizens would be able to vote” in elections, a jubilant Will Martin, Wisconsin state director of Americans for Citizen Voting, told The Federalist in a phone interview this week.

The Badger State’s Citizen-Only Voting Amendment (COVA) was endorsed by more than 70 percent of voters in Tuesday’s election, according to unofficial tallies. Support topped 65 percent in each of the states with COVA questions on the ballot, according to unofficial results reported by state news organizations. In Iowa, the referendum passed with 76 percent support. In South Carolina, the ballot question earned the approval of a whopping 86 percent of voters.

In Missouri, the same ballot question amending the state constitution to make clear only citizens can vote in Show Me State elections also knocked out ranked-choice voting by a two-to-one margin.

Before Election Day, COVA advocates felt confident, but Wisconsin presented the biggest challenge. Jack Tomczak, vice president for Citizen Outreach for Americans for Citizen Voting, told The Federalist that the amendment faced “well-funded” opposition led by the leftist League of Women Voters. More than three dozen leftist groups lent their names and resources to an effort to defeat the referendum. Martin said opponents ran “shameful” ads falsely warning voters that military personnel wouldn’t be able to vote in Wisconsin elections if the amendment passed.

In Idaho, Democrat lawmakers claimed noncitizens could be barred from voting in private elections, including homeowner associations and parent-teacher associations elections. The amendment ballot questions had nothing to do with such races, just as they don’t involve federal election law.

‘Being Diminished’

Opponents, assisted by the accomplice media, pushed the left’s false talking point that foreign nationals voting in elections is nearly nonexistent and that the constitutions in Wisconsin and the other states already bar noncitizens from voting.

“Passage of the amendments marks the latest chapter of Republican’s [sic] ongoing efforts to put unfounded claims of noncitizen voting at the center of a broader political strategy,” Democratic Party mouthpiece NBC News reported this week.

In the words of outgoing acting President Joe Biden, malarky.

As The Federalist has reported, the vast majority of states’ constitutions include language that “every” citizen meeting age and residency requirements is eligible to vote. The amendments demand that “only” U.S. citizens meeting the requirements are electors.

Opponents of the COVA movement insist there’s no difference. The “every” phrasing opens the door to noncitizens being allowed to vote in state and local elections, as is the case in California, Maryland, Vermont and the District of Columbia.

In September, Frederick became the largest city in Maryland to allow noncitizens to vote in its elections. The Board of Aldermen voted 4-1 to give green card and illegal immigrants the right to cast ballots. Kelly Russell was the sole dissenting vote.

“I have talked to many people who worked to get their citizenship in order to vote who do not agree to that, who feel that their efforts and all the hard work that they did is being diminished by this,” she said, according to Fox45 News in Baltimore.

Takoma Park, Maryland, has allowed foreign nationals to vote in local elections for more than 30 years. All told, a dozen Maryland municipalities open the franchise to noncitizens. They can because there’s nothing in the state constitution that prevents them from doing so.

‘Common Sense’ Movement

Wisconsin legislative Democrats have voted en bloc against resolutions to take the citizen-only amendment to the voters. While they insist noncitizens illegally voting in elections isn’t an issue, it is. Noncitizens have voted in U.S. elections and thousands have shown up on state voter rolls this election cycle.

The problems are only magnified by an unprecedented 10 million U.S. Border Patrol encounters with illegal aliens in the nearly four years that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have been in office. While it is a felony for foreign nationals to vote in U.S. elections, incidents are difficult to track and not a priority for many prosecutors.

“There are at least 25 million non-citizens in the country according to the Census Bureau and no federal enforcement mechanism to ensure their names don’t appear on the voters rolls,” Paige Terryberry, senior research fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability, told The Federalist in September. “Right now, the Biden-Harris administration is using welfare offices, DMVs, Public housing, healthercare.gov and more to register voters, and they aren’t verifying citizenship at these locations. States can act too, but the SAVE Act is the only thing that can fix this problem nationwide before the election.”

Each illegal vote diminishes those of eligible voters.

Since 2018, 14 states have added, or have voted to add, citizenship requirements to their constitutions, according to Ballotpedia.

Martin noted that swing state Wisconsin is a “50-50” state, as evident by former President Donald Trump’s victory in the so-called “blue wall” state by a little over 28,000 votes. Still, the ballot question scored majorities in 71 of 72 counties, Martin said.

The COVA advocate said the issue is part of a sea change in America, a return to basic guiding values.

“Theres a movement in this country toward common sense,” Martin said. “People are tired of people trying to interpret for them, people are tired of being told what to think.”

For more election news and updates, visit electionbriefing.com

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Georgia Supreme Court Rules Democrat-Led County Can’t Accept Thousands of Late Absentee Ballots

By: Brianna Lyman | November 04, 2024

The Georgia Supreme Court ruled on Monday that Democrat-run Cobb County cannot accept thousands of absentee ballots that arrive after the Election Day deadline. Cobb County announced on Thursday that as of Oct. 30, “more than 3,000 absentee ballots requested by last Friday’s deadline had not been mailed.”

Cobb County Board of Elections Chairwoman Tori Silas said that the county was “taking every possible step to get these ballots to the voters who requested them” but that the county was “unprepared for the surge in requests and lacked the necessary equipment to process the ballots quickly.” While absentee ballot requests had “been averaging 440 per day … that number surged to 750 per day” during the final week to request an absentee ballot, the county said.

To remedy the issue, the county announced on Thursday that it would overnight the late ballots for a Friday morning (Nov. 1) delivery with “prepaid express return envelopes to ensure voters can return them by Tuesday’s deadline.”

But on Friday, the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a suit arguing that, despite the county taking steps to get the ballots delivered to voters by Friday, voters would be “disenfranchised.”

Cobb County Judge Robert Flournoy bought the bogus argument, ruling on Friday that the 3,000 or so voters who received a late mail-in ballot could return those ballots before 5 p.m. on Nov. 8 — three full days after Election Day — as long as the ballots were postmarked by 7 p.m. on Nov. 5.

The Republican National Committee and the Georgia Republican Party appealed the ruling to the Georgia Supreme Court, arguing that state law mandates the return of absentee ballots on Election Day and that since Cobb County paid for express return postage and overnighted the ballots to voters in order to — as Cobb County said — “ensure voters can return [the ballots] by Tuesday’s deadline,” there is no need to extend the date for acceptance.

The appeal also argued that Georgia “does not guarantee a right to vote by mail.” Rather, “Voters still have many options to vote, including by voting in person or delivering their absentee ballots in person.”

The Georgia Supreme Court agreed, granting the RNC and Georgia GOP’s motion to pause the lower court ruling. This means any late-arriving absentee ballots will not be counted. The court also ordered the late-arriving ballots sent in by the 3,000 voters to be segregated until further notice from the court.

Voters who did not receive their mail-in ballot may vote in person on Tuesday.

RNC Chairman Michael Whatley celebrated the ruling in a post on X.

“Democrat-run Cobb County wanted to accept 3,000 absentee ballots AFTER the Election Day deadline. We took this case to the Georgia Supreme Court. We just got word that we WON the case. Election Day is Election Day — not the week after,” Whatley said.

“We will keep fighting, keep winning, and keep sharing updates.”

For more election news and updates, visit electionbriefing.com.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2

Author Brianna Lyman profile

Brianna Lyman

Visit on Twitter@briannalyman2

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

The Pravda Press Still Won’t Ask Harris If She’ll Accept the Results of the Election If She Loses

By: M.D. Kittle | October 25, 2024

Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Barack Obama appear at a campaign rally in Georgia.

Author M.D. Kittle profile

M.D. Kittle

The Pravda press has asked former President Donald Trump over and over again whether he’ll accept the results of the election if his Democrat opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, wins. Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, has heard the question ad nauseam as well.

CBS News political correspondent Caitlin Huey-Burns peppered the former president with the question in late August, as the Democratic National Committee was installing Harris as the party’s nominee following President Joe Biden’s forced exit from his reelection campaign.

“Will you accept the results of this election?” the reporter asked.

“Absolutely. I assume it’s going to be a fair election. If it’s going to be a fair and free election the answer is absolutely I will,” Trump said.

Burns pressed with this ridiculous question. “What does fair mean to you?”

“It means the votes are counted. It means that votes are fair,” Trump said. “It means they don’t cheat on the election, they don’t drop ballots, install new rules and regulations that they don’t have the power to do.”

In other words, if leftist activists and Trump-hating elections officials don’t rig this election like they did the last one.

“They don’t use 51 intelligence agents to give phony reports, which had an effect on the election. They don’t do many of the things that they did in the last election,” he added, referring to the former intelligence officials who signed a letter insisting the Hunter Biden laptop story reported by the New York Post days before the 2020 presidential election was “Russian disinformation.” It was not. It was very real. And the Deep State, assisted by a complicit corporate media, silenced a story that many Americans say could have changed the results of the election.

Do Tell

But the Pravda press has been generally loath to ask Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, the same question. The Federalist is asking. We sent email requests to both the Harris campaign and the vice president’s office asking if she will accept the results of the election if she loses next month to Trump. As of publication, crickets.

The Federalist also asked the National Security Leaders for America whether their members will accept the results of the election if the former president wins. NSL4A made headlines and garnered lots of airtime last month when its 700-plus former government, military and national security leaders signed an open letter endorsing Harris. Former CIA Director John Brennan is one of the endorsers. He’s also one of the 51 signers of the letter falsely claiming the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation.

Again, no response.

A good question voters should be asking is, why aren’t the accomplice media asking whether Harris, the Democrats, the intelligence community and other swamp creatures will be patriotic enough to accept the results of the election if Trump wins?

They Do Not Accept

They’ve been far too busy publishing all kinds of stories asking all kinds of conservatives whether they’ll accept the results of the election if their guy loses — Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Rep. Barry Moore (R-Ala.), even Republican voters at large via various polls. They’re the same “journalists” who like to gloss over the fact that leading Democrats refused to accept the election results of 2016, when Trump surprised the world and beat bitter shrew Hillary Clinton, Obama’s former secretary of state and the Pravda press’ presidential chosen one.

“I do not see this president-elect as a legitimate president,” the late Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., told NBC News as Trump was taking office amid Democrats’ cries of “Russian interference.”

“I think there was a conspiracy on the part of the Russians and others that helped him get elected. That’s not right. That’s not fair. That’s not the open democratic process,” he added.

Sour Grapes Hillary said the same and has kept on saying since.

“I believe [Trump] understands that the many varying tactics they used, from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories — he knows that — there were just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did,” she complained in a 2019 CBS News interview.

“In fact, the last time Democrats fully accepted the legitimacy of a presidential election they lost was in 1988,” wrote The Federalist’s editor-in-chief Mollie Hemingway in Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.

During the vice presidential debate between Vance and Walz, moderator Norah O’Donnell demanded Vance answer whether he would “seek to challenge this year’s election results.” She didn’t press Walz on whether he would accept the results of a Trump-Vance win.

Walz was given a moment to deliver a “can’t we all get along” speech, insisting that questioning the results of elections must end.

“When this is over, we need to shake hands, this election, and the winner needs to be the winner,” the leftist said. “This has got to stop. It’s tearing our country apart.”

Vance rightly reminded Walz about the hypocrisy of the Democrat Party.

“…[W]e have to remember that for years in this country Democrats protested the results of elections. Hillary Clinton in 2016 said that Donald Trump had the election stolen by Vladimir Putin because the Russians bought like $500,000 of Facebook ads,” Vance said. “This has been going on for a long time. And if we want to say we need to respect the results of the election, I’m on board. But if we want to say, as Tim Walz is saying, that this is just a problem that Republicans have had, I don’t buy that.”

Voters shouldn’t buy it, either. That’s why it’s important to know where the Democrat Party presidential nominee stands less than two weeks before Election Day. So, The Federalist is asking.

Vice President Harris, will you accept the results of the election if you lose?

For more election news and updates, visit electionbriefing.com.

UPDATE:

An official with National Security Leaders for America has provided a comment following the publication of this story. The official, who asked to be identified as an NSL4A “spokesperson” said the following:

“Unlike Mr. Trump, who led a violent insurrection to try to overturn an election he lost, our members–who fought for this nation’s democratic and pluralistic ideals–will respect America’s democratic decision. We hope Mr. Trump, whose own Chief of Staff said Mr.Trump wants to be a dictator, will do the same.”

As has been well documented, Trump’s former chief of staff’s incendiary comments have been debunked by multiple sources, and the assertion that Trump “led a violent insurrection” is widely disputed.

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

The Federalist’s 2024 Battleground State Elections Guide

By: The Federalist Staff | October 10, 2024

The Federalist Staff

With Election Day less than a month away, election processes and early voting are kicking into gear in several swing states around the country. With different election laws and court rulings governing election administration in each state, it can be tough to keep up with the myriad guidelines and rules governing the electoral process. That’s why The Federalist’s 2024 Battleground State Elections Guide is here to help.

From ballot return deadlines to mail-in voting rules, here are all the key dates and information you’ll need to understand the election process in swing states throughout the country this cycle.

Arizona

In-Person Early Voting: Began on Oct. 9 and ends on Nov. 1.

Mail-In Voting: Ballots began to be mailed out Oct. 9.

Ballot Return Deadlines: Mail-in ballots must be returned by 7 p.m. local time on Election Day to be counted. These ballots can be returned via mail or delivered in person. Polling locations for in-person voting on Election Day also close at 7 p.m. local time.

Ballot Harvesting: Arizona law stipulates that only a “family member, household member or caregiver of the voter” may return the elector’s mail-in ballot.

Mail-In Ballot Signature Requirements: All absentee voters are required to sign the affidavit on the ballot envelope in order for their vote to be tabulated. The envelope signature must match the signature on the voter’s registration form.

Voter ID: Arizona requires in-person voters to present one type of acceptable photo ID or two types of non-photo ID.

Citizenship Requirements: The U.S. Supreme Court recently allowed part of a state law to go into effect that requires eligible electors to provide documentary proof of citizenship when registering to vote via state registration form. Arizonans may still register as federal-only voters with no proof of citizenship. The Arizona Constitution further specifies only U.S. citizens can vote in elections.

Post-Election Day Ballot Curing: Arizona law permits a “curing” period, in which local officials are authorized to contact voters to correct signature issues on their mail ballots. Any issue must be corrected “not later than the fifth business day after a primary, general or special election that includes a federal office or the third business day after any other election.”

Major Ballot Initiatives: Arizona’s ballot is expected to be stacked with roughly a dozen ballot initiatives this November. Among the most notable are constitutional amendments to effectively legalize late-term abortion (Proposition 139), raise the threshold for citizen-initiated ballot measures (Proposition 134), give the state legislature power to limit the governor’s emergency powers (Proposition 135), and prohibit open primary elections (Proposition 133).

Also set to appear on the ballot is a constitutional amendment that would institute open primaries and allow for the adoption of ranked-choice voting for general elections (Proposition 140). Despite the discovery that roughly 38,000 pairs of signatures gathered in support of the measure were duplicates, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that votes cast for the measure may count.

For more information on the full list of Arizona ballot measures, see here.

Biggest Election Fights: In September, Arizona election officials discovered roughly 98,000 registered voters lacking documentary proof of citizenship (DPOC) due to an error stemming from how the state’s Motor Vehicle Division shares driver’s license information with the voter registration system. As noted above, individuals who do not provide DPOC may still register as “federal-only” voters and can only cast ballots in federal races.

According to the secretary of state’s office, most of the affected voters are registered Republicans. The Arizona Supreme Court granted these electors the ability to vote full-ballot this November.

The secretary of state’s office revealed on Sept. 30 that election officials found an additional 120,000 voters affected by the issue who lack DPOC.

Georgia

In-Person Early Voting: Begins on Oct. 15 and ends on Nov. 1.

Mail-In Voting: Absentee ballots were sent to UOCAVA voters on Sept. 17. Registrars began sending out absentee ballots for the general public on Oct. 7. The last day to request a mail-in ballot is Oct. 25.

Ballot Return Deadlines: Absentee ballots (excluding UOCAVA ballots) must be returned by 7 p.m. local time on Election Day to be counted. These ballots can be returned in person, through the mail, or at a drop box location. Polling locations for in-person voting on Election Day also close at 7 p.m. local time.

Ballot Harvesting: Georgia does not permit ballot harvesting, but only allows certain family members or a household member to return a voter’s ballot. (A caretaker may also return a disabled voter’s ballot.)

Mail-In Ballot Signature Requirements: Absentee ballot envelopes contain an “oath which must be signed by the voter.” Georgia also “requires the voter’s driver’s license number or state identification card number, which is compared with the voter’s registration record,” according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. If a voter is unable to sign his ballot, Georgia “law requires the voter make a mark,” according to Carroll County’s election website. Ballots lacking a signature or mark are rejected, according to Carroll County.

Voter ID: “Georgia law requires photo identification when voting, either in person or absentee,” according to the secretary of state’s website. Acceptable forms of identification include any state or federal government-issued photo ID (including a driver’s license or a valid passport), a student ID from a Georgia public college or university, or a military or tribal photo ID.

Citizenship Requirements: Since 2010, Georgians registering to vote have been required to provide evidence of their U.S. citizenship, including a driver’s license or driver’s license number as long as the registrant has previously provided proof of citizenship to the Department of Driver Services. For those who don’t possess any of the accepted citizenship documents, Georgia law tasks the State Election Board with establishing “other documents or methods” for proving a person’s citizenship. However, it appears certain voters may be able to evade some of the safeguards in place.

Post-Election Day Ballot Curing: Georgia law permits a “curing” period, in which local officials are authorized to contact voters to correct signature issues on their absentee ballots. The “last day for voters to cure timely submitted absentee ballots if they failed to sign the oath or information mismatch” is Nov. 8.

Major Ballot Initiatives: Georgia will have three initiatives on the November ballot. One would create a Georgia Tax Court “with judicial power and statewide jurisdiction,” the second would provide “for a local option homestead property tax exemption,” and the third “exempts property that is valued at less than $20,000 from the personal property tax,” according to Ballotpedia.

Biggest Election Fights: The conservative-led State Election Board has clashed with Democrats and Georgia’s Republican-led secretary of state’s office recently, especially on the topic of whether election officials should be forced to rubber-stamp election results even if they have concerns about the election’s administration.

Republican officials like Fulton County election board member Julie Adams argue they should be able to investigate concerns about the administration of an election before certifying the results, rather than rubber-stamping results they believe are legally dubious.

Democrats are also waging a series of legal challenges against the State Election Board, which has passed a series of rules aimed at ensuring the number of ballots cast matches the number of voters who voted, among other election integrity measures.

Michigan

Voter Registration: Michiganders can register to vote at any time up to 8 p.m. on Election Day. They can register to vote online, by mail, or in person at the local clerk’s office.

In-Person Early Voting: The Michigan Department of State tells voters early voting will be available “for a minimum of nine consecutive days, ending on the Sunday before an election.” So early voting will start Oct. 26 at the latest, but communities can start the process earlier, allowing it to run for as many as 29 days.

Mail-In Voting: Absentee ballots are available beginning 40 days ahead of every election. Voters can request a ballot from the local clerk, and can opt-in to receive absentee ballots ahead of every federal, state, and local election. After Michigan voters approved no-excuse absentee voting in 2018, Proposal 2, which passed in 2022, further instituted mail-in voting practices and myriad other election policies supported by the left.

Ballot Return Deadlines: Voters must return absentee ballots to the local clerk’s office by 8 p.m. on Election Day to be counted, but overseas voters simply need their ballots to be postmarked by Election Day and received by clerks within six days after the election.

Ballot Harvesting: Michigan law allows an immediate family member or “individual residing in your household” to return a voter’s ballot. A voter may also request the clerk who issued a ballot help return it.

Mail-In Ballot Signature Requirements: Absentee voters must sign the envelope with a signature matching their state ID or voter registration application.

Voter ID: The state requires in-person voters to show a photo ID or sign an affidavit claiming they don’t have one. Acceptable documents include a current student ID or government ID such as (but not limited to) a U.S. passport or state driver’s license. Michigan does not require a copy of an ID to vote by mail.

Citizenship Requirements: It is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, and voter registration forms and ballot applications require a person to attest that he is a citizen, but Michigan does not require documentary proof of citizenship from would-be voters.

Post-Election Day Ballot Curing: If a signature does not match that in the local clerk’s records, Michigan law requires clerks to contact the voter to “cure” the signature and solve the issue. According to the secretary of state’s office, voters may cure their signatures until 5 p.m. the third day after the election.

Major Ballot Initiatives: Michigan will have no statewide ballot measures in November.

Biggest Election Fights: Democrat Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson fought to keep third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the ballot and remove independent Cornel West from the ballot, both of which actions would likely help Vice President Kamala Harris’ chances.

The Republican National Committee has filed multiple lawsuits against Benson for her guidance to clerks on handling ballots and her alleged failure to clean the state’s voter rolls. The Public Interest Legal Foundation has also sued Benson for an alleged lack of voter roll maintenance.

Nevada

Voter Registration: The deadline to register online is Oct. 23. Mailed voter registration forms had to be postmarked by Oct. 8.

Nevada also offers same-day registration, in which eligible electors may register and vote in person during the early voting period or on Election Day. Those who choose this option must present a valid Nevada driver’s license or Nevada ID card. Voters will receive their ballots to vote after the registration process is completed.

In-Person Early Voting: Begins on Oct. 19 and ends on Nov. 1.

Mail-In Voting: Every registrant listed as “active” on Nevada’s voter rolls is automatically mailed a ballot every election. Voters can request to opt out of this mailing list.

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Nevada law does not specify when election officials may start sending mail-in ballots to voters. State law does, however, require these officials to send electors their ballots “not later than the 14 days before the election.”

Ballot Return Deadlines: All ballots that are dropped off in person must be submitted by 7 p.m. local time on Election Day. According to the Nevada secretary of state’s office, “Mail-in ballots that are postmarked on or before the day of the election AND received by the 4th day after election day by 5 p.m., will be accepted as received and processed according to Nevada State law.”

Ballot Harvesting: Nevada law permits any “person authorized by the voter [to] return the mail ballot on behalf of the voter by mail or personal delivery to the county clerk, or any ballot drop box established in the county.”

Mail-In Ballot Signature Requirements: All electors voting via mail must sign the ballot envelope for it to be counted. The envelope signature must match the signature on the voter’s registration form.

Voter ID: Nevada does not require a person to show ID to vote. As summarized by Ballotpedia, state law requires a Nevada in-person voter to “sign his or her name in the election board register at his or her polling place.” That signature is then “compared with the signature on the voter’s original application to vote or another form of identification, such as a driver’s license, a state identification card, military identification, or another government-issued ID.”

Citizenship Requirements: Nevada law requires all eligible residents to be U.S. citizens to vote, although the state constitution does not explicitly stipulate only U.S. citizens can vote. The state does not require documentary proof of citizenship from people voting or registering to vote.

Post-Election Day Ballot Curing: Nevada law permits a “curing” period, in which local officials are required to contact voters to allow them to correct signature issues on their mail-in ballots or otherwise confirm the signature affixed to the ballot belonged to them. The voter “must provide a signature or a confirmation, as applicable, not later than 5 p.m. on the sixth day following the election” for the ballot to be counted.

Major Ballot Initiatives: There will be seven measures appearing on Nevada’s 2024 ballot, six of which are constitutional amendment proposals. Among the most notable are initiatives instituting ranked-choice voting (Question 3), effectively legalizing late-term abortion (Question 6), and requiring electors to present a valid form of ID in order to vote (Question 7).

Biggest Election Fights: The top issue raising concerns among election integrity activists in the state is the accuracy of Nevada’s voter rolls. Organizations such as the Public Interest Legal Foundation have documented what appear to be alarming inaccuracies within the voter registration lists, such as finding some registrants’ addresses listed at bars and casinos. Efforts by the Citizen Outreach Foundation to file citizen-led challenges to have these allegedly ineligible registrants removed have been met with resistance by Democrat Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, whose office recently issued a memo instructing local officials to stop processing the group’s challenges.

North Carolina

Voter Registration: The standard deadline to register to vote is 5 p.m., Oct. 11. However, North Carolinians can register to vote after the Oct. 11 deadline in person at early voting locations.

In-Person Early Voting: Begins Oct. 17 and ends at 3 p.m. on Nov. 2.

Mail-In Voting: Any registered voter in North Carolina can vote by mail for any reason. Voters must request the ballot using an absentee ballot request form, either online or with a paper form. This year, voters must request absentee ballots by Oct. 29 at 5 p.m.

Ballot Return Deadlines: Ballots must be returned by Election Day, Nov. 5 at 7:30 p.m. (with exceptions for UOCAVA voters).

Ballot Harvesting: North Carolina law permits a near relative or legal guardian to return a voter’s absentee ballot. It is otherwise a class I felony for anyone to deliver a ballot to a voter or return it for them.

Mail-In Ballot Signature Requirements: Voters must sign their absentee ballot envelope.

Absentee ballots must be filled out in the presence of two adult witnesses who are not disqualified by other state statutes. Those two persons must print and sign their names on the application and certificate, as well as provide their addresses. Voters can also fulfill the requirement with the seal and signature of one notary public.

Voter ID: A photo ID is generally required to vote in North Carolina, but the address on the ID “does not have to match the voter registration records.”

If an in-person voter does not have a voter ID, he will be asked to either complete an ID exception form and vote provisionally, or vote provisionally and return to his county elections office with a valid ID “by the day before [the] county canvass.” North Carolinians voting by mail are required to provide a copy of a photo ID when returning their ballot, but they can also fill out an exception form. Counties are required to count provisional ballots as long as the ID exception forms are “properly completed.”

Exceptions for not showing an ID are expansive, and range from a disability to “work or school schedule” to a religious objection to being photographed. (Being the victim of a declared natural disaster occurring withing 100 days of Election Day also qualifies a voter for an ID exception.) Mail-in voters who are somehow unable to attach a copy of their ID must include either their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number.

North Carolina does not require photo ID for voters covered under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act.

Citizenship Requirements: North Carolina law requires U.S. citizenship to register to vote. However, citizenship documents are not required to register.

Post-Election Day Ballot Curing: North Carolina allows for ballot curing in certain circumstances, including if the voter “did not sign the voter certification,” “signed the application in the wrong place,” or failed to include a copy of a photo ID with an absentee ballot.

Major Ballot Initiatives: North Carolina only has one ballot initiative certified to appear on the ballot this November. The Citizenship Requirement for Voting Amendment was referred to voters by the state legislature and would amend the state constitution to provide that only eligible U.S. citizens can vote in the state. The amendment would prohibit local governments from allowing noncitizens to vote.

Biggest Election Fights: The RNC has filed several lawsuits against the North Carolina State Board of Elections.

The western part of the state was also significantly damaged by Hurricane Helene, which will make it more difficult to vote in the deep-red region of the state, though state officials are in the process of implementing emergency election procedures.

Pennsylvania

Voter Registration: The deadline to register to vote in Pennsylvania is Oct. 21. The state implemented automatic voter registration in September 2023 through the Department of Motor Vehicles. Since then, anyone who gets a driver’s license and is eligible to vote is automatically registered unless they intentionally opted out of voter registration. Pennsylvanians may also register online, by mail, or in person at their county election office.

In-Person Early Voting: Pennsylvania treats early voting and mail-in voting the same. Voters can go to their county election office, receive a mail-in ballot, vote, and submit this ballot “all in the same visit.” In-person voting starts as soon as counties start mailing out ballots, but that date is different for each county. Voters may check online with the Pennsylvania Department of State to see when their counties’ ballots are ready.

Mail-In Voting: The deadline for requesting a mail-in ballot is Oct. 29. Any registered voter may request a mail-in ballot.

Ballot Return Deadlines: The county must receive a completed ballot by 8 p.m. on Election Day, Nov. 5. Counties will not accept ballots with a postmark of Nov. 5 at 8 p.m.; the ballot must be in hand by then.

Ballot Harvesting: Voters must return their own ballots, although there are some exceptions for voters with a disability to designate someone, in writing, to deliver their ballot. Former Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf created a stir in 2021 when he casually admitted in a radio interview that his wife violated this rule, by dropping off his ballot for him. It is not allowed in Pennsylvania, even between spouses.

Mail-In Ballot Signature Requirements: Voters mail ballots in a two-envelope system. The inner, secrecy envelope is not marked, but the outer, mailing envelope must be signed and dated.

Voter ID: Voters must provide a driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number when registering to vote, as required by federal law. Identification is also required the first time a voter casts a vote in a precinct where they will sign a voter roll book, though the ID does not have to include a photo (voters can use a utility bill or bank statement as long as it includes their name and address). After that, no identification is required as long as the voter continues in the same precinct because they sign the book each election. If a Pennsylvania voter moves to a new precinct, he will need to show identification again.

Voters who qualify for a ballot under the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) or the Voting Accessibility for the Elderly and Handicapped Act do not need to show ID.

Citizenship Requirements: You must be a U.S. citizen and a resident of Pennsylvania at least 30 days before the next election to register to vote.

Military voters, and those who are registered in Pennsylvania but out of the country, may register to vote through UOCAVA. They may participate in federal and local elections. Pennsylvania also allows voters who once lived in the state but now live overseas and have no intention of returning to vote as “federal” UOCAVA voters. These voters may vote in federal-level elections such as president, vice president, U.S. senator, and congressional representative. They cannot vote in Pennsylvania’s local elections.

Post-Election Day Ballot Curing: Some counties give voters notice and opportunity to “cure” mistakes, and some do not. State law tells counties not to count improperly marked ballots, but the Pennsylvania Department of State has issued guidance telling counties to flag ballots in need of curing so voters will receive an automatic notice informing voters they can cure their ballots. This has become a point of controversy.

Biggest Election Fights: Mail-in ballot curing has been under dispute, and in the courts for several years, and in multiple cases. Should counties toss out improperly marked ballots as the election code directs? Or does Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt have the authority to override the law and issue guidance to mail-in voters offering them a second chance to mark their outer envelope properly? Counties have been choosing to either follow the law or the guidance, giving voters different responses to the same problem, depending on where they live.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Republican Party of Pennsylvania challenged Schmidt and Pennsylvania’s 67 county boards of elections over this matter. The RNC believes voters should be held to the law as written by the elected General Assembly, which does have the authority to change the law, and so far, hasn’t. Last week, the state supreme court declined to rule on the issue before Election Day.

Wisconsin

Voter Registration: Wisconsin offers same-day voter registration, so eligible Wisconsinites can register to vote in person on Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024 (Election Day). The deadline to register to vote by mail or online is Oct. 16.

In-Person Early Voting: Counties can offer early voting from Oct. 22 until Nov. 3, although the dates and office hours “vary by municipality.”

Mail-In Voting: Absentee ballots begin being mailed out 47 days before November’s general election.

Ballot Return Deadlines: All absentee ballots must be delivered no later than 8 p.m. local time on Election Day. The ballots may be returned via mail or hand-delivered to the polling place or clerk’s election office.

Ballot Harvesting: Wisconsin law implies that only the voter shall mail the ballot or deliver it in person to the municipal clerk’s office that issued the ballot.

Mail-In Ballot Signature Requirements: All absentee voters must sign and seal the ballot certificate envelope. A witness also is required to sign the envelope and include his address. Ballots that fail to include the required information are rejected.

Voter ID: Wisconsin requires in-person voters to show the “original copy of their photo ID” to vote.

Citizenship Requirements: Wisconsin’s constitution states that “Every United States citizen age 18 or older who is a resident of an election district in this state” is eligible to vote. “Citizenship is documented through a U.S. birth certificate or a Certificate of Naturalization, but proof of citizenship is not required to vote,” notes the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

Post-Election Day Ballot Curing: This has been an on-again, off-again issue in the Badger State for several years. In February, the Wisconsin Elections Commission voted 5-1 on guidance advising clerks to accept ballots with incomplete ballot witness addresses following a Dane County Court ruling on the curing question. A Waukesha County judge in 2022 had ruled that clerks completing or fixing missing information on absentee ballot envelopes on behalf of the voter violated state law. Concerns over improperly “fixed” ballot envelopes were at issue in the 2020 election, and a subject of unsuccessful Trump campaign lawsuits challenging the results of the election in Wisconsin. A federal judge earlier this year tossed out a lawsuit by Democrat Party fixer Marc Elias’ lawfare group seeking to block Wisconsin election law requiring a witness to sign a voter’s absentee ballot.

Major Ballot Initiatives: Wisconsin voters will decide whether to amend Wisconsin’s constitution to provide that “only” U.S. citizens 18 or older may vote in national, state or local elections. Currently the constitution states that “every” U.S. citizen 18 or older may vote. Citizen Only Voting Amendment advocates argue the existing language leaves a loophole that would allow Wisconsin municipalities and the state to open elections to noncitizens, as has been done in other states and the District of Columbia.

Biggest Election Fights: Wisconsin’s four-year battle over the widespread use of absentee ballot drop boxes was decided by a new liberal-led court, just in time for the 2024 general election. In a 4-3 ruling in July, the court endorsed the return of absentee ballot drop boxes, opening the door to the same kind of election shenanigans that plagued the Badger State in 2020. The decision overturned the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s 4-3 ruling by the conservative majority in 2022 banning the widespread use of the drop boxes.

For more election news and updates, visit electionbriefing.com.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

South Dakota Removes 273 Noncitizens from Its Voter Rolls Ahead Of 2024 Election

By: Shawn Fleetwood | October 08, 2024

South Dakota announced Monday it has removed 273 noncitizens from its voter rolls, dealing a major blow to Democrats’ narrative that foreign nationals aren’t interfering in U.S. elections. The announcement was revealed in a Department of Public Safety (DPS) press release, which noted that the “discovery was part of a review to ensure the integrity of South Dakota’s elections and safeguard against improper voter registration.” The agency said the efforts to remove these noncitizens from the rolls are being handled by the office of Republican Secretary of State Monae Johnson.

“Ensuring the integrity of our elections is our highest priority,” Johnson said in a statement. “We are proud of the thorough work done to safeguard South Dakota’s voter rolls. We worked closely with DPS to resolve this issue, and we’re constantly working to make sure that only eligible citizens are participating in our elections.”

While regularly dismissed by Democrats and their media allies as a non-issue, foreign nationals inserting themselves into America’s electoral process is anything but. In recent months, numerous states have collectively removed thousands of noncitizens who were registered to vote in their respective jurisdictions.

On Monday, Oregon announced that state officials identified “an additional 302 people on the state’s voter rolls who didn’t provide proof of citizenship when they were registered to vote,” according to Fox News. That figure brings the total number of suspected noncitizens registering to vote since 2021 up from its previous estimate of 1,259 to 1,561.

In May, the office of Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose discovered 137 voter registrations “assigned to Ohio residents who have twice confirmed their non-citizenship status” to the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles. State officials revealed in August they subsequently found an additional 499 noncitizens who were registered to vote.

In an August executive order, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin disclosed that the commonwealth’s department of elections had removed 6,303 foreign nationals from the state’s voter rolls since he took office in January 2022. Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen revealed that same month plans to clear 3,251 potential noncitizens from the Yellowhammer State’s voter registration lists.

Texas has similarly removed 6,500 suspected noncitizens from its voter rolls since 2021, according to an August announcement by Gov. Greg Abbott.

[READ: Federal Data: Thousands Of Illegals Are Registered To Vote, But In 21 Years DOJ Has Only Prosecuted 35]

Last month, Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird brought charges against Jorge Oscar Sanchez-Vasquez, a noncitizen legally residing in the United States, for allegedly registering to vote and casting a ballot in a 2024 city council race.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served 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

Author Shawn Fleetwood profile

Shawn Fleetwood

Visit on Twitter@ShawnFleetwood

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Newsom Signs Law Barring Huntington Beach Voters from Deciding Their Own Voter ID Laws

By: Brianna Lyman | October 01, 2024

California Gov. Gavin Newsom — California’s Warden/Governor Gavin ***“I do what the hell I want”*** Newsome

Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., signed a law Sunday undermining the will of Huntington Beach voters who approved a measure requiring voter ID. The new state law bars cities from adopting such measures. In March, 53.4% of Huntington Beach residents approved a ballot measure that would require voters present identification in order to vote in municipal elections. The measure was slated to take effect in 2026 and also permitted the city to “provide more in-person voting locations” and “monitor ballot drop-boxes.” But Newsom signed into law Sunday legislation that was originally introduced in response to the Huntington Beach city council approving the measure prior to placing it on the ballot. The new law prohibits “a local government from enacting or enforcing any charter provision, ordinance, or regulation requiring a person to present identification for the purpose of voting or submitting a ballot at any polling place, vote center, or other location where ballots are cast or submitted, as specified.”

The state previously sued Huntington Beach in April to prevent the will of the voters (in the name of “democracy”). California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued the city claiming, “the right to freely cast your vote is the foundation of our democracy and Huntington Beach’s voter ID policy flies in the face of this principle.”

It is unclear whether the lawsuit will still be pursued. The Federalist has inquired with Bonta’s office for a status update.

Bonta had previously sent a letter to city officials in September 2023 claiming the measure “conflicts with state law” and falsely alleged voter ID measures “serve to suppress voter participation.” Bonta told city officials to withdraw the measure or else Bonta would take “action.”

Bonta’s suit alleged Huntington Beach’s voter ID provisions were “preempted and invalid” in matters in which “local law conflicts with state law reasonably tailored to the resolution of a statewide concern.”

The suit also argued the measure undermined the authority of the state legislature, “placing the onus on registered voters to establish their eligibility to vote, and groundlessly challenging the right to vote.”

Huntington Beach City Attorney Michael Gates said in response to the suit that the city would fight to “uphold and defend the will of the people,” according to Courthouse News.

Gates argued that state law (at the time the measure was adopted by the city), did not prohibit the city from adopting the ballot measure. Gates pointed to the introduction of the legislation after the proposal was approved by the city council arguing, as reported by Courthouse News, that “this proves that Bonta [is] wrong — if passing voter ID laws was illegal, why was a new bill necessary?”

For more election news and updates, visit electionbriefing.com.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2

Author Brianna Lyman profile

Brianna Lyman

Visit on Twitter@briannalyman2

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Oklahoma Removes 450,000 Ineligible Voters from Rolls, Including More Than 5,000 Felons

By: Logan Washburn | September 20, 2024

Author Logan Washburn profile

Logan Washburn

Oklahoma election officials have removed more than 450,000 ineligible voters from the state’s rolls ahead of November’s election.

“Voting is our most sacred duty as Americans — and every Oklahoman wants to know their vote is securely cast and properly counted,” said Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt in a press release.

State election officials have removed 453,000 total ineligible voters since 2021, Stitt’s office announced Wednesday.

As part of “routine voter list maintenance,” the state has removed 5,607 felons, 14,993 duplicate registrations, 97,065 dead voters, and 143,682 voters who moved out of state, according to the release. During address verification, officials also canceled 194,962 inactive voters.

We all need an ID to fly, buy alcohol, cash a check, etc.

There’s no reason a state shouldn’t have strict voter ID laws. It’s just common sense.

In Oklahoma, our laws require proof of identity for every voter, regardless of whether you’re voting early, absentee, or in-person.
— Governor Kevin Stitt (@GovStitt) September 18, 2024

Stitt’s office has been working with legislators, the state election board, and the secretary of state on voter list maintenance. Officials are using technology like artificial intelligence to “protect our elections,” said Secretary of State Josh Cockroft in the release.

“We’ve aggressively pursued policies to ensure voting is secure and accurate,” Cockroft said. “Every eligible citizen will have their vote counted and their voice heard.”

Oklahoma allows “only eligible voters” to take part in elections, according to the release. The state’s June primaries had a “100% voter verification match,” KOSU reported.

Stitt formed a Campaign Finance and Election Threats Task Force in November 2023, according to the release. The task force works to “assess the electoral process, scrutinize foreign investment in campaigns, and ensure Oklahoma elections are the safest in the nation.”

The task force recommended random post-election audits, banning ranked-choice voting, regulating the use of AI, changing contribution limits by “non-corporate entities,” banning foreign campaign expenditures, and working with Native American tribes to enforce election law, according to state documents.

“This Task Force was charged with investigating the most critical aspect of our republic: ensuring our elections are free and fair,” Stitt said in an April press release, encouraging state legislators to adopt the recommendations.

Paul Ziriax said in the latest press release that successful recounts and post-election audits have “proven the accuracy of Oklahoma’s voting system.”

“Our laws and procedures are designed to ensure the integrity and security of our elections,” Ziriax said.

Texas recently announced the removal of 1.1 million ineligible voters from the rolls during routine maintenance ahead of November’s election, as The Federalist previously reported. Other states have taken similar steps to deal with ineligible voters on the rolls.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin revealed in an executive order in August that the state’s department of elections had removed more than 6,300 noncitizens from the voter rolls, as The Federalist reported. The same month, Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen announced his office found more than 3,000 potential noncitizens registered to vote. Earlier this year, Ohio discovered more than 100 noncitizens registered to vote, spurring the state to clean its voter rolls.

For more election news and updates, visit electionbriefing.com.

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.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Harris: Trump’s Debate Dodging Due to ‘Toxic Positions’

By Nicole Wells | Friday, 13 September 2024, 03:25 PM EDT

Vice President Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign suggested on Friday that the “toxic positions” former President Donald Trump shared at the debate in Philadelphia earlier this week are the reason he doesn’t want to debate again. Harris called for another debate after her performance on Tuesday night exceeded expectations, but Trump shot down the idea on Thursday, saying there’s no reason to debate the vice president again.

“When a prizefighter loses a fight, the first words out of his mouth are, “I WANT A REMATCH,” Trump said in a Truth Social post. “Polls clearly show that I won the Debate against Comrade Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ Radical Left Candidate, on Tuesday night, and she immediately called for a Second Debate.”

“THERE WILL BE NO THIRD DEBATE!” he said, after participating in the debate against President Joe Biden in June and the one against Harris on Tuesday.

In a Friday memo obtained by The Hill, Ian Sams, Harris campaign senior spokesperson and senior adviser for rapid response, outlined “5 toxic positions Trump took” and claimed those positions will come back to haunt him in November.

Sams also claimed Harris appeared “presidential” and was “in total command” during the debate.

“While much of the focus the past few days has rightly been on Vice President Harris’ total and complete shutdown of Trump, it shouldn’t be lost in the shuffle that Trump took at least five toxic positions on the debate stage,” Sams wrote.

Trump’s five “toxic positions,” according to the Harris campaign official, include:

Refusing to say if he would veto a national abortion ban
Denying the outcome of the 2020 election
Saying “we” when referring to the protesters who breached the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021
Saying he had “concepts of a plan” to repeal ObamaCare
Not saying if he wanted Ukraine to win its fight against Russia

On Thursday, Harris reportedly ridiculed Trump at a North Carolina campaign rally for saying he had “concepts of a plan.”

In the memo, Sams said “Trump should have to answer for” his “toxic positions.”

“Trump doesn’t want to have to account for them on another debate stage, but he should have to say what the ‘concepts’ are that he is considering repealing [ObamaCare],” he wrote.

Nicole Wells ✉

Nicole Wells, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Thousands Of Noncitizens on U.S. Voter Rolls Assure Americans the Next Election Will Be Unsafe and Unfair

By: Ben Weingarten | August 15, 2024

Author Ben Weingarten profile

Ben Weingarten

Visit on Twitter@bhweingarten

More than a dozen jurisdictions run by Democrats — including Washington, D.C., and several adjacent Maryland municipalities — allow noncitizens to vote in some local elections. San Francisco not only permits noncitizens to vote but appointed one to serve on its elections commission.

Such developments, against a backdrop of millions of illegal migrants streaming into the United States under the Biden-Harris administration, bring new urgency to debates over election integrity. Many Republicans fear that a widespread effort is afoot to give noncitizens the full benefits of citizenship, including the right to vote in all elections, on top of benefits already available to illegal aliens in some places, notably driver’s licenses, food stamps, government health care, and work visas.

Although Democrats note that noncitizens may not participate in federal elections and claim there is little evidence noncitizens are voting unlawfully, critics are unmollified.

A RealClearInvestigations analysis of proposed and enacted state and federal laws, along with other reporting and research, suggests that the fight over noncitizen voting is only likely to intensify this year — both in the immediate wake of an expected closely contested presidential election and in its aftermath.

States across the country report that thousands of noncitizens have been discovered on voter rolls in the past decade, with unknown numbers already having voted:

Pennsylvania found 11,000 registrants suspected of being noncitizens after becoming aware of a decades-old “glitch” in the state’s “motor voter” registration system in 2017. It removed 2,500 individuals from the rolls, and it could not verify the citizenship status of the other 8,700 registrants.
Virginia has removed over 11,000 registrants from its rolls between 2014 and 2023 — and more than 6,300 from January 2022 to July 2024 alone — upon learning that they had declared themselves noncitizens in other interactions with government, typically in transactions with the state’s department of motor vehicles. House Republicans cited a study showing that of nearly 1,500 noncitizens the Commonwealth removed from rolls from May 2023 to February 2024, 23 percent had cast ballots since February 2019.
New Jersey had some 616 self-reported noncitizens in 11 counties “engaged on some level with the statewide registration system,” 9 percent of whom cast ballots, according to a 2017 survey conducted by the Public Interest Legal Foundation.
Boston, Massachusetts, officials revealed this year that the city had removed 70 noncitizens from the rolls, some 22 of whom had voted, the removals coming in response to disclosure requests from the Public Interest Legal Foundation.
Ohio recently ordered the removal of 499 noncitizens from its voter rolls after removing some 137 other registrants back in May.
North Carolina identified more than 1,400 registrants on state voter rolls who did not appear to be naturalized, in an audit conducted prior to the 2014 midterm election. Eighty-nine flagged individuals appeared at the polls to vote, and 24 had their registration challenged; 11 challenges were sustained or justified.
Arizona classifies some 42,000 people on its rolls as “federal-only” registrants as of July 1, 2024 — after they had failed to provide the proof of citizenship necessary to vote in state and local races. The state’s bifurcated voter rolls are the result of a 2013 Supreme Court ruling in which a 7-2 majority led by the late Justice Antonin Scalia ruled that federal voter registration requirements — of which documentary proof of citizenship is not one — preempted the state’s standards.

Other evidence of noncitizen voting has been found in states from California to Illinois.

Republicans argue that such examples expose weaknesses in the voter registration and administration process — including that registrants need not provide proof of citizenship to get on the voter rolls. These and other loopholes in state-run systems make elections vulnerable to ineligible noncitizen voters today.

Each side has its own research to support its claims. Democrats cite a study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, finding that local election officials overseeing the tabulation of 23.5 million ballots during the 2016 presidential election identified only 30 potential incidents of noncitizen voting.

Republicans highlight a recent study estimating that 10 percent to 27 percent of noncitizens are illegally registered to vote, and 5 percent to 13 percent will illegally vote in 2024 — a potentially massive number given the illegal alien portion of the noncitizen population alone numbers well over 10 million. Election integrity advocates argue that states have not found many incidents of noncitizen voting for the simple reason that authorities, including the Department of Justice, do not look for it.

“DOJ investigations of illegal voting are all but nonexistent,” Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, said in a recent floor debate concerning the SAVE (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility) Act, a bill Lee and House colleague Chip Roy, R-Texas, introduced to combat noncitizen voting. After the House passed the measure in July, Democrats blocked the legislation in the upper chamber, where it remains stalled.

“[T]oo many prosecutors refuse to enforce the law even when such illegal behavior is discovered by election officials or others,” Hans von Spakovsky, a former Department of Justice official who now works at the conservative Heritage Foundation, told Congress in May.

Should election officials fail to prevent noncitizens from casting ballots on the front end, J. Christian Adams, a fellow former DOJ official and president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, told RCI, there is “almost nothing” the public or political parties can do on the back end to identify, challenge, and invalidate noncitizen votes prior to election certification.

Adams’ group has documented myriad electoral races decided by one vote or tied over the last two decades — something he and others argue indicates just how critical it is to combat illegal voting, given the potential impact to tight races up and down ballots.

States generally seem unfazed by the prospect of noncitizen voting. For this article, RealClearInvestigations contacted authorities in the seven states comprising RealClearPolitics’ top battlegrounds: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Two states, Michigan and Pennsylvania, did not respond to RCI’s inquiries. Election authorities in the five responsive states maintained that current law is a sufficient deterrent to noncitizen voting, emphasizing that casting a ballot as a foreigner would constitute a criminal offense with grave penalties.

“Someone would have to knowingly and intentionally commit a class 6 Felony if they did vote as a noncitizen, and it would result in the revocation of their legal status in the USA, and they would likely face deportation,” a spokesman for Arizona’s Democrat Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said in a statement. The spokesman said he hoped his statement, which pointed to the state’s voter challenge process and noted other procedures pertaining to citizenship, would “compel” RealClearInvestigations to “clear up [RCI’s] notions and erroneous assumptions.”

Georgia touted its 2022 citizenship audit in correspondence with RCI, the first such review of the voter rolls for citizenship in state history, in which it found that 1,634 people who attempted to register to vote were not verified by the SAVE program. All were in “pending citizenship” status within Georgia’s internal systems, and thus none had been allowed to vote. “Due to the effective processes Georgia has in place to verify U.S citizenship at the time of registration … we are confident noncitizens are not voting in Georgia, and if one ever does, they will be punished to the full extent of the law,” Mike Hassinger, a spokesman for Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, told RCI.

North Carolina elections board Public Information Director Patrick Gannon told RCI: “We have little evidence of noncitizens voting in elections, and get very few complaints alleging voting by noncitizens.”

He pointed to a 2016 state audit report and the handful of cases alleging noncitizen voting that the bipartisan State Board of Elections has referred to prosecutors since 2017.

Similarly, Wisconsin Elections Commission Public Information Officer Riley Vetterkind told RCI, “There is no evidence to support the idea that noncitizens are voting in Wisconsin in significant numbers.” The spokesperson for the state’s bipartisan commission cited the few instances of suspected election fraud, irregularities, or violations referred to district attorneys by municipal clerks that the state’s elections commission “has been made aware of.”

These messages of reassurance, however, at times come with notes of caution that underpin election integrity advocates’ concerns.

States each have their own independent processes to maintain voter lists. Those processes vary widely in vigor, tempo, and transparency. They are often based on different degrees of access to sources of citizenship status with which to identify ineligible voters. “No state or federal law requires the WEC [Wisconsin Elections Commission] or clerks to verify a voter’s citizenship status beyond requiring the voter to certify that they are a U.S. citizen as a qualification for voter eligibility,” said Vetterkind.

Pennsylvania has asserted that “the Commonwealth has no systematic program to identify and remove non-citizens from the voting rolls.”

The Public Interest Legal Foundation has litigated against the Keystone State and other jurisdictions just to get a peek into their registration list maintenance processes. As for how states identify potential noncitizens, Gannon said of North Carolina’s audit that “relying on state databases was wildly inaccurate for determining citizenship status.”

The state passed a law in 2023 requiring that the election board regularly reconcile its registration list with lists provided by state courts of those excused from jury duty due to lack of citizenship — an ad hoc approach commonly used by other states.

Georgia emphasized its use of the Department of Homeland Security’s more robust SAVE tool, which provides “point in time immigration status” for those who have been issued a unique immigration identifier. (This Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements tool is distinct from the GOP-sponsored legislation with the same acronym.)

Most state officials who responded to RCI’s query emphasized that there are laws on the books permitting third-party challenges to voter eligibility. But this is a measure requiring time, money, and effort. The two former Justice Department officials — Spakovsky and Adams — recently took issue with the view that state audits and scrubs of voter rolls ought to inspire confidence, writing in the Daily Signal:

Because almost no state even attempts to verify that individuals registering to vote are U.S. citizens — and because the federal government, including both the courts and the executive branch, have put up significant barriers to such verification — we don’t really know how many aliens, whether here legally or illegally, are registering and voting.

Rougher Weather Ahead

Whatever the extent of noncitizen registration and voting today, Election Integrity Network leader Cleta Mitchell says conditions are building for a “perfect storm.” Two factors are about to produce it: “the invasion of our country by millions of illegals” and a series of largely Democrat Party-driven efforts to ease voter registration and participation.

Mitchell and others, including The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, have suggested that significant numbers of noncitizens could wind up on the voting rolls under Biden administration Executive Order 14019, which directs every federal agency to register and mobilize voters.

Officials in Alabama and Mississippi say that under the executive order, which RCI has previously examined, authorities are already attempting to register noncitizens to vote. The Biden administration initiative calls on federal agencies to coordinate with third-party groups in pursuit of its objectives as well. Adams, testifying alongside Spakovsky for the Republican majority before the House Administration Committee in May, said that “most often noncitizens are getting on the rolls through the motor voter registration process or third-party registration drives.”

Regarding motor-voter registration, the Only Citizens Vote Coalition warns that “many states are now automatically registering people to vote at the time of coming into contact with the DMV unless the person ‘opts out’ of registration.”

Advocates are also concerned that practices like same-day voter registration and allowing the use of student IDs to vote — IDs that can be issued to foreigners — could lead to noncitizens ending up on voter rolls and potentially voting.

These issues likely only exacerbate concerns election integrity advocates already have around practices like mail-in voting and ballot harvesting that have become widespread since the 2020 election. A more robust “level of citizenship tracking and verification would almost certainly require legislative change to accomplish,” Wisconsin’s Riley Vetterkind told RCI.

Congressional Republicans have sought to do just that with the SAVE Act, which passed the House on July 10 in a largely party-line vote. Under the existing registration system, applicants attest to their citizenship simply by checking a box, under penalty of perjury. House Speaker Mike Johnson calls this nothing more than an “honor system” that leaves “people who have already proven they have no regard or respect for our laws” undeterred.

The SAVE Act would close this loophole by requiring that applicants provide proof of citizenship in person when registering to vote in federal elections. Adams has argued that under the less stringent status quo, noncitizens often end up on the voter rolls through no fault of their own — subjecting aliens who often can’t speak English to severe legal liability.

Critics of the SAVE Act, echoing some states, believe those liabilities — including the threat of deportation, jail time, and other punishments — sufficiently curb noncitizen registration and voting.

New York University Brennan Center for Justice President Michael Waldman emphasized in the May congressional hearing, as the Democrat minority’s witness opposite Adams and Spakovsky, that “under current law, noncitizen voting in federal elections is illegal four times over: it is both a state and federal crime to register to vote, and it is both a state and federal crime to vote in federal elections.”

The liberal think tank did not respond to RCI’s inquiries in connection with this story. Democrat Party leaders from President Biden on down also dismiss evidence of noncitizen voting, claiming it is virtually non-existent.

“Even the conservative CATO Institute has said that ‘noncitizens don’t illegally vote in detectable numbers,’” California Democrat Sen. Alex Padilla noted in a floor speech in response to Mike Lee, referencing a 2020 blog post from the libertarian think tank.

Democrats also claim the bill’s documentary proof of citizenship requirements disenfranchise potential voters. They point to past evidence indicating that similar state laws in places like Kansas ended up preventing eligible registrants from voting. They also highlight surveys showing millions of Americans lack commonly used documents to prove citizenship, like a passport or birth certificate — two of a number of forms one could present to satisfy the SAVE Act’s requirements.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries branded the SAVE Act an “extreme MAGA Republican voter suppression bill.”

DHS’s ‘Slow-Walking’

Registration requirements and voter ID laws, which vary by state, do not necessarily prevent ineligible individuals from voting since noncitizens — and, in some cases, illegal aliens — can obtain relevant forms of identification. As Republican Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin highlighted in a recent executive order, only three states — his included — require even a full Social Security number to register to vote.

Thus, the SAVE Act would also mandate that states bolster their registration list maintenance practices explicitly to identify and remove noncitizens from voter rolls — including through cross-referencing their lists with more comprehensive data sources.

Only five states currently have access to one resource referenced in the bill, the Department of Homeland Security’s SAVE tool. A House Administration Committee report indicates that DHS is not granting the same level of access to all states and may be “slow-walking” requests to use it.

‘Significant Inaccuracies’ in the Federal Database

When asked about this allegation, a spokesman for the U.S. Customs and Immigration Service told RCI, “There is an established process agencies must undergo and eligibility criteria agencies must meet to complete SAVE registration.”

“USCIS is committed to working with agencies seeking access to SAVE and processing registration requests as efficiently as possible,” the spokesman added while referring a reporter to several resources on the USCIS website.

Still, these databases are not seen by all as a panacea. “Even using the federal SAVE database, which can only be used to determine current citizenship status for one person at a time, and only when that person has been involved in the federal immigration system, our agency found significant inaccuracies in the data we received,” North Carolina’s Patrick Gannon told RCI in an email. “There is no comprehensive, accurate, or up-to-date database of U.S. citizens that election administrators could use for verification purposes.”

Democrats argue that the more robust voter registration list maintenance demanded by Republicans could leave eligible voters purged. Calling the SAVE Act “nothing other than a solution in search of a problem,” Sen. Padilla blocked the bill in the upper chamber.

With a September spending fight looming in Congress, the House Freedom Caucus is seeking to force the issue by calling on leadership to attach the SAVE Act to any stopgap spending solution — a plan Sen. Lee has also endorsed.

Meanwhile, election integrity advocates like the Only Citizens Vote Coalition are calling for state-level model legislation to combat noncitizen voting. The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project has been working to identify vulnerabilities in extant voter registration systems and potential legal violations, publicize them, and press lawmakers to enforce relevant laws to combat noncitizen voting.

The conservative public interest law organization America First Legal recently sent letters to all 50 states instructing them that under existing law, states can and should send requests to the DHS soliciting the citizenship status of registered voters.

America First Legal has also sent demand letters to all 15 Arizona county recorders, compelling them to verify the citizenship of all “federal-only” voters, including through making citizenship requests of DHS — or face legal action.

On Aug. 5, America First Legal filed suit against the Maricopa County Recorder for his alleged failure to act in response to the group’s demand letter. Three days later, the Republican National Committee filed an emergency application at the Supreme Court in a bid to compel Arizona to enforce its proof of citizenship requirements for the 2024 presidential election.

Warning: Extended Lawfare Ahead

These forces on the right are likely to find themselves locked in battle with the left for years to come.

House Democrats, today in the slim minority, have voted to continue apportioning congressional seats based on total population rather than total citizens in a given jurisdiction; to protect noncitizen voting rights in Washington, D.C.; and, in legislation aimed at providing certain aliens with a path to permanent resident status, to permit authorities to waive unlawful voting as grounds for deeming noncitizens inadmissible. Leftist witnesses were unable or unwilling to affirm that only citizens should be permitted to vote in federal elections during a March Senate Judiciary Committee hearing concerning elections.

As a presidential candidate in 2020, Vice President Kamala Harris signaled her support for providing government health care to illegal aliens. Her presumed running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, signed legislation providing benefits for illegal aliens, including state-funded health care, driver’s licenses, and free college tuition.

Those on the left see voting rights, like the expansion of other benefits to noncitizens, as a matter of fairness.

“Immigrants pay taxes, they use city services, their kids go to our public schools. They are part of our community. And they deserve a say in local government,” New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson said in defending a bill that has been ruled unconstitutional that would have allowed an estimated 800,000 noncitizens to vote in local elections.

The Trump-Vance campaign, by contrast, has called for mass deportation of the illegal alien population (to which Democrats increasingly wish to extend rights and benefits), among other immigration measures the Republicans say aim to protect and support Americans. In contrast to the growing coterie of blue-state jurisdictions embracing noncitizen voting, red states are increasingly passing amendments prohibiting local governments from allowing noncitizens to vote, with Louisiana and Ohio approving such constitutional changes in 2022. Eight more states have citizenship-related ballot measures in the 2024 election.

This article is republished from RealClearInvestigations, with permission.

Ben Weingarten is editor at large for RealClearInvestigations. He is a senior contributor to The Federalist, columnist at Newsweek, and a contributor to the New York Post and Epoch Times, among other publications. Subscribe to his newsletter at weingarten.substack.com, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Dems Lay Groundwork To Prosecute, Sue, And Threaten Swing-State Officials Into Certifying Elections

By: Brianna Lyman | August 15, 2024

Author Brianna Lyman profile

Brianna Lyman

Visit on Twitter@briannalyman2

After Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, a handful of congressional Democrats objected to certifying his electoral victory. But, after some local election officials withheld votes to certify the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden over concerns about that election’s administration, Democrats launched an intimidation campaign to force those officials to fall in line. Wielding prosecutions and threats of lawsuits, their message is clear: rubber-stamp election results or else.

Last week, for example, election meddler Marc Elias threatened Republican officials in a post on X, implying that, should they not certify election results, he will sue them.

“In 2020, Trump tried to overturn the election. My team and I beat him in court 60+ times,” Elias posted on X. “In 2022, Republicans in several counties refused to certify. We sued and won. Here is my message to the GOP: If you try to subvert the election in 2024, you will be sued and you will lose.”

In 2020, Trump tried to overturn the election. My team and I beat him in court 60+ times.

In 2022, Republicans in several counties refused to certify. We sued and won.

Here is my message to the GOP: If you try to subvert the election in 2024, you will be sued and you will lose.
— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) August 7, 2024

But it’s not just Elias who has weaponized the law to target election officials who dare to question the process or outcome of an election. Some of the most egregious examples are happening in key swing states.

Georgia

The Georgia State Election Board ruled in a 3-2 vote last week that county election board members are entitled to a “reasonable inquiry” into election discrepancies before they certify the results of an election. The rule clarifies that county board members are responsible for certifying an election “after reasonable inquiry that the tabulation and canvassing of the election are complete and accurate and that the results are a true and accurate accounting of all votes cast in that election.”

But for Fulton County board member Julie Adams, her decision not to certify the election results for the state’s March presidential preference primary led to threats from the Democrat Party of Georgia. Adams claims she requested election data such as the qualified voter list, the voter check-in list, and drop-box ballot recap sheets, among other things, prior to the certification of the presidential preference primary. Adams alleges the elections director refused to provide the information, and therefore Adams did not certify the results. But ten days later the Democrat Party of Georgia sent a letter to the entire Fulton County board effectively threatening criminal charges should members, like Adams, not certify the results.

Nevada

Nevada’s secretary of state and attorney general want to use the state’s Supreme Court to force election officials to certify the election results.

Three members of the Washoe County Board of Commissioners originally voted in July not to certify two recount primary races citing allegations of suspicious behavior were made during the public comment portion of a hearing. County Commissioner Clara Andriola reportedly said it was “not the first time that we’ve heard a lot of concerns of procedures, a lot of concerns of alleged mishaps” and said it warranted “further investigation.” One complainant, Val White, alleged she saw “multiple thumb drives” being used during both the election and recount after being allegedly told no thumb drives would be permitted.

Despite the concerns, Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar and Attorney General Aaron D. Ford in July filed a petition with the state Supreme Court to force the county to certify the results, arguing Nevada Administrative Code requires counties to certify recount results “within 5 working days after the completion of the recount.”

“This week, three county commissioners refused to canvass accurate election results as required by law,” Aguilar said. “This vote has the potential to set a dangerous precedent for elections in Nevada. It is unacceptable that any public officer would undermine the confidence of their voters.”

“I take serious the role of the Attorney General’s Office to defend Nevada’s elections against anyone who might try to delegitimize accurate election results or undermine a count of the people, and I will never hesitate to join the Secretary of State in protecting Nevada’s elections,” Ford said.

“We must have a legal precedent affirming that the canvass of the vote is ministerial, and that no elected official can deny the results of a legitimate election,” Aguilar said in a release earlier this month announcing the motion to hear the case was officially filed with the Nevada Supreme Court.

Arizona

In Arizona’s Cochise County, supervisors Terry Thomas Crosby and Peggy Judd were each charged with two felonies — conspiracy and interfering with an election officer — in 2023 by Arizona Attorney General Kristin Mayes after they stalled on certifying the 2022 county election results. A federal district judge recently denied the duo’s motions for dismissal and reamendment.

This occurred during the same year in which election administration in Arizona’s most populous county, Maricopa, was marred by allegations surrounding the administration of the 2022 midterms; these included claims of improperly calibrated printers that led to ballots being rejected. Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Wright even sent a letter to Maricopa election officials demanding answers regarding the election administration. As my colleague Shawn Fleetwood explained, the request “prompted Cochise and Mohave Counties to delay their respective election certifications until the 28th” of November.

Crosby and Judd chose not to certify the Cochise County results, claiming “they weren’t satisfied that the machines used to tabulate ballots were properly certified for use in elections, though state and federal election officials said they were,” The Associated Press reported. Before the midterm race, the Republicans also reportedly “abandoned plans to hand-count all ballots, which a court said would be illegal.”

Mayes said in a statement regarding the charges against Crisby and Judd that the “repeated attempts to undermine our democracy are unacceptable” — because nothing says protecting democracy like trying to jail those who question it.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Speaker Mike Johnson: Only Americans should decide our elections. Here’s how Congress can guarantee it

By Rep. Mike Johnson Fox News | Published August 12, 2024 5:00am EDT

There are few things more important to our country than ensuring the integrity of our elections. The people rightfully demand it, and Congress has a duty to act. Yet, when given the opportunity to eliminate one of the most glaring threats to fair elections, 198 House Democrats voted instead to keep the door open to fraud.

The threat is very real. In nearly all 50 states today — including every major electoral battleground state — a noncitizen can walk into a DMV or welfare office, fill out a federal voter registration form, claim they are a U.S. citizen, and be registered to vote. That noncitizen can then cast a ballot and help decide the direction of America.

REPUBLICANS SAY SCHUMER MUST ACT ON VOTER PROOF OF CITIZENSHIP BILL IF DEMOCRAT ‘REALLY CARES ABOUT DEMOCRACY’

This is not a hypothetical problem. I was recently in San Diego, CA to tour the new epicenter of the Biden-Harris border catastrophe where brave, overworked Customs and Border Protection agents have encountered millions of illegals. The agents told me the Biden-Harris Executive Order isn’t working the way the administration says it is. In some ways, it’s made the crisis worse.

Voting sign midterms — Noncitizen voting jeopardizes the rights of all Americans. FILE: ‘Vote Here’ sign is seen at a voting precinct. (REUTERS/Emily Elconin)

Instead of carrying out their mission of protecting our borders, they have become processing agents, forced by the administration to send illegals throughout the country with little paperwork or record of their location. Many of them end up at local DMVs.

While it is illegal and clearly wrong for a noncitizen to vote in a federal election, and thus engage in foreign election interference, a current loophole in the National Voter Registration Act actually prevents states from requesting proof of citizenship when the registration form is signed. To close that dangerous loophole and help ensure that only Americans decide American elections, House Republicans drafted and passed the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act. Our legislation makes several critically important reforms. It requires state election officials to request proof of citizenship for every person registering to vote and gives the state officials easy access to federal databases so they can confirm citizenship status.

Video

The SAVE Act also requires those state officials to clean up their voter rolls and directs the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to determine whether to conduct removal proceedings of any illegal alien who has registered unlawfully.

To ensure actual citizens can continue to easily register to vote, the bill allows state officials to accept a wide variety of documents for registrants to prove citizenship and requires states to establish an alternative process for Americans who have misplaced their documentation.

Finally, the SAVE Act requires DHS to notify a state chief election official whenever an individual has been naturalized to ensure our newest citizens can exercise their right to vote. These commonsense provisions are not only right, but they are also in high demand. Polling has shown that 89% of Americans believe only Americans should decide elections — including 82% of Democrats, 80% of Black voters, and 78% of Hispanic voters.

Video

In light of all this, one would expect overwhelmingly bipartisan support for the SAVE Act in Congress. But Democrat leaders put on a full-court press to discourage their members from supporting our bill, and the White House issued a veto threat.

The Democrats’ opposition to this simple election integrity bill is indefensible and exposes their intention to allow illegal aliens to vote.

Earlier this year, most of these same Democrats voted to count illegal aliens in the 2030 Census. They also voted to let noncitizens vote in local elections in Washington, D.C. Some may also remember, how, in 2019, then-presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris relied on a study that touted the “electoral implications” of widespread amnesty, including “sizable contributions to the margin of victory in swing states.” Perhaps that’s why Border Czar Harris has done such a pitiful job securing the border.

Those who have illegally entered our country have no regard for our laws and have no right to interfere in our lawful election processes. Virtually all Americans agree — except for the Biden-Harris administration and congressional Democrats, who are so desperate to hang on to power that they will sacrifice the integrity of our election system.

While it is illegal and clearly wrong for a noncitizen to vote in a federal election, and thus engage in foreign election interference, a current loophole in the National Voter Registration Act actually prevents states from requesting proof of citizenship when the registration form is signed.

In a study of the 2008 election, researchers estimated that 6.4% of noncitizens in the U.S. had voted in the general election. If a similar portion of the 7.2 million illegal aliens Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have welcomed into the country were to vote this year, those 460,800 votes would be more than enough to change the election outcome in a few key battleground states.

In an era of divided government where every single ballot matters immensely, we must have zero tolerance for fraud. One of our Republican colleagues won her first race in 2020 by only six votes. And for many weeks during this Congress, our majority in the House was held by just a one vote margin.

As the sanctity of our elections now hangs in the balance, the SAVE Act is urgently needed. It is smart policy and overwhelmingly supported by the American people. Everyone who shares this common concern should insist that Senator Schumer bring this bill forward to pass in the Senate, and that President Biden then sign it into law. The stakes could not be any higher.

Republican Mike Johnson is the 56th speaker of the United States House of Representatives and represents Louisiana’s 4th District in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

RNC’s Whatley to Newsmax: ‘Massive Shifts’ in Minority Vote

By Nicole Wells | Thursday, 01 August 2024 02:02 PM EDT

Former President Donald Trump’s outreach to minority voters and willingness to take tough questions is starting to pay off, according to Republican National Committee Chair Michael Whatley on Newsmax.

“I think it’s terribly important that we have a former president who has done events in the Bronx, in downtown Philadelphia,” Whatley told “Newsline.” “He has been to Detroit, then he goes to this [National Association of Black Journalists] event in Chicago and takes the tough questions. You have to ask yourself, where was Kamala Harris? If there was ever an event for her, this would have been it and she was not there.’

“She will not talk to the press. She will not take any tough questions. Donald Trump is communicating directly to every American. He’s reaching out to every single community. And I think it’s going to pay off.‘

“We are starting to see already massive shifts in Hispanic voters and Black voters and Asian American voters that are coming from the Democratic Party and supporting Donald Trump 20 points higher than they did back in 2020, because he is listening to them and cares about the issues that they care about,” he added.

When asked why the national conversation pivots so often to the topic of race, Whatley said it is because “that’s what the Democratic Party wants to talk about” and “that’s what Kamala Harris wants to talk about.”

“What Donald Trump wants to talk about is how to make America better for every American family,” Whatley said. “How are we going to lift this economy up so that it can lift every family up? How are we going to protect our southern border? How are we going to shut down this immigrant invasion that we have seen coming across into Texas and Arizona?‘

“What is it that we’re going to do on the world stage? Under Donald Trump, China was in check, Russia was in check, and we didn’t have the attacks in the Middle East that we’re watching right now. The whole Middle East is really on fire. So, we want to get back to a strong America. I think the entire country does and those are the issues that the voters care about. So, that’s what we’re going to continue to talk about.”

Nicole Wells ✉

Nicole Wells, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.

Related Stories:

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Democrats Are Rigging Their Own Election. Does Anyone Still Think They Didn’t Rig 2020?

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | JULY 22, 2024

Author Shawn Fleetwood profile

SHAWN FLEETWOOD

VISIT ON TWITTER@SHAWNFLEETWOOD

If you need further proof that Democrats will go to extreme lengths to rig elections in their favor, look no further than the silent coup that occurred Sunday, when it was announced that Joe Biden would not seek reelection this November.

One is the best ads ever!
pic.twitter.com/vfdO1SJYm5
— 🇺🇸ProudArmyBrat (@leslibless) July 4, 2024

“It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President,” read a letter posted by Biden’s X account. “And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term.”

The whole episode resembles a storyline from a dystopian horror film. For years, Democrats and their legacy media allies pushed endless propaganda claiming a mentally declining Biden possessed the rigorous stamina required to be president. Just last month, media hacks were parroting debunked talking points put out by the White House claiming videos showcasing Biden’s frailty were “cheap fakes.”

And then the June 27 debate against Donald Trump happened. Realizing they could no longer hide Sleepy Joe’s mental decline and worrying that his cratering approval rating could cost them the 2024 election, the Democrat political machine jumped into action.

These political forces suddenly acknowledged what the general public has known since before the Delaware Democrat assumed the presidency. In a seemingly coordinated campaign, left-wing media acolytes, Democrat politicos, and Hollywood snobs spent the following weeks feigning a newfound concern about Biden’s ailing health and demanding he drop his reelection bid to “protect democracy.”

[READ: The Ousting Of Biden Was A Textbook Coup D’état]

While Biden initially resisted calls to step aside, the Democrat-led pressure campaign was too big to overcome. Biden — or whoever is running things in the White House — dropped his reelection bid, tossing the 2024 nomination to Vice President Kamala Harris (or whoever the leftist oligarchy controlling the nomination process ultimately decides is the candidate). Like clockwork, these same forces are now praising him for the decision. For the party of “democracy,” it doesn’t matter that millions of Democrat primary voters are now disenfranchised. The machine got what it wanted.

A Repeat of Democrat Election Rigging

Much like their concentrated bid to remove Biden from the 2024 ticket, Democrats’ efforts to rig the 2020 contest involved participation from a variety of left-wing actors, both public and private. Under the guise of Covid, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg poured hundreds of millions of dollars into left-wing nonprofits, which then siphoned the funds into local election offices. These “Zuckbucks” — which were heavily directed toward “blue” municipalities — were used to advance Democrat-backed voting policies, amounting to what was effectively a giant Democrat get-out-the-vote operation.

Around the same time, leftist election officials in battleground states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin circumvented their states’ respective legislatures by unilaterally changing election procedures regarding unsupervised practices such as mail-in balloting and the use of ballot drop boxes. Several of these actions were later determined to be illegal by state courts.

Democrats’ election rigging got even worse leading up to the November 2020 election. The New York Post’s release of a bombshell report revealing potentially incriminating information about Joe Biden found on Hunter Biden’s laptop prompted one of the largest censorship campaigns in modern American history. Big Tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter suppressed the story with encouragement from the FBI, which had authenticated the laptop a year before the Post published its story.

Equally alarming were the efforts by 51 former intel officials to squash the laptop story by baselessly claiming it bore all the hallmarks of “Russian disinformation.” The CIA reportedly solicited signatures for the letter, which Biden used during a debate with Trump to dismiss criticisms about the laptop’s contents, which detailed the Biden family business. One of the letter’s signatories claimed under oath that a phone call he had with then-Biden campaign official Antony Blinken in the weeks before the election prompted the letter’s creation.

These actions don’t even include the Justice Department’s reported bid to delay an investigation into Hunter over concerns that it could impact the 2020 election.

Expect Nothing Less This November

Democrats’ 2020 and 2024 election-rigging schemes are two sides of the same coin. Both cases show that there is no task the party of “democracy” won’t undertake to ensure its hold on state power. (In fact, Democrat efforts to rig the 2024 general election have been underway since Biden took office.)

Leftists’ success in removing Biden from the 2024 ballot should serve as a wake-up call to normie America about the security of our elections. The Democrat Party is a political force seeking total control over every facet of our government and society. Hoping they’ll play fair this November is a fool’s errand.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served 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

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

CNN Contributor, Ex-Biden Staffer: Dems Need To ‘Turn Their Fire on Donald Trump’ Following Failed Assassination Attempt

BY: BRIANNA LYMAN | JULY 16, 2024

CNN contributor and former White House communications director Kate Bedingfield

CNN contributor and former Biden White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield said Monday that Democrats need to “turn their fire” on former President Donald Trump to win the election, just days after he survived an assassination attempt. Bedingfield immediately backtracked, but the Freudian slip was another example of the inflammatory rhetoric Democrats and left-wing corporate media deploy against Trump and his candidacy.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper played a recent clip from President Joe Biden’s sit-down interview with NBC’s Lester Holt in which Biden became angry that the media apparently won’t talk about the “18 to 28 lies” Trump told during the debate.

Anderson, noting that Biden’s team is receiving internal polling data suggesting Biden is doing poorly among voters and losing any potential chance of winning, asked Bedingfield how much longer this scenario for Democrats can continue.

“It shouldn’t go on much longer if Democrats want to win this election,” Bedingfield said. “Joe Biden became the nominee by the votes of voters who voted in the Democratic primary. He has said many, many times after having been questioned many times about this, that he’s not stepping down, and he is going to be the nominee.”

“At some point, Democrats have to decide that they want to try to win this election and turn their fire on Donald Trump. I think there is — I shouldn’t have said ‘turn their fire.’ I apologize. That was not the phrase that I meant. They need to turn their focus on Donald Trump,” Bedingfield said.

It has been less than 72 hours since Trump avoided near-certain death by half an inch and a local former fire chief was brutally murdered while shielding his family from gunfire. It’s been less than 48 hours since Biden himself called for people to “lower the temperature” and “cool” “down” the rhetoric following the near assassination. But already, left-wing media and Democrats are returning to the inflammatory language they’ve used to describe Trump for years.

Biden told donors recently, according to Politico, that he’s “done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.” Biden and other Democrats have repeatedly called Trump a “threat” the both “democracy” and “the very soul of this country.”

Donald Trump and MAGA Republicans are a threat to the very soul of this country.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) September 2, 2022

Biden and others have also called Trump a would-be “dictator” and repeatedly warned he could be the next Adolf Hitler.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

Author Brianna Lyman profile

BRIANNA LYMAN

VISIT ON TWITTER@BRIANNALYMAN2

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Meet The Shadowy Left-Wing Nonprofit Harvesting Voter Data to Juice Democrat Turnout

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | JULY 08, 2024

Screenshot of VPC voter registration form.

Author Shawn Fleetwood profile

SHAWN FLEETWOOD

VISIT ON TWITTER@SHAWNFLEETWOOD

In an era of U.S. elections where ballots — not voters — are the favored currency, nonprofit voter registration has become instrumental in determining which candidate comes out on top at the ballot box.

While conservatives have largely failed to recognize the necessity of such operations in driving Republican voter turnout, leftists haven’t. Unlike their opponents, Democrats have amassed a well-funded machine that’s accumulated their party massive electoral wins in recent cycles, even as the head of their party remains widely unpopular among the American electorate.

Central to Democrats’ efforts is the Voter Participation Center (VPC), a left-wing nonprofit that, despite claiming to be “nonpartisan,” aims to create a “New American Majority” by facilitating “registration of numerous Democratic-leaning voting populations” such as “unmarried women, [racial] minorities and millennials,” according to InfluenceWatch.

Originally known as Women’s Voices Women Vote prior to 2011, VPC was founded by Page Gardner, a prominent Democrat political operative connected to the Kennedy family, with help from John Podesta, the chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Today, the group is run by Tom Lopach, a Democrat operative and head of the Center for Voter Information (CVI), VPC’s “sister” organization that helps it conduct partisan get-out-the-vote operations.

A 2023 Restoration of America report shows just how influential VPC and CVI’s voter outreach has been in recent elections. During the 2020 contest, for example, the groups’ registration-by-mail campaign purportedly produced an additional 272,443 votes, most of which came from battleground states such as Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. Those figures are higher than the vote totals VPC claimed it netted during the 2016 and 2018 election cycles.

But VPC isn’t your typical GOTV nonprofit. A closer look at the group’s operations reveals how it uses voter data harvested through its registration efforts to enhance the left’s election machine.

How VPC Operates

VPC’s primary method of registering its “New American Majority” is through the use of mailers it sends to prospective electors.

After accumulating “commercial and public data to identify people who are eligible to vote but who need to register,” the group sends registration forms to households it believes are occupied by these eligible voters. A Tennessee registration form sent to a state resident and provided to The Federalist shows how VPC pre-populates information about the individual on these forms, such as their address.

The form also comes with a pre-paid postage envelope that includes the recipient’s return address already filled out. The envelope is addressed to the local county election office.

Communication records obtained by The Federalist show how VPC notifies state election offices about its plans to disburse these materials to prospective voters prior to doing so.

On Dec. 15, 2023, for example, VPC Deputy Director of Partnerships and Outreach Sarah Mitchell sent an email notifying Virginia Elections Commissioner Susan Beals and members of the commonwealth’s elections department of VPC’s plans to mail voter registration forms to prospective voters on March 21. Mitchell claimed the March mailings would be the “first of three large scale voter registration mailings” the group plans to send to Virginians in 2024 and sent to “people who are turning 18 and newly eligible to register to vote, people who have moved between counties or into your state and according to our records need to update their registration, and addresses where our records show unregistered voters likely live.”

Mitchell sent a follow-up email on March 7, notifying the aforementioned officials that VPC’s second batch of voter registration mailers would be distributed to residents around June 28.

Speaking with The Federalist, Ned Jones, director of the Citizens Election Research Center of the Election Integrity Network, explained that sending multiple mailings to potential voters appears to be a strategy that allows VPC to narrow down its list of which voters it should direct its GOTV efforts toward as Election Day nears.

It seems to be their attempt to “get a feel for who’s going to vote and who might not,” Jones said. “It’s really complex.”

VPC’s multiple mailings in Virginia match a strategy the group has deployed in other states, according to Jones.

Voter Data Collection

Encouraging voters to mail their voter registration applications to their local election office is just one aspect of VPC’s strategy, however. The group also provides prospective electors with an option to register through its online portal.

Included in VPC’s mailings is a paper with a QR code that individuals can scan with their phones. After clicking on the link, users are taken to an online registration portal operated by VPC and Rock the Vote (RTV), “a left-progressive-aligned organization … whose stated mission is to engage and ‘build the political power of young people,’” according to InfluenceWatch.

Users are required to enter their email address and zip code before proceeding. Upon continuing through the process, these users are required to provide personal information, such as their full name, address, and date of birth. They’re also asked to answer a series of questions, such as “Is this your first time registering to vote?” and “Why are you registering to vote?”

In a March 5 email to Beals and Virginia’s election officials, Mitchell claimed that including a QR code on its mailings has “resulted in a roughly 20% shift from recipients returning [VPC’s] mail applications to instead filling out online voter registration applications.” She separately contended in an email sent to these same officials two days later that “close to 50% of the young people who received [VPC’s] mail chose to register [online].”

What’s most alarming, however, is that registering through the VPC-RTV portal allows these groups to acquire voters’ personal data and share it with other third parties. Located at the bottom of the registration page is RTV’s privacy policy, which stipulates that it may share an individual’s “personal information” with “partners and organizations with principles and missions that overlap with those of RTV,” “affiliates and companies with whom [RTV] share[s] common ownership,” and other listed third parties.

Data classified as “personal” by RTV includes an individual’s identifiers (name, address, Social Security number), demographic information (race, sex, marital status), professional information (employer), internet activity information (IP address, language preferences, device ID), and non-precise geolocation information (“geolocation derived from [a user’s] IP address”).

The amount of information collected by RTV is dependent on how a user interacts with its online services, according to the privacy policy.

RTV does, however, allow users to “opt out” of “supporter list exchanges.” (That’s when RTV shares users’ identifier information with “named partners and other organizations with principles and/or missions that overlap with those of RTV”).

Neither VPC nor RTV responded to The Federalist’s request for comment on what specific third parties they share personal voter data acquired through the voter registration portal with. Nor did either group respond when pressed on how long they have been collaborating on voter registration activities.

Growing Concerns

VPC’s antics have drawn attention from prominent GOP election officials.

Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi’s secretaries of state have issued press releases in recent months warning voters that VPC’s mailers are not official correspondence from their respective offices. Alabama Secretary of State Allen West went a step further by “officially discourag[ing]” the “targeted” mailings, which he said represents “partisan interference by out-of-state, third-party organizations [that] is unnecessary, confusing, and counterproductive.”

Concerns about VPC’s partisanship are not new. Last week, the Capital Research Center’s Parker Thayer shared a photo of what appears to be a VPC mailing with former First Lady Michelle Obama on the cover.

VPC did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment on how it can claim to be a “nonpartisan” organization while using Obama’s likeness on its mailers.

“Putting Michelle Obama on the front of a voter registration form is obviously a tactic to filter out Republicans, who will be more likely to throw it out after assuming it’s a Democrat fundraiser,” Thayer wrote.

Legal Remedies

Legislative efforts aimed at stymying third-party groups from flooding states with election mailers have largely failed to materialize, according to Jones. Even in states where such legislation passed, left-wing groups immediately sued to stop its implementation.

That’s what happened three years ago in Georgia, when state Republicans passed SB 202, a benign election integrity measure that included a provision prohibiting third parties from mailing pre-filled absentee ballot applications to voters. Shortly after Gov. Brian Kemp signed the measure into law, Democrat-aligned groups launched a barrage of lawsuits baselessly alleging the statute suppressed voters, particularly racial minorities.

A federal judge shot down Democrat groups’ request that a preliminary injunction be placed on the law in October, ruling plaintiffs failed to show evidence SB 202 “intentionally discriminate[s] against black voters.”

While legislative fixes to VPC’s shenanigans are lacking, some conservative legal groups are taking action against the Democrat-aligned organization ahead of the 2024 election. On June 24, Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE) filed a complaint with the North Carolina State Board of Elections against VPC, CVI, and Rock the Vote “for unlawfully collecting and retaining personally identifiable information (‘PII’) from voter registration applications.”

RITE alleged that the aforementioned groups violated North Carolina law, which prohibits “any person who is not an elections official or who is not otherwise authorized by law to retain a registrant’s signature, full or partial Social Security number, date of birth, or the identity of the public agency at which the registrant registered.” The legal group additionally asked the board to investigate the groups based upon these allegations.

“The board of elections must investigate and, if necessary, put a stop to this outrageous betrayal of voter trust,” RITE President Derek Lyons said in a statement. “Retaining personally identifiable information demonstrates that groups like this may be more interested in their own agendas than in merely registering voters.”

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served 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

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Can Democrats Just Dump Biden And Move On? It’s Not That Simple

BY: SEAN DAVIS | JUNE 28, 2024

Will Democrats replace Joe Biden as their presidential nominee?

It’s not that simple, logistically or politically, as long he’s still alive. States have pretty strict rules on last-second ballot changes, but Democrats have always found ways to get courts to rewrite laws for them at the last second. Just look at what they did for Frank Lautenberg and Robert Torricelli in New Jersey. It would be a heavy lift but not an impossible one.

The real problem for Democrats is political: Removing Biden as nominee requires them to deny and reject the election results of their voters in all 50 states after they spent four years accusing everyone else of being “election deniers.” They also will have a very hard time removing Biden as nominee but leaving him in as president. If he’s not mentally fit to be on the campaign trail or debate stage, how on Earth can he be fit enough to remain as president? The downsides of that strategy are immense, with little upside.

And that brings us to the real problem for Democrats: Kamala Harris. They know she’s political kryptonite because she’s both incredibly stupid and extremely unlikeable. Democrat voters can’t even stand her. So, if they manage to get rid of Biden both as nominee and as president, they end up stuck with her, which might even be worse than doing nothing. Do they really want to be in the position of preventing the first female president from running as an incumbent? And can they sideline her while promoting another white dude like Gavin Newsom when their entire party is built around identity politics?

Four minutes of Kamala. I defy you to listen to it without cracking a molar… pic.twitter.com/ylqmEDcxsu
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) June 28, 2024

So, the predicament for Democrats right now is they have to somehow find out how to get rid of Biden as the nominee, keep him as president, and prevent the black woman who is currently vice president from being the nominee. I don’t think it’s a needle they’ll be able to thread without resorting to violence and republic-destroying tactics.

Now, they could just reap what they’ve sown, accept the consequences of their choices, and accept losing an election for once — but I’m not holding my breath.

Sean Davis is CEO and co-founder of The Federalist. He previously worked as an economic policy adviser to Gov. Rick Perry, as CFO of Daily Caller, and as chief investigator for Sen. Tom Coburn. He was named by The Hill as one of the top congressional staffers under the age of 35 for his role in spearheading the enactment of the law that created USASpending.gov. Sean received a BBA in finance from Texas Tech University and an MBA in finance and entrepreneurial management from the Wharton School. He can be reached via e-mail at sean@thefederalist.com.

Author Sean Davis profile

SEAN DAVIS

VISIT ON TWITTER@SEANMDAV

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Biden’s ‘Amnesty’ Plan Could Turn 500,000 Illegal Aliens into Future Voters

BY: BRIANNA LYMAN | JUNE 19, 2024

Author Brianna Lyman profile

BRIANNA LYMAN

VISIT ON TWITTER@BRIANNALYMAN2

President Joe Biden announced an executive order (EO) Tuesday that awards amnesty to illegal immigrants married to U.S. citizens. And while he dubbed his overreach as keeping “families together,” it is nothing more than another step in Democrats’ plan to expand their future electorate.

The EO makes it easier for illegal immigrants who married U.S. citizens — and their children — to apply for lawful permanent residence status without leaving the country, and after that, U.S. citizenship. An approximate 500,000 illegal immigrants who married a U.S. citizen will benefit from this order along with 50,000 children, according to the White House.

Without providing any explanation as to how, Biden claims this will “strengthen” the U.S. economy. Notably, recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) shows foreign-born workers gained 637,000 jobs year-over-year while native-born workers lost roughly 299,000. The BLS acknowledges foreign-born workers likely include illegal immigrants. As economist E.J. Antoni recently explained to The Federalist, the drain illegal migrants place on the economy offsets their production value.

[READ: Foreign-Born Workers Dominate U.S. Job Gains While Native-Born Americans Struggle]

What Does This EO Mean for Democrats?

By federal law, “non-citizens, including permanent legal residents,” are not allowed to “vote in federal, state, and most local elections,” according to USA.gov. But lawful permanent residents are “eligible to become a U.S. citizen after five years of becoming a lawful permanent resident, or three years if you are married to a U.S. citizen,” according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Unless there are specific carveouts in Biden’s executive order prohibiting individuals who came into this country illegally before receiving amnesty from registering to vote, then Biden just gifted Democrats with hundreds of thousands of potential future voters.

Former President Donald Trump warned that under Biden’s election-year order, “a deluge of illegals will be given immediate green cards and put on the fast track to rapid citizenship so they can vote.”

“Couple this with [Biden’s] previous voter registration EO and it is clear that Biden is attempting to win the upcoming election, not by winning over legitimate American voters, but by attempting to legitimize illegal immigrants,” said Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen. “He won’t stop with this EO. He will keep attempting to dilute the power of the vote of legal Americans.”

Of course, Biden and Democrats, as my colleague Shawn Fleetwood explained, “want Americans to believe they aren’t interested in handing out U.S. citizenship and voting rights to foreign nationals like it’s candy on Halloween.” Yet their actions, including this EO, suggest otherwise.

In fact, Biden’s EO sends the same message that a trio of Democratic witnesses sent during a Senate Judiciary Hearing in March. Not a single Democrat witness could resolutely say they believe only citizens should be able to vote in a federal election. And it’s the same message being sent by Democrats nationwide who oppose legislation to ensure only citizens vote in federal elections. As of right now, anyone registering to vote in federal elections must simply check a box affirming he is a U.S. citizen. Individuals — legal or not — can simply lie on their registration forms. In other words, our elections hinge on the honor system. It’s a loophole Republicans are working to close via the Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act, which would amend current law to require documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote.

Democrats have insisted the SAVE Act is unreasonable and unnecessary since, according to federal law, it’s illegal to vote in an election if you’re not a U.S. citizen. It’s also illegal to bum-rush border agents and break into the country.

Only one state, Arizona, requires voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in state elections. As a result of the federal government’s attempt to weaken Arizona’s proof-of-citizenship law, individuals who cannot prove their citizenship can register as federal-only voters.

During the 2020 election in Arizona, 11,600 voters voted using a federal-only ballot, according to AZ Free News. Biden won that state by 10,457 votes.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

Category:

corruption, Political

Tagged with:

Democrat Fixer Marc Elias’ Firm Steps In To Stop ‘Disastrous Election System’ Fix

BY: M.D. KITTLE | JUNE 19, 2024

Democrat attorney Marc Elias appearing on MSNBC.

Author M.D. Kittle profile

M.D. KITTLE

Bogus Russian dossier peddler and Democrat Party problem fixer Marc Elias has again injected himself into a key election integrity case to “defend the broken status quo.” Swing-state Nevada’s dirty voter rolls include hundreds of suspect addresses, at bars, strip clubs, empty parking lots, and other commercial addresses, according to an investigation by the Public Interest Legal Foundation. Doing so is clearly against the law.

“In Nevada, by the state law, you are required to be registered where you actually live, where you sleep. Not where you work, not at a P.O. Box. So we’re trying to get elections officials to enforce the law,” Lauren Bis, PILF’s director of communication and engagement, says in a video tracking bad addresses in the Las Vegas area.

To that end, the foundation has filed a petition in Washoe County, Nevada’s second-most populous county, to force elections officials to investigate and fix commercial addresses on the voter roll. PILF investigators found addresses on the rolls reported as liquor stores, empty lots, and even the Nevada Gaming Control Board, among others.

Baseless Attacks?

Elias Law Group and a band of leftists have sought to intervene in PILF’s petition for a writ of mandamus, arguing that forcing Washoe election administrators to follow the law and clean up the county’s dirty voter rolls will “threaten” voting rights.

The would-be intervenors claim that their members and constituents would be forced to “expend substantial resources to educate voters and protect them from baseless attacks on their eligibility.”

Baseless attacks?

As The Federalist recently reported, Bis was greeted with a lot of quizzical looks from employees at the casinos, fast-food restaurants, retailers, post offices, funeral homes, strip clubs, tattoo parlors, and jails where registered voters — at least according to Nevada’s dirty voter rolls — “resided.” What PILF found was equal parts sad and hilarious, foundation President J. Christian Adams told me on “The Federalist Radio Hour.”

The election integrity public interest law firm tracked data from the Nevada secretary of state’s office, which in the 2022 midterm elections reported 95,556 ballots sent to undeliverable, or “bad,” addresses. PILF investigators documented commercial addresses purported to be the residences of registered voters, confirming on video that the individuals did not live where they reported residing.

“We’ve been to all of the locations. It’s not some data exercise we see sitting at a computer in Chicago. We’ve actually got boots on the ground looking for the voters, and they don’t exist,” Adams said.

‘Disastrous Elections System’

Making matters worse, Nevada automatically mails a ballot to every active registrant on the voter rolls.

“I’m looking for Ronald or William Phelps,” Bis says in the video to a bartender wearing a “Tacos por favor” T-shirt at a local watering hole on North Nellis Boulevard in Vegas. “I don’t know who that is,” the barkeep replies.

“So, they don’t live here?” Bis asks. “Uh, at the bar? No,” the bartender says, chuckling. She’s clearly amused by the question.

It’s almost as amusing as Elias and friends’ apparent efforts to stop election officials from following the law under the absurd premise of voter rights. Their court filing offers a dire warning about what will happen if Washoe County is required to do what PILF has done: Washoe County’s job.

“If the Court grants such relief, Respondent Burgess — and other clerks and registrars across the state — will be flooded with third-party demands to investigate all manner of alleged peculiarities in the voter rolls, based on unsourced, unverified, and unsworn information,” the court filing admonishes. “Petitioners are not the only ones making such demands. Nevada is in the midst of a storm of baseless efforts by third parties to force election officials to undertake a rushed purge of registered voters before the November election.”

Adams called Elias’ latest lawfare stunt a “cry wolf exercise.”

“He does this all over the country. He spools up these progressive astroturf organizations and they file a legal brief, which they have done in our case, which we have to respond to, that says, ‘Oh, if you listen to these evil conservatives, there will be eligible people improperly removed from the rolls.’ Nonsense,” said Adams, who formerly served in the Voting Section at the U.S. Department of Justice and was appointed to President Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.

“Marc Elias is in the business of defending the riches of a disastrous elections system with universal vote-by-mail that are sending ballots automatically to thousands of bogus addresses,” Adams added.

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Rubio Gives Masterclass On Parrying Media Hacks’ Dishonest Election Questions

BY: BRIANNA LYMAN | MAY 20, 2024

Author Brianna Lyman profile

BRIANNA LYMAN

VISIT ON TWITTER@BRIANNALYMAN2

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio delivered a masterclass Sunday on how Republicans should respond when media partisans ask them to prematurely commit to accepting the results of the 2024 election. NBC News’ Kristen Welker asked Rubio if he would “accept the 2024 election results no matter what happens.”

“No matter what happens? No! If it’s an unfair election, I think it’s going to be contested by each side,” Rubio said.

“No matter who wins, Senator? No matter who wins?” Welker asked.

“You’re asking the wrong person! The Democrats are the ones that have opposed every Republican victory since 2000. Every single one. Hillary Clinton…”

“No Democrat has refused to concede,” Welker interjected. “Hillary Clinton conceded. Senator, will you accept the election results?”

“Hillary Clinton said the election was stolen from her, and that Trump was illegitimate. Kamala Harris agreed,” Rubio said. “By the way, there are Democrats serving in Congress today who, in 2004, voted not to certify the Ohio electors because they said those machines had been tampered with. And you have Democrats now saying they won’t certify 2024 because Trump is an insurrectionist and ineligible to hold office. So you need to ask them.”

Rubio then pointed out that having “over 500 illegal dropbox locations” in Wisconsin, for example, is something that legitimately undermines confidence in elections.

Rubio’s answer was excellent because he understands the insidiousness of such a question: Republicans are being goaded to relinquish their right to question problematic election administration. Instead of being bullied into agreeing with Welker’s presuppositions, he immediately went on the offensive.

When will the media start asking democrats if they will accept the outcome of the 2024 election if Trump wins? pic.twitter.com/9kGf9O3sTF
— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) May 19, 2024

Left-wing corporate media have already smeared Rubio and other conservatives as election “deniers” for refusing to play into the media’s trap. It’s a cheap trick designed to silence legitimate concerns about election administration by painting them as threats to “democracy.”

When Republicans treat the question as anything but a cheap trick, they put themselves immediately on the defensive by assuming the question’s dishonest premises. That’s exactly what South Carolina senator and potential vice-presidential pick Tim Scott did during a recent interview of his own with Welker. When goaded as to whether he would accept the results of the 2020 election, Scott chose to side-step the question.

“At the end of the day, the 47th president of the United States will be President Donald Trump,” he said.

When asked again, Scott responded “That is my statement” and “I look forward to President Trump being the 47th president — the American people will make the decision.”

Scott’s answer was abysmal because he was obviously afraid of the question. But no Republican should be afraid to refuse to play along with corporate media partisans’ bad-faith “gotcha” questions. What’s more, there’s nothing wrong with refusing to resoundingly affirm the results of an election that has not yet taken place, especially at a time when Democrats are deploying everything from weaponized lawfare to unconstitutional attempts to federalize elections via “Bidenbucks” to rig elections in their favor.

Besides, as Rubio pointed out, the 2020 election was far from the first to face scrutiny. Democrats called Republican George Bush’s election in 2000 “fraudulent,” said his 2004 victory was “stolen,” and objected to the certification of Trump’s 2016 election while claiming he had colluded with Russia to steal the presidency.

In the 1960 presidential election, some electors declared Richard Nixon the winner of Hawaii’s electoral votes before a recount eventually led to John F. Kennedy’s electors’ votes being certified. Should Kennedy have resigned his right to question the incorrect initial results prior to the election?

Of course not — yet that’s what Republicans are being asked to do now. They should understand the question as the unserious hackery it is and answer accordingly.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Paralegal Testimony: Alvin Bragg’s Office Tampered with Evidence

BY: BRIANNA LYMAN | MAY 13, 2024

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s paralegal testified on Friday that his office deleted from their evidence three pages of phone records between convicted liar Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels’ lawyer Keith Davidson without notifying former President Donald Trump’s legal team, according to reports.

Trump attorney Emil Bove questioned paralegal Jaden Jarmel-Schneider on Friday about three pages of 2018 phone records between Davidson and Cohen that Bragg’s office had deleted, according to CNN. Additional phone records between Daniels manager Gina Rodriguez and then-National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard regarding Daniels’ claim about her alleged affair were also deleted, according to The Epoch Times.

The altered call records were submitted into evidence, but Bragg’s office did not tell Trump’s team that three pages were missing, The Epoch Times reported. Tampering with evidence is a class E felony in the Empire State under New York Consolidation Laws, Penal Law § 215.40, which states in part:

A person is guilty of tampering with physical evidence when: Believing that certain physical evidence is about to be produced or used in an official proceeding or a prospective official proceeding, and intending to prevent such production or use, he suppresses it by any act of concealment, alteration or destruction, or by employing force, intimidation or deception against any person.

Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., took to X on Friday calling the developments “insanity.”

“How on earth is this not a felony committed by Bragg and his minions? It sure would be if team Trump did it,” Trump Jr. posted to X.

Insanity! How on earth is this not a felony committed by Bragg and his minions? It sure would be if team Trump did it.

I’d love if we had actual journalists that would report on this ongoing travesty.

Sadly, proper journalism is dead. They’re just scribes for the regime. https://t.co/vQkLDk3t1T
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) May 10, 2024

Bragg — who campaigned for office on targeting Trump — indicted the former president in April 2023 on 34 felony charges for allegedly falsifying business records. Bragg alleges Trump’s lawyer at the time, Cohen, paid Daniels before the 2016 election to stay quiet about an alleged affair that the former president denies. Bragg alleges Trump made this payment to help win the 2016 election so the expenditure should have been classified as a campaign expense rather than a legal expense.

Trump’s defense also made a motion for a mistrial, which Judge Juan Merchan denied. Merchan also kneecapped Trump’s team from defending the former president by limiting what former Federal Election Commission Chairman Bradley Smith could say when testifying about campaign finance-related issues, noted Steve Roberts and Oliver Roberts in The Federalist Friday.

Smith was expected to testify, as Roberts and Roberts note, that “almost anything a candidate does can be interpreted as intended to ‘influence an election’” though “not every expense that might benefit a candidate is an obligation that exists solely because the person is a candidate.”

Merchan ruled Smith can now only testify to the “general background as to what the Federal [Election] Commission is, background as to who makes up the FEC, what the FEC’s function is, what laws, if any, the FEC is responsible for enforcing, and general definitions and terms that relate directly to his case, such as for example ‘campaign contribution.’”

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

Author Brianna Lyman profile

BRIANNA LYMAN

VISIT ON TWITTER@BRIANNALYMAN2

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Without The SAVE Act, The Only Thing Keeping Foreigners from Voting Is the Honor System

BY: MIKE LEE | MAY 13, 2024

Someone holding an 'election integrity' sign.

MIKE LEE

Congressional Democrats insist that the SAVE Act — which requires proof of citizenship to establish eligibility to vote in federal elections — is unnecessary because federal law (18 USC § 611) already prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections. Those making this argument ignore a glaring problem: the government officials who register voters and conduct federal elections aren’t allowed to require proof of citizenship.

The Demands From Illegal Immigrants In Denver Colorado Get More & More Insane

People who have broke our laws and are already being supported by American Tax Payers need even more. Here are their demands:

Number 1: (Illegal) Migrants will cook their own food with fresh… pic.twitter.com/bRdtq2pq9a
— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) May 11, 2024

It’s therefore shockingly easy for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, leaving our elections dangerously vulnerable to foreign interference. Anyone — even an illegal alien or other noncitizen — can register to vote in federal elections, just by checking a box and signing a form. This is all on the honor system. No proof of citizenship is required.

It’s not just that state officials — who are responsible for federal voter registration and elections in our country — don’t verify citizenship in this context; it’s that the Supreme Court has told them that they’re not allowed to do so. In Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, Inc., 570 U.S. 1 (2013), the Court held that the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA, also known as the “Motor Voter” law) prohibits states from requiring proof of citizenship when processing federal voter registration forms.

You need to watch. This is how the Democrats are planning to steal the election.

pic.twitter.com/F6ZOZnglEo
— Juanita Broaddrick (@atensnut) May 13, 2024

The SAVE Act would fix this gaping loophole by requiring anyone registering to vote in federal elections to provide proof of citizenship. It would also require states to review existing federal voter registration files and remove all noncitizens.

Remember: every state issues driver’s licenses to noncitizens, and 19 states issue them to illegal aliens. This, coupled with the Motor Voter law and the Supreme Court’s ruling, makes it shockingly easy for aliens — legal and illegal — to vote in federal elections, even though they’re prohibited from doing so. Considering that there are now nearly 30 million noncitizens in the U.S., including about 12 million who have entered illegally since the last presidential election, we desperately need the SAVE Act.

While Democrats are already mocking the SAVE Act, they don’t dispute that noncitizens shouldn’t vote in federal elections. Rather, they insist that there’s no need for the bill because noncitizens — being prohibited by law from voting in federal elections — categorically do not vote in such elections. That argument fails for one simple reason: it implausibly assumes universal compliance with a law that has become breathtakingly easy (and correspondingly tempting) to violate.

Some say that noncitizens wouldn’t dare register to vote in federal elections, as doing so is illegal and could adversely affect their present or future immigration status. Even if this assumption were correct with regard to many (or even most) noncitizens in the U.S., that still wouldn’t disprove the need for the SAVE Act.

If even a tiny percentage of America’s 30 million noncitizens were to vote, they could change the outcome of a close federal election. And, as noted by the Immigration Accountability Project, it’s odd for the left to insist so vehemently that illegal aliens don’t vote, given that congressional Democrats have inserted language “to waive inadmissibility for illegal voting in all [their] amnesty bills.”

Democrats can’t have it both ways; they can’t (1) credibly say that illegal aliens don’t vote in federal elections, and then (2) expect us to forget their own proposals, which assume the opposite is true. In any event, and regardless of how many (or few) noncitizens may have voted in the past, why not take steps to prevent it from happening in the future?

The sanctity of your vote is at stake. Now more than ever, we need to make sure that our elections are fair, lawfully conducted, and free of foreign influence. To do that, it’s imperative that Congress pass the SAVE Act.

All of the democrats’ arguments are just as ridiculous. This guy has something to say about them.

This guy is a savage. pic.twitter.com/rTK5zl1JN6
— TaraBull (@TaraBull808) May 13, 2024

Mike Lee is a U.S. Senator from Utah and author of “Our Lost Constitution: The Willful Subversion of America’s Founding Document.”

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

South Carolina Agency: The Feds Force Us to Give Voter Registration to Foreign Nationals

BY: M.D. KITTLE | MAY 07, 2024

Author M.D. Kittle profile

M.D. KITTLE

As South Carolina law enforcement investigates allegations a state agency is handing out voter registration forms to foreign nationals, an agency official tells The Federalist that federal law has tied the state’s hands.

Jeff Leieritz, a spokesman for the state’s Department of Health and Human Services, says the department, as the state’s Medicaid agency, is mandated to provide voter registration information under Section 7 of the National Voter Registration Act Of 1993. The information apparently goes out to everyone applying for the benefits, including foreign nationals.

Section 7 requires each state to designate voter registration agencies, including all state offices providing public assistance, unemployment compensation, or disability services; state or local government offices; federal and nongovernmental offices; and armed forces recruitment offices.

“SCDHHS does not believe the state Medicaid agency should have a role in voter registration. However, absent the legal authority to make this change, SCDHHS remains required by federal law to provide voter registration application forms with each Medicaid application,” Leieritz said in a statement Monday to The Federalist.

‘That’s Insane’

South Carolina state Rep. Adam Morgan has been pushing for answers after a refugee reported receiving a packet of information, including voter registration forms, at the Health and Human Services office. Morgan did not return The Federalist’s requests for comment, but he did speak about the issue last week on FrankSpeech.

“The refugee was actually confused. They were like, ‘Am I supposed to fill this out?’ They asked a relative, and the relative is a citizen who said, ‘No, you can’t fill this out. You’re not a citizen.’ [The refugee] said, ‘Why are they giving this out to noncitizens?’ And we were, like, “Exactly! That’s insane,” Morgan told The Absolute Truth with Emerald Robinson.

Why is the SC Medicaid office insisting on giving voter registration forms to non-citizens?

Listen to what SC Freedom Caucus Chairman @RepAdamMorgan found out is going on even in his Republican-lead state.

Watch the full episode at FRANK SPEECH DOT COM. pic.twitter.com/4k1WImariC
— The Absolute Truth with @EmeraldRobinson (@AbsoluteWithE) April 30, 2024

Morgan said the refugee mailed the forms back to the Medicaid office advising that the government agency shouldn’t be giving voter registration information to people who are not eligible to vote. The office sent the refugee even more information in response, Morgan claims.

“It’s just infuriating that the government is actually sending these forms out and literally confusing people who may not be trying to do wrong, or opening the door wide open for somebody to do wrong and get people who are not citizens to vote in the election,” said the president of the South Carolina Freedom Caucus and a Republican candidate for a U.S. House seat.

On, Wednesday, the Freedom Caucus sent Gov. Henry McMaster a letter expressing its “grave concern with this breach of election integrity.” They asked that the state inspector general’s office launch an immediate investigation and that the governor order state agencies to “cease and desist distributing voter registration and voter declination forms to non-citizens.”

McMaster, a Republican, quickly responded, saying he has asked the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division to immediately contact Morgan to “provide SLED with any and all evidence, documents and information that you possess in order to evaluate the authenticity of your allegation of illegalities.”

“SLED has received the Governor’s letter to Representative Adam Morgan and will review the allegations provided,” the Law Enforcement Division told The Federalist in an email Monday.

‘Overreaching Federal Requirements’

Leieritz, the spokesman for the state health department, said the agency is aware of reports circulating on social media about the refugee receiving voter registration forms. He said the department does not process or submit voter registration forms for Medicaid applicants or members. That is the domain of the South Carolina Election Commission.

“SCDHHS is investigating what has been reported on social media,” the spokesman said, adding that the agency believes the 30-year-old National Voter Registration Act needs to be amended “to repeal these overreaching federal requirements.”

“South Carolina’s citizens would be better served by a state Medicaid agency that is able to focus singularly on efficiently operating the state’s Healthy Connections Medicaid program,” Leieritz said.

Morgan and the Freedom Caucus are proposing adding a provision in the state budget prohibiting state money from funding the distribution of voter registration information to foreign nationals at South Carolina agencies.

“But isn’t it insane that we have to do that,” the lawmaker told Robinson. “It’s crazy to me that we are at a place in America where we have government employees and government agencies who are willing to actively give out voter registration forms to noncitizens. And if it’s happening in South Carolina, you’d better believe it’s happening all over especially the swing states.”

It is, via federal executive fiat.

‘Bidenbucks’

Beyond the NVRA, President Joe Biden’s Executive Order 14019 commands federal agencies to do what some legal experts say the executive branch does not have the legal authority to do: expand voter registration and turnout — using White House “approved” third-party organizations connected to Democrats. The sweeping initiative has been billed “Bidenbucks,” since it uses federal dollars. Think of Executive Order 14019 as Zuckbucks on steroids, using your money.

“This is clearly weaponization of the government for a partisan purpose,” Dave Craig, a senior legal fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability, told me in February.

On the swing state front, the Michigan Department of State earlier this year signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the U.S. Small Business Administration “to promote civic engagement and voter registration in Michigan.” The agreement, according to Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and SBA Administrator Isabel Casillas Guzman, is a “first-of-its-kind collaboration” for the federal agency. It is expected to run through Jan. 1, 2036. Such constitutionally suspect “agreements” between the Biden administration and left-led state executive branches are part of Biden’s unprecedented executive order.

‘Non-issues’ Becoming ‘Major Issues’

The South Carolina State Election Commission (SEC) last week said it had received several questions and concerns about foreign nationals registering to vote in defiance of basic election integrity protections.

“The SEC is actively auditing voter data through the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) Program database to ensure that only U.S. citizens are included on the active list of registered voters. Regardless of the method of registration, no voter may be registered in South Carolina without signing an oath swearing that they are a citizen of the United States,” the agency states on its website. “The auditing process ensures that any bad actors are removed from voter rolls and held accountable through state and federal election law statutes.”

The elections regulator said it has not received any “specific information that non-U.S. citizens are fraudulently being registered to vote” in South Carolina.

“The SEC will not allow fraudulent voter registration to happen on our watch,” said Howie Knapp, executive director of the SEC. “Should we receive or discover information that non-U.S. citizens are being registered to vote in our state, we will immediately report to our law enforcement partners for investigation and prosecution to the fullest extent of the law.”

South Carolina is looking to join a growing list of states passing resolutions for constitutional amendments barring foreign nationals, including illegal immigrants, from voting in local elections.

“Many said this was a non-issue. Then we discovered state agencies sending voter registration forms to non-citizens. These ‘non-issues’ keep turning out to be major issues,” Morgan recently tweeted on his X account.

🚨Constitutional Amendment passes prohibiting non-citizens from voting in elections at any level in SC.

Many said this was a non-issue. Then we discovered state agencies sending voter registration forms to non-citizens.

These “non-issues” keep turning out to be major issues… pic.twitter.com/1wgFDR2Mmm
— Adam Morgan (@RepAdamMorgan) May 1, 2024

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.

Category:

corruption, Political

Tagged with:

10 Lies Democrats Tell About Our Elections (And How to Refute Them)

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | MAY 03, 2024

Author Shawn Fleetwood profile

SHAWN FLEETWOOD

VISIT ON TWITTER@SHAWNFLEETWOOD

There is almost no subject the left won’t lie about. Whether it’s denying basic biology or fabricating “bloodbath” hoaxes about their top Republican rival, no topic is off limits for the Democrat “disinformation” police — and that includes elections.

Since the 2020 election, Democrats and their media allies have worked overtime to smear Americans concerned about the integrity of U.S. elections. No matter how legitimate these concerns may be, the left slanders anyone who challenges controversial elections won by Democrats as so-called “election deniers.”

Putting aside the fact that Democrats have questioned elections they don’t win (see the Trump-Russia collusion hoax), it’s important to highlight that the left regularly lies about America’s elections to further their party’s goal of acquiring and maintaining government power. In service of this goal, no falsehood is too great.

Here are the 10 biggest lies Democrats tell about U.S. elections so you can identify and combat these mistruths.

1. Election Integrity Laws ‘Suppress’ Voters

Under the guise of Covid, many states expanded the use of unsupervised mail-in voting, permanently changing the electoral landscape and how modern elections are conducted. With Covid-era lockdowns now in the rearview mirror, many Republican-controlled states have spent the past several years returning their election systems to pre-Covid practices and moving away from unsupervised methods.

With their election machine that thrives off the insecure mail-in system threatened, Democrats have taken to dishonestly attacking GOP-backed election integrity laws. The most common of these smears is the debunked claim that voter ID laws suppress voters, especially those who aren’t white. Of course, there’s no evidence to support such assertions, as m ultiple court rulings have found.

One of the more egregious examples of these attacks came from President Joe Biden, who grossly labeled a benign 2021 Georgia election law as “Jim Crow on steroids.” Contrary to Democrats’ smears, Georgia experienced record early voter turnout during the state’s 2022 midterms. A poll conducted after the election also revealed that zero percent of black Georgia voters said they had a “poor” experience voting.

2. The 2020 Election Was the ‘Most Secure in American History’

This claim from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) — the “nerve center” of the federal government’s censorship operations — is just as inaccurate today as the day it was issued nearly four years ago.

From illegal election rule changes in Michigan and Pennsylvania to the unauthorized use of ballot drop boxes in Wisconsin, the 2020 election was fraught with mischief and irregularities. In unprecedented fashion, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg poured hundreds of millions of dollars into left-wing nonprofits, which funneled most of these “Zuckbucks” into election offices in Democrat-majority localities to push Democrat-backed voting policies and get-out-the-vote efforts.

There was also heavy involvement from U.S. intel agencies and officials to help Joe Biden leading up to the election.

Weeks ahead of the 2020 contest, the New York Post dropped a bombshell story documenting the Biden family’s foreign business dealings. Despite having authenticated the laptop as early as November 2019, the FBI spent months leading up to the election pressuring Big Tech companies such as Facebook and Twitter (now X) to be on the lookout for so-called “Russian propaganda” and “hack and leak operations.” Zuckerberg all but admitted during a 2022 interview with podcaster Joe Rogan that the company’s decision to suppress the Post story was based on the FBI’s warning.

The CIA — while allegedly coordinating with the Biden campaign — purportedly solicited signatures for a letter issued by 51 former intel officials claiming Hunter’s laptop was part of a Russian disinformation campaign. Meanwhile, Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss reportedly delayed his investigation into Hunter’s alleged tax law violations to avoid negatively affecting Joe’s electoral prospects.

[READ: Docs: CISA Knew Risks Of Mail-In Voting In 2020, But Got Posts About Them Censored Anyway]

3. Voter Fraud Doesn’t Exist

When it comes to defending the chaotic and irregular 2020 election, legacy media have adopted the strategy of pretending that voter fraud never happens. But recent cases of such illegalities show that isn’t true.

In December, the Louisiana Supreme Court let stand a lower court decision that the existence of voter fraud in a local sheriff’s race warranted a new election. While initial results in Caddo Parish’s November sheriff’s race indicated that Democrat Henry Whitehorn defeated Republican John Nickelson by one vote, a lawsuit filed by Nickelson and subsequent legal proceedings revealed there were enough illegal votes to call into question the election outcome.

The judge overseeing the case ultimately determined there were 11 unlawful votes cast in the race, and as such, ordered that a new election be held.

Another recent incident of voter fraud occurred in Bridgeport, Connecticut’s Democrat mayoral primary. Surveillance footage released after the September election showed what appeared to be a city employee affiliated with the incumbent mayor’s campaign “stuffing ballot boxes.” The matter prompted a superior court judge to order a new election.

4. Election Workers Are Under Siege

As America edges closer to the 2024 election, Democrats are ramping up their attacks on election oversight. On an almost weekly basis, regime-approved media outlets run article after article lamenting an alleged wave of “threats” against election workers that they blame on Trump’s 2020 election criticisms.

Of course, these same doomsday predictions didn’t materialize during the 2022 midterms. But that hasn’t stopped the press from continuing to repeat the narrative they have little evidence to support.

5. Ranked-Choice Voting Is ‘Fair’

Often referred to as “rigged-choice voting” by its critics, ranked-choice voting (RCV) is a system whereby voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of first-choice votes in the first round of voting, the last-place finisher is eliminated, and his votes are reallocated to the voter’s second-choice candidate. This process continues until one candidate receives a majority of votes.

RCV’s (mostly Democrat) proponents have deceptively attempted to garner support for the system by claiming it brings “fairness” to the voting process. But a quick look into RCV’s history reveals anything but a fair system.

RCV has produced election results that contradict the desires of voters, especially Republican ones. Since adopting the system, Alaska and Maine have produced elections in which the Democrat candidate was the declared winner despite the Republican candidate winning more votes in the first round of voting.

Jurisdictions employing RCV have also experienced inaccurate election results and high rates of discarded ballots.

6. Contingent Electors Are ‘Fake’ and Unlawful

After Arizona Democrat Attorney General Kris Mayes released an indictment alleging 18 Republicans illegally participated in a so-called “fake elector scheme,” media hacks are once again using this dishonest terminology to characterize Trump’s challenging of the 2020 election results as unlawful and unprecedented.

But there’s no such thing as a “fake elector,” and the naming of contingent Republican electors during the 2020 election was neither unprecedented nor unlawful. The process undertaken in states such as Georgia closely mirrored efforts taken during the 1960 presidential contest between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

[READ: The Left’s 2020 ‘Fake Electors’ Narrative Is Fake News]

Had courts ruled in Trump’s favor in lawsuits disputing the election results in battleground states, the alternate electors would have been in place to ensure the will of the people was exercised.

7. ERIC Is ‘Nonpartisan’

The Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) has become a favorite tool of the Democrat election machine — so naturally, the media have rushed to smear its opponents as unhinged crazies.

Deceptively marketed to states as a means to keep their voter rolls updated, ERIC is a widely used voter-roll “management” system founded by far-left activist David Becker that places a higher priority on registering new voters than on cleaning up existing voter rolls. The program inflates voter rolls by requiring member states to contact “eligible but unregistered” residents and encourage them to register to vote.

Concerns about ERIC’s ties to Becker and its refusal to change its bylaws prompted numerous GOP-led states to depart the organization. To salvage ERIC’s reputation, the media launched a seemingly coordinated campaign to position the group as “nonpartisan” and cast its opponents as “conspiracy theorists.” Of course, this coverage fails to disclose ERIC’s relationship with the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), another Becker-founded nonprofit most notable for its “Zuckbucks” interference in the 2020 election to help Biden and other Democrats.

As The Federalist previously reported, ERIC sends the voter-roll data it receives from states to CEIR. Upon receiving the data, CEIR “then develops targeted mailing lists and sends them back to the states to use for voter registration outreach.” In other words, CEIR — a highly partisan nonprofit with a history of left-wing activism — is creating lists of potential (and likely Democrat) voters for states to register in the lead-up to major elections.

8. Mail-In Voting Is Secure and Reliable

Much like the issue of voter fraud, Democrats have gone to great lengths to convince the American public that mail-in voting has zero problems and is 100 percent secure. But according to left-wing media’s own reporting, that narrative isn’t true.

In recent months, outlets such as NBC News and CBS News have published stories highlighting insecurities within the U.S. postal system. While NBC addressed the effect postal delivery delays could have on mail-in voting during the 2024 election, CBS explored the increasing problem of mail theft.

NBC even cited remarks from Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Texas, who expressed concern that mail delivery delays could present “difficulties” and “barriers” to voters during the November election.

9. Democrats Are the Party of ‘Democracy’

Biden and Democrats love to contend that “democracy is on the ballot” this November. The insinuation, of course, is that the republic as we know it will collapse if Trump and Republicans emerge victorious at the ballot box. Yet, for all their professed concerns about “democracy,” Democrats are doing everything in their power to destroy it.

In unprecedented fashion, the left is abusing the legal system in an attempt to imprison and bankrupt their chief political rival ahead of a major election. Spanning dozens of counts, a roughly half-a-billion-dollar fine, and five judicial venues, the Biden Department of Justice and leftist prosecutors are waging lawfare against Donald Trump to hinder his reelection prospects.

10. Biden’s Federal Election Takeover Is Just a ‘Nonpartisan’ Outreach Effort

The seriousness of Executive Order 14019 cannot be overstated. Signed by Biden in March 2021, the directive ordered hundreds of federal agencies to interfere in state and local election administration by using taxpayer dollars to engage in voter registration and get-out-the-vote activities — a policy Congress never authorized.

Under the edict, each department was instructed to draft “a strategic plan” explaining how it intended to fulfill Biden’s order, and to collaborate with so-called “nonpartisan third-party organizations” that have been “approved” by the administration to supply “voter registration services on agency premises.” While Biden and his lackies claim these outside groups are “nonpartisan,” the facts tell a different story.

Good government groups and conservative media have discovered that many of the organizations collaborating with the administration are extremely left-wing, indicating an effort to identify and register likely-Democrat voters. Among those identified are the ACLU and Demos, both of which contributed to a “progress report” tracking agencies’ compliance with the “Bidenbucks” order.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served 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

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Swing States Are Using Taxpayer Money to Turn Out Democrat-Leaning Young Voters

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | MAY 01, 2024

Author Shawn Fleetwood profile

SHAWN FLEETWOOD

VISIT ON TWITTER@SHAWNFLEETWOOD

Democrat election officials in Arizona and Nevada are using taxpayer resources to register and turn out Democrat-favorable young voters ahead of the 2024 election.

On Monday, Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, announced that his office is partnering with the ALL IN Campus Democracy Challenge to launch the “Arizona Campus Voting Challenge.” According to an office press release, this allegedly “nonpartisan initiative” is designed to increase voter engagement among students attending accredited universities throughout the state.

Young voters (18-29) broke for Democrat House candidates over Republican ones by a nearly 2-to-1 margin during the 2022 midterms, according to estimates by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.

Participation in the Arizona Campus Voting Challenge is free and allows participating colleges to become “eligible for awards based on voter turnout and registration rates on their campuses for the November 5, 2024 election.” Federal law makes it illegal to “make[] or offer[] to make an expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote.”

Students who join will also be “provided guidance and tools to create an action plan for increasing student engagement on their campus,” according to Fontes’ office.

“By signing up for the Arizona Campus Voting Challenge, all accredited, degree-granting higher education institutions across the state can improve, measure, and celebrate efforts to institutionalize nonpartisan civic learning, political engagement and informed voter participation,” the presser reads. “Institutions that sign up for the Arizona Campus Voting Challenge will also be automatic participants in the nationwide ALL IN where awards are issued for highest voter turnout, most improved voter turnout, and highest rate of voter registration. As well as state-specific awards for meeting objectives mapped out in an institution’s nonpartisan democratic engagement action plan.”

Despite being marketed as “nonpartisan,” the initiative appears to be anything but. As I previously wrote in these pages, ALL IN is an enterprise of Civic Nation, a left-wing nonprofit headed by Valerie Jarrett, a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama. The initiative has previously produced Democrat talking points, such as the baseless claim that “strict voter ID requirements” are “barriers” to voting.

ALL IN’s leadership team is also comprised of Democrats. Founding advisory board member Alicia Kolar Prevost, for example, previously served in the Clinton administration and worked at the Democratic National Committee.

Not Democrats’ First Rodeo

Fontes is hardly the only left-wing election official using his office to turn out a demographic favorable to Democrats.

Earlier this year, Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, also a Democrat, announced his office would be accepting applications to join his “Youth Advisory Task Force” to engage young voters ahead of the 2024 election. According to an office press release, the task force’s priorities include “identifying and proposing programs that support participatory democracy and solutions to any problem concerning the level of participatory democracy of young voters,” and “supporting projects … that encourage and advance participatory democracy of young voters.”

Task force members were appointed by Aguilar earlier this month and include “high school and college students, as well as non-students, between the ages of 17 and 24.” There are roughly 118,000 students enrolled in Nevada colleges, according to Univstats.

Michigan Democrat Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson launched a similar task force in October.

Democrats Use Taxpayer Dollars to Target Young Voters

At the same time Democrat officials like Fontes and Aguilar target young voters with taxpayer dollars in their respective states, President Joe Biden is weaponizing the federal government to take these efforts nationwide.

Signed in March 2021, Executive Order 14019 directed hundreds of federal agencies to interfere in state and local election administration by using taxpayer funds to boost voter registration and get-out-the-vote activities. Agencies were instructed to collaborate with so-called “nonpartisan third-party organizations” that have been “approved” by the White House to provide “voter registration services on agency premises.” Of course, many of these “nonpartisan” groups have been identified as extremely left-wing, such as the ACLU and Demos.

As part of its compliance with the “Bidenbucks” order, the Department of Education issued a memo in February announcing that Federal Work-Study funds — which are used to provide part-time campus jobs to help students with tuition costs — may be used to employ students by government agencies for work such as “supporting broad-based get-out-the-vote activities, voter registration, providing voter assistance at a polling place or through a voter hotline, or serving as a poll worker.” The agency also released a “toolkit” that included guidelines for universities on how to increase voter registration and turnout on their campuses.

A Nationwide Strategy

Through the use of these taxpayer-funded GOTV operations and voter registration drives conducted by left-wing nonprofits such as the Voter Participation Center, Democrats are hoping young voters can make the difference for Biden in the battleground states needed to win the presidency this November.

In the 2020 election, for example, Biden won Arizona by less than 11,000 votes, or 0.4 percent. The Grand Canyon State also experienced close elections in the 2022 midterms, in which Democrat Kris Mayes defeated Republican Abe Hamadeh in the attorney general’s race by just 280 votes.

Given these slim margins and college students’ history of (mostly) backing Democrats, it’s no surprise Biden and Co. have made them a major focus of 2024 GOTV operations. With many students living near or on university grounds, campuses make for the perfect Democrat Party registration hubs and offer the party an opportunity to expand their chances of electoral success.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served 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

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Alito: Criminalizing Close Election Contests Would Destabilize Entire Foundation Of American Democracy

BY: BRIANNA LYMAN | APRIL 25, 2024

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito suggested Thursday during oral arguments regarding presidential immunity that criminalizing individuals just because they question government-run elections would destabilize true democracy.

Special counsel Jack Smith indicted former President Donald Trump for questioning the administration of the 2020 election. The high court is now hearing challenges as to whether presidents have immunity from criminal prosecutions for actions taken while in office that fall within the scope of their presidential duties.

“Let me end with just a question about, what is required for the functioning of a stable democratic society, which is something that we all want?” Alito began. “I’m sure you would agree with me that a stable, democratic society requires that a candidate who loses an election, even a close one, even a hotly contested one, leave office peacefully if that candidate is the incumbent?”

“Of course,” attorney Michael Dreeben said.

Justice Alito hypothesizes what could happen if presidents don’t have criminal immunity:

“If an incumbent…knows…that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country?” pic.twitter.com/zXSJEGMNOo
— The Recount (@therecount) April 25, 2024

“Now, if an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off in a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?” Alito asked. “And we can look around the world and find countries where we have seen this process where the loser gets thrown in jail.”

“So, I think it’s exactly the opposite, Justice Alito,” Dreeben said. “There are lawful mechanisms to contest the results in an election and outside the record, but I think of public knowledge, petitioner and his allies filed dozens of electoral challenges and my understanding is lost all but one that was not outcome determinative in any respect. There were judges that said in order to sustain substantial claims of fraud that would overturn an election results that’s certified by a state, you need evidence, you need proof and none of those things were manifested. So there’s an appropriate way to challenge things through the courts with evidence, if you lose, you accept the results, that has been the nation’s experience.”

“Thank you,” Alito interjected.

Alito appears to warn Democrats that should the high court rule that certain presidential acts are not covered by presidential immunity and Smith’s lawfare case against the former president may continue — true democratic norms would be decimated as partisan politicians could weaponize the justice system to target their opponents.

Smith indicted Trump on charges of conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and an attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights. In simpler terms, Smith alleges that Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen were false and that Trump knew they were false.

To support his claims, Smith alleges that since federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — which meddled in the 2020 election — told Trump the election wasn’t stolen, and he should have taken that at face value, as pointed out by Federalist Senior Editor John Daniel Davidson.

But objecting to elections is a tale as old as time. Failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton still claims the 2016 election was stolen while Democratic Reps. Jim McGovern, Pramila Jayapal, Raul Grijalva, Sheila Jackson Lee, Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters — who also called the 2000 election “fraudulent” — and Jamie Raskin all objected to Congress’ certification of electoral votes in 2017 that formally declared Trump the winner, my colleague Tristan Justice details.

The 2004 election was also considered “stolen” by New York Rep. Jerry Nadler who went so far as to declare voting machines need to be investigated.

And even after the Supreme Court ended Al Gore’s attempt to overturn the outcome of the election, there were no steps taken to throw Gore in jail for challenging the contest.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

Author Brianna Lyman profile

BRIANNA LYMAN

VISIT ON TWITTER@BRIANNALYMAN2

Category:

Law, Political

Tagged with:

Prosecutors Accuse Trump Of ‘Criminal Scheme’ To ‘Corrupt’ 2016 Election While Russia Hoaxers Walk Free

BY: BRIANNA LYMAN | APRIL 23, 2024

Author Brianna Lyman profile

BRIANNA LYMAN

VISIT ON TWITTER@BRIANNALYMAN2

In opening statements on Monday, Manhattan prosecutors sought to convince a jury that former President Donald Trump “orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election.” Meanwhile, the perpetrators of the Russia-collusion hoax — the real criminal scheme that was orchestrated to meddle in that election — walk free.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg claims Trump broke the law after he classified payments made by his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, to pornographer Stormy Daniels, as “legal fees” rather than campaign expenditures. (It is not illegal to purchase negative press about oneself, and Trump likely would have run afoul of campaign finance laws if he had classified such an expense, which benefitted him personally rather than just his campaign, as a campaign payment.)

Prosecutor Matthew Colangelo, who formerly held a top post in President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice, alleged Monday during opening statements that “this was a planned, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help Donald Trump get elected through illegal expenditures to silence people who had something bad to say about his behavior.”

“It was election fraud, pure and simple,” Colangelo continued, according to PBS News. “The defendant, Donald Trump, orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election. Then he covered up that criminal conspiracy by lying in his New York business records over and over and over again.”

Manhattan prosecutors seek to put Trump in jail for up to four years. Meanwhile, the operatives who invented a hoax accusing Trump of being a Russian asset in 2016, commissioned a dossier of fake oppo research, and shopped it to the FBI — which then used the shoddy “research” as a basis to illegally spy on the Trump campaign — have received a light tap on the wrist, if any punishment at all.

Marc Elias, the Clinton campaign lawyer who commissioned the discredited dossier, received no punishment. The DNC and the Clinton campaign — which together provided funds for oppo research firm Fusion GPS to hire former British spy Christopher Steele, who put his name on the so-called “Steele dossier” — were fined $105,000 and $8,000, respectively, for labeling the payments as “legal and compliance consulting” and “legal services.” Clinton herself, who personally approved the decision to leak the false accusations to the press, was still suggesting the 2016 election was “stolen” from her as recently as 2022 and has never received any repercussions for the Russia hoax.

Russian national Igor Danchenko, the “primary sub-source” whose testimony Steele relied on in creating the dossier, “fed Steele false information about the Trump campaign, which a Clinton booster had invented.” Danchenko was indicted by Special Counsel John Durham for lying to the FBI about a 2016 phone call he claimed he received from an anonymous person who he thought was Sergei Millian. Danchenko claimed the anonymous caller revealed a “conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump and the Russians. These claims were added to the Steele dossier.

Evidence presented to the jury, as The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland noted at the time, indicated that “Danchenko did not know Millian and had not received any telephone calls during the relevant time frame that might fit the description of the call Danchenko claimed he received.”

Nevertheless, a jury in a deep-blue Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. acquitted Danchenko in 2022.

Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann was also acquitted, despite evidence suggesting he lied to then FBI-General Counsel James Baker in 2016. Sussman “presented Baker with data and whitepapers that supposedly showed the existence of a secret communications network between the Russian-based Alfa Bank and the Trump organization,” Cleveland explained. “According to the indictment [from Special Counsel John Durham], Sussmann was acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign and tech executive Rodney Joffe when he met with Baker, but falsely told his friend that he was coming on his own behalf to help the FBI.”

The only person who received any sentence was former FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who pleaded guilty to forging an email to get a warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. Clinesmith, according to Federalist CEO Sean Davis’ reporting on Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s findings, “altered an email from a separate U.S. federal agency, believed to be the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), to falsely state that [Trump campaign affiliate Carter] Page had never worked with the CIA to investigate suspected Russia agents operating within the U.S.”

“In fact,” Davis wrote, “as Clinesmith was told by the operative, Page had worked with the CIA previously, as well as with the FBI.”

Clinesmith was sentenced to 400 hours of community service and one year of probation.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Trump’s Jury Trial Will Be As ‘Fair’ As The Russia Hoax And 2020 Election

BY: BRIANNA LYMAN | APRIL 19, 2024

Author Brianna Lyman profile

BRIANNA LYMAN

VISIT ON TWITTER@BRIANNALYMAN2

Jury selection for 12 jurors wrapped up Thursday in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s lawfare against former President Donald Trump, with the next phase of the trial expected to begin as early as Monday. But with two selected jurors booted for potential bias and perjury and at least one juror who made clear she doesn’t like Trump’s “persona,” can he really get a fair trial?

Who Are the Jurors?

After two of the initial seven selected jurors were struck from the panel, another seven were chosen Thursday. The jurors will hear Bragg’s claim that Trump broke the law by allegedly classifying payments made by his then-lawyer, Michael Cohen, to pornographer Stormy Daniels as part of a nondisclosure agreement as “legal fees” instead of campaign expenditures. Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York declined to charge Trump in 2018.

The final selection of jurors is as follows:

A salesman originally from Ireland who follows MSNBC, The New York Times, the Daily Mail, and Fox News. This juror is reportedly set to serve as the case’s foreman, according to ABC News.
A corporate lawyer from Oregon who reads the NYT, Google News, and the Wall Street Journal. The juror “suggested that he could infer the former president’s intent without ‘reading his mind,’” according to ABC News.
A man who works in finance and follows Michael Cohen — a convicted liar and the prosecution’s star witness — on social media. The juror also said he believes Trump did some good for the nation, The New York Times reported.
A lawyer who told the court he has “political views as to the Trump presidency” in that he agrees with some policies but disagrees with others, according to The Times.
A product development manager who said she did not like Trump’s “persona,” according to ABC News.
A female health care worker who enjoys faith-based podcasts.
A woman who “works in an educational setting” and acknowledged that because Trump “was our president, everyone knows who he is,” according to The Times.
A businessman who likes to listen to podcasts on behavioral psychology.
A retired wealth manager who claims he has no opinions that would hinder his ability to be impartial.
An engineer who said, “No, not really,” when asked if he has strong feelings about Trump, according to the NYT.
An English teacher from Harlem who appreciated Trump speaking “his mind,” according to ABC News.
A female who works in technology and relies on the NYT, Google, Facebook and TikTok for news. According to the NYT, “she said she probably has different beliefs than Mr. Trump, but that ‘this is a free country.’”

Two jurors were struck Thursday, one who admitted her inability to be impartial and another who had a possible history of vandalizing conservative political posters. One female juror told the court “outside influences” could impact her decision-making and expressed concerns about her identity becoming public, according to the Associated Press (AP).

“Yesterday alone I had friends, colleagues and family push things to my phone regarding questioning my identity as a juror,” the woman reportedly said. “I don’t believe at this point that I can be fair and unbiased and let the outside influences not affect my decision making in the courtroom.”

A second juror was dismissed after the prosecution argued he may have been dishonest about his past when he claimed he had never been arrested. “Prosecutors said they found an article about a person with the same name who had been arrested in the 1990s for tearing down posters pertaining to the political right in suburban Westchester County,” the AP reported.

Will These Jurors Deliver a ‘Common Sense Judgment’?

The Supreme Court held in the 1975 case Taylor v. Louisiana that “The purpose of a jury is to guard against the exercise of arbitrary power — to make available the common sense judgment of the community as a hedge against the overzealous or mistaken prosecutor … or biased response of a judge.”

The Sixth Amendment is designed to protect the accused from any arbitrary and capricious trials perpetrated by a weaponized government. A jury of the accused’s peers is meant to check the power of the government, a right created in response to the British courts’ habit of permitting judges to compel juries to change their verdict if the outcome was not favored by the judge.

But from what we know of the Manhattan jury pool, it’s not clear these New Yorkers will be willing to check the government on a case that experts on both sides of the aisle have called “dubious.” New York County, which encompasses Manhattan, voted for Joe Biden over Trump 87 percent to 12 percent in 2020.

Trump’s lawyer objected to one potential juror who posted a video of a crowd of people celebrating Biden’s 2020 victory. Judge Juan Merchan decided to chastise Trump instead and refused to strike the potential juror for cause.

Another potential juror who was excused because of a job conflict told reporters outside of the courthouse that while she believes it is important for Trump to get a fair trial, she did not “approve of what he did as president.“

Meanwhile of the dozen jurors selected, a number said they get their news from corporate media like The New York Times — one of the outlets that spent years disparaging Trump and spreading false information about him.

Three NYT reporters won Pulitzer Prizes for their “reporting” on the Russia-collusion hoax, which they based on anonymous sources. But FBI official Peter Strzok, who ran the investigation into the alleged collusion, privately acknowledged the report was filled with “misleading and inaccurate” information, as pointed out by The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway.

Other jurors cited Google as a news source. Google “interfered” in elections at least 41 times over the past 16 years to harm candidates “who threatened [Google’s] left-wing candidate of choice,” a study from the Media Research Center found. In 2020, corporate media and Big Tech suppressed a bombshell report about the Biden family’s corrupt foreign business dealings mere weeks before the presidential election, adding to a pattern of burying negative press about Trump’s opponent while spreading lies about Trump.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

Category:

Law, Political

Tagged with:

Report: Flyers Urging Illegals to Vote for Biden Found in Left-Wing Group’s Office in Mexico

BY: BRIANNA LYMAN | APRIL 17, 2024

A flyer purportedly encouraging illegal immigrants to vote for Joe Biden

Flyers reportedly posted around a Resource Center Matamoros facility in Mexico encouraged illegal immigrants — who are not eligible to vote in the United States — to vote for President Joe Biden in November, according to The Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project. One of the organizations operating out of the Resource Center Matamoros (RCM) has ties to Biden’s Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, whose articles of impeachment the U.S. House of Representatives delivered to the Senate Tuesday afternoon.

The flyers, which the Oversight Project posted photos of on X, read “Reminder to vote for President Biden when you are in the United States. We need another four years of his term to stay open.” The Heritage Foundation said the flyers were first discovered by Muckraker but also confirmed to The Federalist that their own team had obtained a copy of one of the flyers “inside the RCM office.”

“The flyer in the X thread is a direct scan of the one our folks obtained on-site inside the RCM office,” a Heritage Foundation representative said. “The flyers were also posted all over the camp in the port-a-potties.”

Nevertheless, others have raised questions about the flyer, including Fox News’ Bill Melugin.

“I am extremely skeptical of this. The flier appears to be a word for word Google Translate copy & paste of a portion of the NGO’s English website, with ‘vote for Biden’ randomly added in at the end, when it does not appear on the site,” Melugin posted on X. “The translation is bad, then you have ‘bienvenidos’ spelled wrong and ‘todos con Biden’ added onto the flier with a Biden logo.”

Another social media user associated with a left-wing immigration group claimed to have spoken with the executive director of RCM and said the posters were “Totally fake” and “Made up by two posers.”

It is unclear whether RCM authorized the posting of the flyers, but the Heritage Foundation told The Federalist that because they found flyers in the RCM office, they have “every reason to believe” the flyer is from the organization. The Federalist reached out to RCM for more information but did not receive a response.

The flyers “appear to be handed out when illegal aliens use the RCM for assistance in coming to the USA,” according to the Oversight Project.

These flyers were discovered by @realmuckraker throughout the Resource Center Matamoras (RCM) location including on the walls of port-a-potties

They also appear to be handed out when illegal aliens use the RCM for assistance in coming to the USA pic.twitter.com/hvlkwOI5Xs
— Oversight Project (@OversightPR) April 16, 2024

RCM says it is “a humanitarian organization that provides a safe space where refugees at the southern Texas-Mexico border can access legal and social support services.” Its “6-unit office complex” hosts the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS), which provides “legal assistance and assistance with obtaining formal documents for job search and integration into the city of Matamoros as [migrants] wait to access the asylum process in the US.”

RCM founder and executive director Gaby Zavala previously worked with La Union del Pueblo Entero (LUPE)– a left-wing organization that is partnered with the Open Society Institute, as pointed out by the Oversight Project. The Open Society Institute is funded by left-wing billionaire and mega-donor George Soros.

RCM also worked alongside Team Brownsville, a left-wing organization, and Angry Tias and Abeulas, which aims to help illegal immigrants cross the border, according to the Oversight Project.

RCM has significant ties to Soros-funded non-profits operating in the United States, including Save the Children, Team Brownsville Texas, and Angry Tias and Abuelas pic.twitter.com/cydCAM4PdE
— Oversight Project (@OversightPR) April 16, 2024

Mayorkas — whose disastrous handling of the invasion at the southern border earned him impeachment by the House — was formerly on the board of HIAS and in his current role with the Biden administration has met with members of both Angry Tias and Abuelas as well as LUPE, according to Judicial Watch.

While illegal immigrants and other noncitizens are prohibited from voting in federal elections, federal voter registration forms simply require each individual to check a box affirming he is a U.S. citizen. The lack of any requirement that new voters show documentary proof of citizenship prompted former President Donald Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson on Friday to announce Republican legislation that would demand such documentation from new registrants.

The federal government currently prohibits states from requiring potential voters to provide such proof to register to vote in federal elections. States may require proof of citizenship to register for statewide elections, as Arizona does. But even in Arizona, a voter who attempts to register to vote with the state form but fails to provide proof of citizenship must then be registered to vote on a federal-only form.

During the 2020 presidential election, 11,600 voters voted using a federal-only ballot, AZ Free News reported. President Joe Biden won the state by 10,457 votes.

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

Author Brianna Lyman profile

BRIANNA LYMAN

VISIT ON TWITTER@BRIANNALYMAN2

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Black Voters’ Disillusionment with Biden Could Help Trump Pull Off A 2016 Repeat

BY: BRIANNA LYMAN | APRIL 08, 2024

Author Brianna Lyman profile

BRIANNA LYMAN

VISIT ON TWITTER@BRIANNALYMAN2

During a recent segment on “Saturday Night Live,” Michael Che joked President Joe Biden, like the Baltimore bridge that collapsed, “is no longer connecting with black communities.” But for the Biden campaign, it’s not funny. In fact, the president’s low approval ratings and apparent inability to inspire enthusiasm among black voters could mean a repeat of 2016 for Democrats, if the enthusiasm gap is wide enough to outweigh Democrats’ ballot trafficking operations.

A poll surveying Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin conducted by the Wall Street Journal found that Biden is winning about 68 percent of black voters in those swing states — a low number, by historical comparison. During the 2020 election, Biden received 91 percent of the black vote nationwide, according to the WSJ.

The WSJ poll, which was conducted March 17-24 and included 600 voters in each state, isn’t the first to suggest black voters may be growing dissatisfied with the Biden administration. In November, a New York Times and Siena College poll found 22 percent of black voters in six key swing states would choose Trump over Biden. A December poll from the University of Chicago found 63 percent of black Americans would vote for Biden while 20 percent said they would vote for “someone else” besides Trump or Biden. Seventeen percent said they would choose Trump.

Lifelong Chicago Democrat explains her flip to voting for Trump. Clips like this should scare the crap out of Democrats. 🔥pic.twitter.com/oDFFiDLKgA
— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) April 2, 2024

An NBC News poll also found that while black voters may still overwhelmingly favor Biden when compared to Trump, “the margin shrank” when it came to those under the age of 34. Biden’s support went from 73 percent among black voters of all ages to 60 percent amongst those under 34. Meanwhile, Trump went from 17 percent to 28 percent respectively, according to the poll. The demographic is key for Biden, who won “89% of Black voters under 29 and 78% of those 30 to 44,” according to the poll.

‘Overall Lack of Enthusiasm’

“It doesn’t seem like any choice is really a good choice at all,” 30-year-old Detroit native Kaja Braziel told NPR. Braziel, who voted for former President Barack Obama, said she’s upset Biden “hasn’t done more” to pay for her student loans and is not sure she will even head to the polls come November.

“It feels more so like you’re caught between the devil you know and the devil you don’t. And at this point in time, it feels like both the devils that we know. And I’m not comfortable with either of them,” Braziel said.

Ka’Marr Coleman-Byrd, 27, is a tax consultant who voted for Biden in 2020 but said as of now he has not made up his mind about the 2024 election.

“Growing up, I feel like I voted Democrat just because it just seemed like the thing to do,” Coleman-Byrd told NPR. “I’d say now … I’m sort of more into politics and seeing exactly what both parties present, so it’s not just like a blind vote in a sense.”

Then there is 31-year-old CJ Sampson, who told NPR that while he considers himself to be liberal, Biden does not inspire confidence. He said when comparing whether life was better under Trump or Biden, “it’s kind of a mixture of both.”

Team Trump appears eager to capitalize on the shift among voters. Trump received 6 percent of the black vote in 2016 and 8 percent in 2020, according to a Pew Research analysis. Now the former president is encouraging Republicans in key states like Michigan to reach out to black voters in Detroit and other areas, in the hopes of drawing them away from Biden, according to The Associated Press.

“This is part of Donald Trump’s path to victory,” CEO of Democrat firm HIT Strategies Terrance Woodbury told The Washington Post. “There’s about 32 percent of the Black electorate that’s just cynical, frustrated, closest to the pain, and that voter doesn’t like Democrats or Republicans. They feel like they’ve been failed by both sides and they’ve been failed by a system. And that’s a part of Donald Trump’s ‘the system is broken’ message that appeals to them.”

For Trump, the goal isn’t about “winning” the black vote so much as it is chipping away at Biden’s base.

“Nobody thinks we are going to win the Black vote,” an anonymous Trump adviser told the Post. “But if you get 10 percent or more, the election is over.”

Democrat strategist Doug Schoen contends that “overall lack of enthusiasm” is the biggest issue for Biden.

“I tend to think that black voters will probably come back to Biden in bigger numbers than they are now but that there’s an enthusiasm gap and turnout will be an issue for Biden,” Schoen told The Federalist.

Biden does not have much leeway. In 2020, he won states like Georgia and Arizona by less than 15,000 votes. Voters who decide to choose Trump over Biden — or even the couch over Biden — present a roadblock to the incumbent.

A 2016 Repeat?

If enough voters choose to stay home, Biden could run into the same problem Hillary Clinton did in 2016 when she lost by thin margins after millions of voters either sat the race out or voted for her opponent.

The Washington Post reviewed data from 33 states and Washington D.C. and found at least 1.75 million people who went to the polls in 2016 did not vote for a presidential candidate.

A separate review from Pew Research found that out of the “tens of millions of registered voters” who did not vote at all in 2016, 25 percent said their “dislike” of the candidate drove their decision. When broken down by race, 19 percent of black voters who did not vote cited issues with the candidates.

Clinton’s team misjudged their chances in Wisconsin, for example, where the NYT noted “Clinton had assumed she would win.” Trump ended up winning the state, which saw its lowest voter turnout in 16 years, by just 27,000 votes. (Trump lost the state in 2020 by less than 21,000 votes.)

Wisconsin’s District 15, which was 84 percent black during the 2016 election, saw the state’s biggest turnout decline in 2016 compared to 2012, according to the NYT. Several voters told the Times they were upset about the candidate choices — a common sentiment heard this go-around as well.

Since 2016, of course, Democrats have come a long way in institutionalizing their ballot trafficking operations, which make voter enthusiasm less of a gold standard. Even if enthusiasm for Biden remains dismal, Democrats will do their best to counteract it by harvesting ballots for voters who aren’t motivated enough to get themselves to the polls.

Biden Courts Anti-Israel Radicals

As Biden faces polling drops among black voters, he is also struggling among anti-Israel radicals. In Michigan’s majority-Arab Dearborn, “uncommitted” beat Biden during the state’s presidential primary. Statewide, more than 100,000 voters chose “uncommitted” in the primary, according to the NYT.

Schoen told The Federalist that Biden appears more concerned about losing the progressive wing of his party rather than black voters.

“I think Biden’s worried about progressives,” he said. “He’s worried about the left undermining him, he’s worried about Arab-Americans in states like Michigan and that I think explains in large part his movement … to a policy now that is going to condition military aid for Israel.”

“I’m more confident that black voters will come home [in November] than progressives and I think that’s what Biden thinks as well,” Schoen added. But will taking black voters for granted only give them more reason to be disillusioned with Biden?

Democrats in general seem less enthusiastic about Biden than they were in 2020. A Gallup poll found 42 percent of Democrats say they are less enthusiastic about voting than normal compared to 35 percent of Republicans. A USA Today/Suffolk University poll released in January found 44 percent of Trump supporters scored their enthusiasm for Trump as a 10. Just 18 percent of Biden supporters said the same for the Democrat president.

It’s little wonder Democrats have tried to keep the election from being a referendum on the unpopular incumbent president. The campaign strategy appears to be fearmongering about “threats to democracy” and waging lawfare against Trump, instead of touting Biden’s uninspiring record.

Schoen said Biden needs to address Americans’ concerns about illegal immigration and inflation. Asked whether Biden’s messaging about alleged “threats to democracy” would increase voter turnout and appeal to dissatisfied voters, Schoen told The Federalist: “You can’t eat ‘threat to democracy.’”

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Leftists Bragged About ‘Fortifying’ The 2020 Election. Now They’re Flaunting Plans To Do It Again In 2024

BY: BRIANNA LYMAN | MARCH 27, 2024

President Joe Biden at his inaugural address

Author Brianna Lyman profile

BRIANNA LYMAN

VISIT ON TWITTER@BRIANNALYMAN2

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.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Alabama Secretary Of State Warns Of ‘Misleading’ Voter Registration Mailer By Leftist Group

BY: M.D. KITTLE | MARCH 26, 2024

A sticker declaring, I Voted, with American flag.

Author M.D. Kittle profile

M.D. KITTLE

Two groups are running a “misleading, unsolicited mass mailing of pre-filled voter registration forms targeting Alabama mailboxes,” according to an alert from Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen. In his warning, Allen says his office has “officially discouraged” the mailer, which is in no way affiliated with the state.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that left-wing groups founded by an old Clinton family friend are behind the effort. According to the secretary of state’s office, the Voter Participation Center and Center for Voter Information have said they intend at least two rounds of mass mailings.

“On two occasions, this Office was contacted on behalf of Voter Participation Center and Center for Voter Information regarding a mailer they planned to send to Alabama citizens,” Allen said in the alert. “In response, I strongly discouraged the group’s plan to mass mail our citizens.”

According to activist tracker InfluenceWatch, the Voter Participation Center (VPC) was launched in 2003 as Women’s Voices Women Vote, before expanding its mission and changing its name nearly a decade later.

“The group initially focused on registering the strongly Democratic-leaning voting bloc of single women to vote; today, the group organizes registration of numerous Democratic-leaning voting populations,” InfluenceWatch reports.

Founded with help from former President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff John Podesta, the leftist nonprofit has been heavily scrutinized for trying to “register animals, dead people, infants and felons to vote,” according to a 2012 Judicial Watch probe. The center has ties to Big Labor, including the AFL-CIO.

The VPC’s “questionable tactics to undermine the electoral process have caused concerns in several states, including New Mexico, Florida, Wisconsin and Virginia,” the Judicial Watch investigative report states. “VPC forms are deceiving and appear to be official when they are not, according to a news report that links a picture of the mailer. The VPC has also defended the famously corrupt Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) during its various scandals.”

The Voter Participation Center and its partner nonprofit, the Center for Voter Information, were at it again in the 2020 presidential election, to the concern of election officials in several states. As left-leaning Propublica reported at the time, the Democrat-tied groups conducted a “massive campaign to register voters and promote mail-in voting.”

“The nonprofits aim to send 340 million pieces of mail this election cycle, with a focus on two dozen key states. The groups describe themselves as nonpartisan, but they were founded by a former Democratic operative, and the organization has spent at least $47,142 this cycle to promote former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential bid and $40,065 supporting other Democrats, according to public filings,” Propublica reported on Oct. 23, 2020, just 11 days before the election.

Propublica’s figures were a drop in the bucket. Tax filings subsequently reviewed by the Hill found the Voter Participation Center spent more than $100 million, a sevenfold increase from what the organization spent on the 2016 presidential election.

Like other leftist groups, the center used the cover of Covid to defend its get-out-the-vote efforts targeting Democrats.

“At a time when in-person voter contact was sidelined for health and safety reasons, the Voter Participation Center really stood up and did the work that was needed to help register voters, to help voters learn about and sign up to vote by mail, and to educate voters on early voting in person, voting by mail and how to vote safely on election day,” Tom Lopach, the group’s CEO, told the Hill at the time. Lopach, as the publication noted, is a longtime Democrat operative who previously served as “executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and a former chief of staff” to Democrat Sen. Jon Tester.

Allen said his office has in previous elections cycles received complaints from Alabama residents about “incorrect pre-filled voter registration forms” much like the ones from the Voter Participation Center.

“This type of targeted, partisan interference by out-of-state, third-party organizations is unnecessary, confusing, and counterproductive,” the secretary of state said.

“Alabama citizens can rest assured that the Alabama Secretary of State’s office and local election officials are well-equipped to handle voter registration in Alabama,” Allen added. “Trusted voter registration and election information can be found on the Secretary of State’s official website.”

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Exclusive: Jordan Tells CISA To Fork Over Docs About Its Collusion with Pennsylvania to Target Election Speech

BY: BRIANNA LYMAN | MARCH 20, 2024

House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan sent a letter Wednesday to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Administration (CISA) — which has been called the “nerve center” of government censorship — notifying the agency that documents related to CISA’s partnership with Pennsylvania to target so-called “misinformation” are included in the Judiciary Committee’s ongoing subpoena, according to a copy of the letter obtained exclusively by The Federalist.

Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro recently announced the state’s Election Task Force would partner with CISA’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), to “mitigate threats to the election process, protect voters from intimidation, and provide voters with accurate, trusted election information.”

The Pennsylvania State Department revealed to The Federalist that the state would also be partnering with CISA to “open lines of communication and share intelligence among the included government agencies.” The State Department did not clarify what “intelligence” refers to or what will be done with said information.

Jordan demanded the DHS provide more detailed information on the partnership by April 3.

“The Committee on the Judiciary is conducting oversight of how and to what extent the Executive Branch has coerced or colluded with companies and other intermediaries to censor lawful speech,” the letter reads. “In light of recent public reporting that the [CISA] has partnered with at least one state government in a way that may target Americans’ speech online in the lead-up to the upcoming 2024 election, we write to notify you that documents about such partnerships are responsive to the Committee’s April 28, 2023 subpoena.”

https://www.scribd.com/embeds/715382868/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll&access_key=key-dI7I48lQYKZzytDIZ0Rt

Jim Jordan sends letter to … by The Federalist

“The reporting about a partnership between CISA and the Pennsylvania Election Threats Task Force reinforces concerns that CISA is again partnering with third parties in a way that will censor or chill Americans’ speech,” Jordan wrote.

“The government’s involvement in this type of speech is particularly alarming because, as the Supreme Court has recognized, ‘the importance of First Amendment protections is at its zenith’ for ‘core political speech,’” the letter continued.

Shapiro said the task force would “combat misinformation” but CISA, the DHS subagency which congressional Republicans have called the “nerve center” of federal censorship, has a history of targeting Americans and their free speech by smearing it as “misinformation” or “malformation.” CISA defines “malinformation” as anything “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”

In other words, CISA has censored Americans for stating true information. For example, America First Legal obtained documents showing CISA created a six-point list in October 2020 warning of the risks of unsupervised mail-in voting. Publicly, however, the weaponized agency flagged social media posts highlighting those concerns as “disinformation” for Big Tech companies to censor.

CISA partnered with consulting firm Deloitte and asked for notifications of social media trends about “narratives relating to ‘Vote-By-Mail’ — and to flag specific social media posts for CISA’s awareness and attention.”

One of the posts Deloitte flagged was an October 2020 tweet from then-President Donald Trump in which he claimed there were “Big problems and discrepancies with Mail In Ballots all over the USA.”

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

Author Brianna Lyman profile

BRIANNA LYMAN

VISIT ON TWITTER@BRIANNALYMAN2

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Media Attack New RNC Chair For Election Integrity Efforts, But GOP Critics Say He Could Do More

BY: BRIANNA LYMAN | MARCH 11, 2024

Then-President Donald Trump speaks at rally in North Carolina

Author Brianna Lyman profile

BRIANNA LYMAN

VISIT ON TWITTER@BRIANNALYMAN2

The Republican National Committee (RNC) replaced its chairwoman Ronna McDaniel on Friday with the now-former North Carolina Republican Party (NCGOP) chair Michael Whatley, who was the Trump-backed frontrunner. Ever since Whatley’s name was floated, the corporate media predictably deployed the “election denier” smear they assign to any Republican who has ever shown an interest in protecting the integrity of elections.

Whatley has a track record of emphasizing election integrity — and that’s enough, in the eyes of the corporate press, to paint him as a radical election-denying extremist. But with the high stakes of the 2024 election cycle, some of Whatley’s critics say he needs to amp up his election integrity efforts to another level in his anticipated post at the RNC.

Attacks From the Corporate Media

Whatley, who had served as NCGOP chair since narrowly defeating his opponents Jim Womack and John Lewis in 2019, has been the target of hand-wringing pieces from corporate media ever since he was tapped as former President Trump’s choice to lead the RNC. In an MSNBC column, North Carolina Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton clutched her pearls about the “danger” Whatley poses.

“It’s clear that Trump is looking for an RNC leader who won’t hesitate to disenfranchise voters, rig elections or dismantle our democracy,” Clayton melodramatically wrote. “[Whatley] has helped lead efforts to defy the will of the people and infringe on North Carolinians’ rights.”

CNN ran a piece entitled “Likely frontrunner for RNC chair parroted Trump’s 2020 election lies.”

Multiple outlets affiliated with States Newsroom — a network launched by a Democrat dark-money group — shuddered at the thought that Whatley teamed up with organizations like Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network that trains poll watchers, under the headline: “Trump’s pick for RNC chief worked with top election denier’s group.”

Russia hoax lawyer Marc Elias’ Democracy Docket joined in the attacks, saying Trump’s “endorsement of Whatley signals that the party is continuing down its path of pushing false election fraud narratives ahead of the November general election.”

What did Whatley do to be smeared as an election conspiracy theorist? In November 2020, he alleged that there was “massive fraud” in “places like Milwaukee and Detroit and Philadelphia.” Of course, even the Associated Press has admitted the existence of voter fraud in the 2020 election, just simply not enough for their liking to denote it as “widespread.”

As Whatley told CNN, “changes to the 2020 election process … weakened safeguards on absentee and mail-in votes in some states,” which “led to distrust by many across the country.”

Whatley’s Work on Election Integrity

Whatley’s supporters tout major wins for the state’s courts and election integrity efforts under his leadership.

“I think [election integrity] is probably [Whatley’s] greatest strength,” Nash County Republican Party Chair Mark Edwards said. “Coming out of the 2020 election there was a lot of angst and energy among Republicans about election integrity and rather than stoke some of the more outlandish and extreme and outrageous reactions to what happened in 2020, Whatley stood above it and saw that this is where the concerns of the party were.”

“He took it upon himself to grab the election integrity issue by the horns and direct that energy into productive use by setting up the Election Integrity Review Committee within the party,” Edwards added, crediting Whatley with “hiring legal staff to help head up the election integrity efforts of the party, and work very closely with Republican legislators to craft legislation that was drafted, introduced and passed and is now being implemented.”

The NCGOP established the Election Integrity Committee in 2021 to recruit, train and send out attorneys and poll watchers to observe “absentee-by-mail approval meetings, early voting polls, election day polls, county canvasses, recount meetings, and protest hearings.”

In 2022, “Whatley doubled down on his efforts to recruit and train poll observers and lawyers,” said former NCGOP legal counsel Philip Thomas. The NCGOP was unable to provide numbers for how many poll watchers were appointed over the course of Whatley’s tenure. Whatley critic Jay DeLancy, however, said it might be difficult for the NCGOP to obtain that data since individual counties appoint observers and the process is decentralized.

Senior legal fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute Cleta Mitchell said Whatley “understands that there is more to winning elections than just turning out votes and voters.”

“He has a sense of the need to focus on the election system itself,” Mitchell added. “While sometimes he has too narrow a focus, such as thinking that volunteer lawyers on Election Day will somehow overcome the billions of dollars that the left has invested in changing the entire voting system in our country, Michael is at least aware that there is more to winning than the historic or traditional ‘If we have a good candidate and good issues and a good campaign, our side will win.’ Those days are long gone and at some level, Michael understands that.”

Whatley also created the Judicial Victory Fund, which states its goal is “raising the resources needed to support … statewide conservative judicial candidates.” NCGOP Communications Director Matt Mercer said the fund is “something that really can’t be overstated enough.”

“Whatley campaigned on ‘Reset in Raleigh’ and overturning a 6-1 Republican deficit on the Supreme Court,” Mercer said. “Whatley has been undefeated [in judicial races] in 2020 and 2022 with the Judicial Victory Fund and the partners at the county and district levels.”

Mercer also credits Whatley with helping get voter ID “past the finish line” by flipping the balance of the court, adding while the NCGOP will miss him, “it’s going to be a benefit for the RNC to have someone of his caliber there.”

The fund was particularly handy during the 2020 election for the North Carolina Supreme Court’s chief justice between Democrat incumbent Cheri Beasley and Republican Associate Justice Paul Newby. Beasley refused to concede after she lost by about 400 votes and attempted to restore thousands of ballots. Of the 2,800 of those ballots analyzed by The News & Observer at the time, 70 percent belonged to Democrats and just nine ballots belonged to Republicans.

Some of the ballots Beasley tried to force election officials to accept were ballots that had already been counted, WRAL News reported. But the NCGOP says her attempts ultimately failed after they used resources from the Judicial Victory Fund to fight back.

Republicans also managed to flip the balance of the state’s Supreme Court in 2022 after Republicans Trey Allen and Richard Dietz won their races, giving Republicans a 5-2 majority.

“If you’re a state party chairman and you don’t have critics, you probably aren’t doing your job,” former chairman of the NCGOP Tom Fetzer told The Federalist. “It’s something that anybody who has ever been a state party chairman accepts and deals with.”

GOP Critics Say Whatley Could Do More

Womack and John Kane, who tried to unseat Whatley in 2022, say he is being given too much credit and should be doing more for election integrity.

“He’s taking credit for [the Judicial Victory Fund] as a great accomplishment, but the credit needs to be shared with … the attorneys that were working on the judicial campaigns, there were different districts that were raising money,” Womack said.

And when it comes to fighting to secure elections, Womack said the real effort comes from the RNC. In October, the NCGOP and RNC intervened in a lawsuit wherein Democrats attacked a state senate bill that “prevents non-citizens from voting, protects bipartisan poll watchers, and eliminates dark money in elections.”

“The RNC is taking the lead on their lawyers so the NCGOP is just saying, ‘Me too,’” Womack told The Federalist. “We do have a general counsel who is pretty good but the RNC is the one floating all these costs for the lawsuits nationwide.” Aside from the RNC’s election integrity efforts, he added, grassroots Republicans have also worked behind the scenes to ensure the state has a fair process.

This criticism was echoed by Executive Director of Voter Integrity Project of North Carolina, Jay DeLancy, who claimed the NCGOP only addressed allegations of dead people voting in the Beasley-Newby race after his organization took the lead and began investigating.

“It wasn’t [the NCGOP] idea, it was ours,” DeLancy said, adding however that he was pleased the NCGOP helped ramp up efforts. DeLancy also argued that while he has “no complaints about [the NCGOP] lawsuits” and said he gives “credit” to the “effective” legal action that was taken, securing elections starts from the bottom up.

“Election integrity takes creativity, you have to think about how the bad guys are doing things and get into the process,” he said. “What we’re more concerned with is day-to-day ground game and where people are cheating, where the rubber meets the road at the polls.”

“When things go south at the polls, we train our poll workers to pull out the law and show the clerk where they’re wrong. [NCGOP] doesn’t, they just say, ‘call us’…and log it unless they feel they can take legal action,” DeLancy added. “I would love to have seen someone who took election integrity seriously as RNC chairman but at the end of the day, all they really care about is get out the vote efforts and they’re not serious about election integrity.”

Mitchell expressed similar thoughts, saying while recruiting volunteer lawyers and poll observers is “absolutely vital,” she hopes Whatley “will be open to hearing about and understanding” that Republicans need to “fight the left on every single issue and every inflection point regarding the election system.”

“We cannot hope to counter their massive funding and organizational advantage that has nothing to do with the DNC or the normal political campaigns,” Mitchell said. “We are in a different world now and hopefully, Michael and the new RNC leadership will want to learn and do something about it. Banking early votes or ballot harvesting as a singular strategy has the left rolling in the aisles laughing at us.”

Womack and Kane also expressed concerns about whether Whatley could actually fundraise for the party.

“The state party would be broke if it weren’t for RNC subsidies,” Womack said. Kane also attributed the state party’s funds to the RNC.

Womack acknowledged, however, that Whatley likely wouldn’t need to worry about doing all the heavy lifting when it comes to fundraising because Trump would be able to drum up most of the support himself.

“Trump’s train has left the station,” Womack said. “I think he’s gonna do well regardless of who the RNC chair is so I’m guessing it really doesn’t matter who leads the RNC.”

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Report: 186 Now-Removed Arizona Voter Roll Names Were Foreign Nationals

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | FEBRUARY 22, 2024

Arizona removed nearly 200 residents from its voter rolls after discovering they were foreign nationals, and therefore ineligible to vote, a new report revealed.

Published on Tuesday, the analysis by the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) found that 186 noncitizens residing in Pima County have been “involuntarily purged” from the Grand Canyon State’s voter registration lists since 2021. According to the report, seven of these 186 foreigners appear to have cast ballots “across two federal and local elections.”

Records reviewed by PILF included more detailed information, such as the party affiliation of the aforementioned noncitizens. The analysis indicated 108 did not have a party affiliation, while 46 were registered as Democrats and 28 as Republicans. Three were registered independents and one was a Libertarian.

“Roughly 65 percent of records came from ‘political parties and group drives,’” the report reads. “Although conclusions in other studies established that organizers of voter registration drives can be left leaning, the party affiliations of the registrants within the Pima disclosure are more varied.”

A separate report released by PILF last year found that Arizona had also removed 222 Maricopa County residents who were identified as foreign nationals since 2015. Of those 222 noncitizens, nine purportedly cast “12 ballots across 4 federal elections.”

PILF’s analysis comes amid concerns over whether Arizona’s voter registration processes could lead to registering foreign nationals to vote. While Arizona requires residents to show proof of citizenship to vote in state elections, a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision forbade the state from implementing such a requirement for federal elections. As PILF noted, individuals who cannot provide Arizona with documents to prove citizenship “may participate only in federal elections” using a federal-only ballot.

“State officials also query government databases to backfill these credentials for existing registrants where they can,” the report says. “If officials become aware of a registrant’s documented foreign nationality from reliable government data, however, they are ‘involuntarily purged’ from the roll if they cannot prove subsequent naturalization has occurred.”

These registration procedures highlight the problems with policies such as automatic voter registration and permitting illegal aliens to obtain driver’s licenses, which, PILF noted, “exacerbate the problem” of foreign nationals being registered to vote in U.S. elections.

In a statement, PILF President J. Christian Adams blasted federal law for “hamper[ing] states’ abilities to validate citizenship during the voter registration process” and called on lawmakers to change it so states can verify registrants’ citizenship.

“Arizona is limited to building imperfect systems to address the problem of foreign nationals voting,” Adams said.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served 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

Author Shawn Fleetwood profile

SHAWN FLEETWOOD

VISIT ON TWITTER@SHAWNFLEETWOOD

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

If Democrats Love ‘Democracy,’ Why Do They Attack Election Security Measures Voters Want?

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | FEBRUARY 02, 2024

Author Shawn Fleetwood profile

SHAWN FLEETWOOD

VISIT ON TWITTER@SHAWNFLEETWOOD

“We are the party of democracy!”

That’s the asinine campaign message Democrats are using heading into the 2024 election to convince voters that Donald Trump and his “MAGA Republican” supporters are an existential threat to the republic. Because as everyone knows, the political party that attempts to throw its primary political opponent off the ballot and into prison; prosecutes praying pro-lifers; targets practicing Catholics; interferes in elections to its candidates’ benefit; and coordinates with Big Tech to silence dissent online is the standard-bearer of “democracy.”

For all their disingenuous rhetoric about upholding the will of the people, Democrats are actively fighting against Americans’ wishes — especially when it comes to the integrity of U.S. elections.

Last week, the Honest Elections Project (HEP) released a report recommending 14 policies for states to implement to ensure an electoral process that’s fair and accountable to the people. Democrats are actively fighting against many of the commonsense practices outlined in the analysis despite their popularity amongst the American electorate.

Take, for instance, voter ID requirements. In July, the HEP released survey data showing that a whopping 88 percent of U.S. voters back laws requiring eligible citizens to show a form of identification in order to cast their ballot. Polling by Gallup in 2022 produced similar results, with 79 percent of respondents in favor of a photo ID requirement. But that doesn’t seem to matter to Democrats, whose acolytes have spent years ignoring voters’ wishes and engaging in dishonest lawfare to dismantle states’ existing voter ID requirements.

From Ohio to New Hampshire, leftist lawyers and groups have filed frivolous lawsuits aimed at gutting voter ID statutes. Many of these suits are based on unsubstantiated claims that such laws “disenfranchise” nonwhite voters.

While courts across the country have repeatedly determined their “voter suppression” arguments to be bogus, Democrats’ continuous use of nonwhite voters as a crutch to smear popular voter ID laws shows how little respect they have for “democracy.” The aforementioned HEP poll also showed the vast majority of black (82 percent) and Hispanic (83 percent) voters support such requirements in order to vote. Gallup found that 77 percent of nonwhite respondents supported photo ID laws. If Democrats truly respected the will of the American voter, as they regularly claim to do, why are they trying to undercut a policy most of them support?

But it’s not just voter ID requirements. Democrats are actively waging a nationwide campaign to demolish numerous policies recommended by the HEP that ensure secure elections and are supported by the majority of U.S. voters.

While most of the electorate (89 percent) believes “American elections should only be for American citizens,” that hasn’t stopped Democrats from attempting to authorize noncitizen voting throughout the country. Last year, for example, Rhode Island Democrats introduced legislation to authorize localities to allow illegal aliens to vote in their municipal elections. Some cities, such San Francisco, New York City, and Washington, D.C, have already passed measures permitting certain noncitizen voting.

In response to left-wing nonprofits dumping hundreds of millions of “Zuckbucks” into local election offices during the 2020 election to benefit Joe Biden, elected officials and voters in 27 states enacted measures restricting election offices’ ability to accept and use private monies to administer elections. In response, several of those same Democrat-aligned groups formalized the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence as a way of circumventing these “Zuckbucks” bans and therefore violating the will of the people in the aforementioned states.

The same dynamic can also be seen regarding mail-in voting. Most voters (66 percent) support terminating no-excuse mail voting “as long as states offer two weeks of early in-person voting, including weekends.” Meanwhile, Democrats — who used the Covid lockdowns as a pretext for expanding the use of vote-by-mail and other insecure election practices — have continued to push unsupervised mail balloting across the country. Some states, such as Nevada, automatically mail individuals listed on the state’s voter rolls a ballot ahead of elections.

Whether it’s banning foreign money in elections, ensuring transparency in the elections process, or backing election audits, the story remains the same: Democrats actively oppose policies supported by voters that bring accountability and security to the U.S. elections system. Their screeds about being the party of “democracy” are a dishonest talking point designed to obfuscate their contradictory actions and smear their political opponents as extremists.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served 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

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Censorship-Industrial Complex Enlists U.K. ‘Misinformation’ Group Logically.AI To Meddle In 2024 Election

BY: LEE FANG | JANUARY 29, 2024

LEE FANG

Brian Murphy, a former FBI agent who once led the intelligence wing of the Department of Homeland Security, reflected last summer on the failures of the Disinformation Governance Board — the panel formed to actively police misinformation. The board, which was proposed in April 2022 after he left DHS, was quickly shelved by the Biden administration in a few short months in the face of criticism that it would be an Orwellian state-sponsored “Ministry of Truth.”

In a July podcast, Murphy said the threat of state-sponsored disinformation meant the executive branch has an “ethical responsibility” to rein in the social media companies. American citizens, he said, must give up “some of your freedoms that you need and deserve so that you get security back.”

The legal problems and public backlash to the Disinformation Governance Board also demonstrated to him that “the government has a major role to play, but they cannot be out in front.”

Murphy, who made headlines late in the Trump administration for improperly building dossiers on journalists, has spent the last few years trying to help the government find ways to suppress and censor speech it doesn’t like without being so “out in front” that it runs afoul of the Constitution. He has proposed that law enforcement and intelligence agencies formalize the process of sharing tips with private sector actors — a “hybrid constellation” including the press, academia, researchers, nonpartisan organizations, and social media companies — to dismantle “misinformation” campaigns before they take hold.

More recently, Murphy has worked to make his vision of countering misinformation a reality by joining a United Kingdom-based tech firm, Logically.AI, whose eponymous product identifies and removes content from social media. Since joining the firm, Murphy has met with military and other government officials in the U.S., many of whom have gone on to contract or pilot Logically’s platform.

Logically says it uses artificial intelligence to keep tabs on over 1 million conversations. It also maintains a public-facing editorial team that produces viral content and liaisons with the traditional news media. It differs from other players in this industry by actively deploying what they call “countermeasures” to dispute or remove problematic content from social media platforms.

The business is even experimenting with natural language models, according to one corporate disclosure, “to generate effective counter speech outputs that can be leveraged to deliver novel solutions for content moderation and fact-checking.” In other words, artificial intelligence-powered bots that produce, in real-time, original arguments to dispute content labeled as misinformation.

In many respects, Logically is fulfilling the role Murphy has articulated for a vast public-private partnership to shape social media content decisions. Its technology has already become a key player in a much larger movement that seeks to clamp down on what the government and others deem misinformation or disinformation. A raft of developing evidence — including the “Twitter Files,” the Moderna Reports, the proposed Government Disinformation Panel, and other reports — has shown how governments and industry are determined to monitor, delegitimize, and sometimes censor protected speech. The story of Logically.AI illustrates how sophisticated this effort has become and its global reach. The use of its technology in Britain and Canada raises red flags as it seeks a stronger foothold in the United States.

Logically was founded in 2017 by a then-22-year-old British entrepreneur named Lyric Jain, who was inspired to form the company to combat what he believed were the lies that pushed the U.K. into voting in favor of Brexit, or leaving the European Union. The once-minor startup now has broad contracts across Europe and India, and has worked closely with Microsoft, Google, PwC, TikTok, and other major firms. Meta contracts with Logically to help the company fact-check content on all of its platforms: WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook.

The close ties to Silicon Valley provide unusual reach. “When Logically rates a piece of content as false, Facebook will significantly reduce its distribution so that fewer people see it, apply a warning label to let people know that the content has been rated false, and notify people who try to share it,” Meta and Logically announced in a 2021 press release on the partnership.

Meta and Logically did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

During the 2021 local elections in the U.K., Logically monitored up to “one million pieces of harmful content,” some of which they relayed to government officials, according to a document reviewed by RealClearInvestigations. The firm claimed to spot coordinated activity to manipulate narratives around the election, information they reported to tech giants for takedowns.

The following year, the state of Oregon negotiated with Logically for a wide-ranging effort to monitor campaign-related content during the 2022 midterm elections. In a redacted proposal for the project, Logically noted that it would check claims against its “single source of truth database,” which relied on government data, and would also crack down on “malinformation” — a term of art that refers to accurate information that fuels dangerous narratives. The firm similarly sold Oregon on its ability to pressure social media platforms for content removal.

Oregon state Rep. Ed Diehl has a led push against the state from renewing its work with Logically for the election this year. The company, he said in an interview, violates “our constitutional rights to free speech and privacy” by “flagging true information as false, claiming legitimate dissent is a threat, and then promoting “counter-narratives” against valid forms of public debate.

In response, the Oregon secretary of state’s office, which initiated the contract with Logically, claimed “no authority, ability, or desire to censor speech.” Diehl disputes this. He pointed out that the original proposal with Logically clearly states that its service “enables the opportunity for unlimited takedown attempts” of alleged misinformation content and the ability for the Oregon secretary of state’s office to “flag for removal” any “problematic narratives and content.” The contract document touts Logically as a “trusted entity within the social media community” that gives it “preferred status that enables us to support our client’s needs at a moment’s notice.”

Diehl, who shared a copy of the Logically contract with RCI, called the issue a vital “civil rights” fight, and noted that in an ironic twist, the state’s anti-misinformation speech suppression work further inflames distrust in “election systems and government institutions in general.”

Logically’s reach into the U.S. market is quickly growing. The company has piloted programs for the Chicago Police Department to use artificial intelligence to analyze local rap music and deploy predictions on violence in the community, according to a confidential proposal obtained by RCI. Pentagon records show that the firm is a subcontractor to a program run by the U.S. Army’s elite Special Operations Command for work conducted in 2022 and 2023. Via funding from DHS, Logically also conducts research on gamer culture and radicalization.

The company has claimed in its ethics statements that it will not employ any person who holds “a salaried or prominent position” in government. But records show closely entrenched state influence. For instance, Kevin Gross, a director of the U.S. Navy NAVAIR division, was previously embedded within Logically’s team during a 2022 fellowship program. The exchange program supported Logically’s efforts to assist NATO on the analysis of Russian social media.

Other contracts in the U.S. may be shrouded in secrecy. Logically partners with ThunderCat Technologies, a contracting firm that assists tech companies when competing for government work. Such arrangements have helped tech giants conceal secretive work in the past. Google previously attempted to hide its artificial intelligence drone-targeting contracts with the Defense Department through a similar third-party contracting vendor.

But questions swirl over the methods and reach of the firm as it entrenches itself into American life, especially as Logically angles to play a prominent role in the 2024 presidential election.

Pandemic Policing

In March 2020, as Britain confronted the spread of Covid-19, the government convened a new task force, the Counter Disinformation Unit (CDU). The secretive task force was created with little fanfare but was advertised as a public health measure to protect against dangerous misinformation. Caroline Dinenage, the member of Parliament overseeing media issues, later explained that the unit’s purpose was to provide authoritative sources of information and to “take action to remove misinformation” relating to “misleading narratives related to COVID-19.”

The CDU, it later emerged, had largely outsourced its work to private contractors such as Logically. In January 2021, the company received its first contract from the agency overseeing the CDU, for £400,000, to monitor “potentially harmful disinformation online.” The contracts later swelled, with the U.K. agency that pertains to media issues eventually providing contracts with a combined value of £1.2 million and the Department of Health providing another £1.3 million, for a total of roughly $3.2 million.

That money went into far-reaching surveillance that monitored journalists, activists, and lawmakers who criticized pandemic policies. Logically, according to an investigation last year in the Telegraph, recorded comments from activist Silkie Carlo criticizing vaccine passports in its “Mis/Disinformation” reports.

Logically’s reports similarly collected information on Dr. Alexandre de Figueiredo, a research fellow at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Figueiredo had published reports on the negative ways in which vaccine passports could undermine vaccine confidence and had publicly criticized policies aimed at the mass vaccination of children. Despite his expertise, Logically filed his tweet in a disinformation report to the government. While some of the reports were categorized as evidence of terms of service violations, many were, in fact, routine forms of dissent aired by prominent voices in the U.K. on policies hotly contested by expert opinion.

The documents showing Logically’s role were later uncovered by Carlo’s watchdog group, Big Brother Watch, which produced a detailed report on the surveillance effort. The CDU reports targeted a former judge who argued against coercive lockdowns as a violation of civil liberties and journalists criticizing government corruption. Some of the surveillance documents suggest a mission creep for the unit, as media monitoring emails show that the agency targeted anti-war groups that were vocal against NATO’s policies.

Carlo was surprised to even find her name on posts closely monitored and flagged by Logically. “We found that the company exploits millions of online posts to monitor, record and flag online political dissent to the central government under the banner of countering ‘disinformation,’” she noted in a statement to RCI.

Marketing materials published by Logically suggest its view of Covid-19 went well beyond fact-checking and veered into suppressing dissenting opinions. A case study published by the firm claimed that the #KBF hashtag, referring to Keep Britain Free, an activist group against school and business shutdowns, was a dangerous “anti-vax” narrative. The case study also claimed the suggestion that “the virus was created in a Chinese laboratory” was one of the “conspiracy theories’’ that “have received government support” in the U.S. — despite the fact that a preponderance of evidence now points to a likely lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology as the origin of the pandemic.

Logically was also involved in pandemic work that blurred the line with traditional fact-checking operations. In India, the firm helped actively persuade patients to take the vaccine. In 2021, Jain, the founder and CEO of the company, said in an interview with an Indian news outlet that his company worked “closely with communities that are today vaccine hesitant.” The company, he said, recruited “advocates and evangelists” to shape local opinion.

Questionable Fact-Checking

In 2022, Logically used its technology on behalf of Canadian law enforcement to target the trucker-led “Freedom Convoy” against Covid-19 mandates, according to government records. Logically’s team floated theories that the truckers were “likely influenced by foreign adversaries,” a widely repeated claim used to denigrate the protests as inauthentic.

The push to discredit the Canadian protests showed the overlapping power of Logically’s multiple arms. While its social media surveillance wing fed reports to the Canadian government, its editorial team worked to influence opinion through the news media. When the Financial Times reported on the protest phenomenon, the outlet quoted Murphy, the former FBI man who now works for Logically, who asserted that the truckers were influenced by coordinated “conspiracy theorist groups” in the U.S. and Canada. Vice similarly quoted Joe Ondrak, Logically’s head of investigations, to report that the “Freedom Convoy” had generated excitement among global conspiracy theorists. Neither outlet disclosed Logically’s work for Canadian law enforcement at the time.

Other targets of Logically are quick to point out that the firm has taken liberties with what it classifies as misinformation.

Will Jones, the editor of the Daily Sceptic, a British news outlet with a libertarian bent, has detailed an unusual fact-check from Logically Facts, the company’s editorial site. Jones said the site targeted him for pointing out that data in 2022 showed 71 percent of patients hospitalized for Covid-19 were vaccinated. Logically’s fact-check acknowledged Jones had accurately used statistics from the U.K. Health Security Agency, but tried to undermine him by asserting that he was still misleading by suggesting that “vaccines are ineffective.”

But Jones, in a reply, noted that he never made that argument and that Logically was batting away at a straw man. In fact, his original piece plainly took issue with a Guardian article that incorrectly claimed that “COVID-19 has largely become a disease of the unvaccinated.”

Other Logically fact-checks have bizarrely targeted the Daily Sceptic for reporting on news in January 2022 that vaccine mandates might soon be lifted. The site dinged the Daily Sceptic for challenging the evidence behind the vaccine policy and declared, “COVID-19 vaccines have been proven effective in fighting the pandemic.” And yet, at the end of that month, the mandate was lifted for health care workers, and the following month, all other pandemic restrictions were revoked, just as the Daily Sceptic had reported.

“As far as I can work out, it’s a grift,” said Daily Sceptic founder Toby Young, of Logically. “A group of shysters offer to help the government censor any criticism of its policies under the pretense that they’re not silencing dissent — God forbid! — but merely ‘cleansing’ social media of misinformation, disinformation and hate speech.”

Jones was similarly dismissive of the company, which he said disputes anything that runs contrary to popular consensus. “The consensus of course is that set by the people who pay Logically for their services,” Jones added. “The company claims to protect democratic debate by providing access to ‘reliable information,’ but in reality, it is paid to bark and savage on command whenever genuine free speech makes an inconvenient appearance.”

In some cases, Logically has piled on to news stories to help discredit voices of dissent. Last September, the anti-misinformation site leaped into action after British news outlets published reports about sexual misconduct allegations surrounding comedian and online broadcaster Russell Brand — one of the outspoken critics of government policy in Britain, who has been compared to Joe Rogan for his heterodox views and large audience.

Brand, a vocal opponent of pandemic policies, had been targeted by Logically in the past for airing opinions critical of the U.S. and U.K. response to the virus outbreak, and in other moments for criticizing new laws in the European Union that compel social media platforms to take down content.

But the site took dramatic action when the sexual allegations, none of which have been proved in court, were published in the media. Ondrak, Logically’s investigations head, provided different quotes to nearly half a dozen news outlets — including Vice, Wired, the BBC, and two separate articles in The Times — that depicted Brand as a dangerous purveyor of misinformation who had finally been held to account.

“He follows a lot of the ostensibly health yoga retreat, kind of left-leaning, anti-capitalist figures, who got really suckered into Covid skepticism, Covid denialism, and anti-vax, and then spat out of the Great Reset at the other end,” Ondrak told Wired. In one of the articles published by The Times, Ondrak aired frustration on the obstacles of demonetizing Brand from the Rumble streaming network. In an interview with the BBC, Ondrak gave a curious condemnation, noting Brand stops short of airing any actual conspiracy theories or falsehoods but is guilty of giving audiences “the ingredients to make the disinformation themselves.”

Dinenage, the member of Parliament who spearheaded the CDU anti-misinformation push with Logically during the pandemic, also leapt into action. In the immediate aftermath of the scandal, she sent nearly identical letters to Rumble, TikTok, and Meta to demand that the platforms follow YouTube’s lead in demonetizing Brand. Dinenage couched her official request to censor Brand as a part of a public interest inquiry, to protect the “welfare of victims of inappropriate and potentially illegal behaviour.”

Logically’s editorial team went a step further. In its report on the Brand allegations published on Logically Facts, it claimed that social media accounts “trotting out the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ refrain” for the comedian were among those perpetuating “common myths about sexual assault.” The site published a follow-up video reiterating the claim that those seeking the presumption of innocence for Brand, a principle dating back to the Magna Carta, were spreading a dangerous “myth.”

The unusual advocacy campaign against Brand represented a typical approach for a company that has long touted itself as a hammer against spreaders of misinformation. The opportunity to remove Brand from the media ecosystem meant throwing as much at him as possible, despite any clear misinformation or disinformation angle in the sexual assault allegations. Rather, he was a leading critic of government censorship and pandemic policy, so the scandal represented a weakness to be exploited.

Such heavy-handed tactics may be on the horizon for American voters. The firm is now a member of the U.S. Election Infrastructure Information Sharing & Analysis Center, the group managed by the Center for Internet Security that helps facilitate misinformation reports on behalf of election officials across the country. Logically has been in talks with Oregon and other states, as well as DHS, to expand its social media surveillance role for the presidential election later this year.

Previous targets of the company, though, are issuing a warning.

“It appears that Logically’s lucrative and frankly sinister business effectively produced multi-million pound misinformation for the government that may have played a role in the censorship of citizens’ lawful speech,” said Carlo of Big Brother Watch.

“Politicians and senior officials happily pay these grifters millions of pounds to wield the red pen, telling themselves that they’re ‘protecting’ democracy rather than undermining it,” said Young of the Daily Sceptic. “It’s a boondoggle and it should be against the law.”

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and LeeFang.com.

Lee Fang is an investigative reporter. Find his Substack here.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Dishonest Ballot Initiative Wording Is Another Way Democrats Rig Elections

BY: ELLE PURNELL | JANUARY 15, 2024

Author Elle Purnell profile

ELLE PURNELL

VISIT ON TWITTER@_ETREYNOLDS

Would you support a law protecting healthy minors from life-altering injections and amputations, side effects of which may include infertility, cancer, sexual dysfunction, and heart trouble?

Would you support a law that makes it a crime for a doctor to give “gender-affirming care” to minors whose gender dysphoria places them at a heightened risk of suicide?

If the average voter were asked each of these two questions, it’s not hard to deduce that the wording of question No. 2 is far more likely to garner “no” answers, regardless of the false assumptions the question relies on. We see the same reality at work in polling: The way you ask someone a question greatly influences the answer. Its why lawyers aren’t allowed to “lead the witness” during direct examination.

For example, when PBS commissioned a poll in 2021 asking about restricting transgender surgeries for children, pollsters used this euphemistic language: “Do you support or oppose legislation that would prohibit gender transition-related medical care for minors?”

Unsurprisingly, they got 66 percent of respondents to say “oppose,” with only 28 percent admitting support. Who doesn’t want kids to get “medical care”?

Conversely, when the conservative group Convention of States Action asked respondents the following year, “Do you believe underage minors should be required to wait until they are adults to use puberty blockers and undergo permanent sex change procedures?” an overwhelming 79 percent said yes.

There are doubtless other factors contributing to the polling discrepancy (though it’s worth noting both survey samples included more Democrats than Republicans). But the more than 50-point spread between the polls has something to do with the question language. Researchers have tested the idea that ballot language affects voters’ decisions and come to the same obvious conclusion. Democrat officials and activists are aware of this too — and use it to their advantage when writing the language voters see on their ballots.

‘Prejudicial, Partial, and Inaccurate’

For example, parents rights group Protect Kids California is suing the state’s attorney general, Rob Bonta, for dishonestly crafting the title and summary of their proposed ballot initiative to benefit Democrats’ policy preferences. The summary provided by Protect Kids California for its own ballot initiative says it will:

(1) repeal the California law that permits [male] students to compete in female’s sports and students to be in females’ locker rooms and bathrooms; (2) prohibit schools from deceiving parents about their student’s gender identity crisis and stop them from secretly transitioning a child; and (3) stop sex change operations and chemical castrations on minors.

I might quibble with the phrase “sex change” — since it’s metaphysically impossible to change a person’s sex — but overall, the summary is pretty clear. The actual text of the proposed statute is similar, with provisions like, “Health care providers are not permitted to provide sex-reassignment prescriptions or procedures on a patient under the age of 18 years,” and “any sex-segregated facility, including, but not limited to, a bathroom or locker room, on the campus of a school shall be segregated based on biological sex.”

Bonta took it upon himself to title the initiative the “Restricts Rights of Transgender Youth Initiative.” The summary created by his office says the initiative, in part, “Prohibits gender-affirming health care for transgender patients under 18, even if parents consent or treatment is medically recommended,” and that it “Requires schools to notify parents whenever a student under 18 asks to be treated as a gender differing from school records without exception for student safety.” According to California law, the attorney general’s dishonest title and summary must appear on every page of the petition.

Protect Kids California is suing Bonta over his obvious attempt to prejudice voters and run interference against the ballot initiative. The group contends his “title and summary is prejudicial, partial and inaccurate.”

How to Get Away with (Making People Vote for) Murder

Sometimes the dishonest framing is in the proposed measure itself, rather than the summary. In Ohio last year, for example, pro-abortion activists behind Issue 1 carefully crafted the benign-sounding amendment to cloak its drastic ramifications.

“Every individual has the right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions, including but not limited to contraception; fertility treatment; continuing one’s own pregnancy; miscarriage care; and abortion,” the amendment text stated, brushing over the fact that it made no exception for minors and threw open the door to transgender surgeries for kids as a kind of “reproductive decision.”

Furthermore, the text used a common Democrat trick to ensure the amendment would allow abortions throughout all nine months of pregnancy. It winked at allowing abortion restrictions after “fetal viability,” but kneecapped any such restrictions by making exceptions “if in the professional judgment of the pregnant patient’s treating physician it is necessary to protect the pregnant patient’s life or health.” It sounds nice to the voter who skims the page for the first time at the polling station on his lunch break, but it really allows any doctor to prescribe an abortion for any reasons that can be couched as “health”-related — presumably including a woman’s mental distress at being pregnant.

Define the Terms, Control the Discourse

Language is an all-important tool, and Democrats often use it to manipulate and take advantage of Americans who don’t have hours to spend sifting through media lies to figure out the truth. Dishonest terms like “gender-affirming care” sound positive and invite sympathy, even though the procedures described by the term are neither medical “care” nor “affirming” of a person’s real sex.

And — just like media blackouts (see: Hunter Biden laptop) or partnerships between election offices and left-wing dark-money groups — deceptive ballot initiative language is one of the many methods Democrats use to rig elections before the first vote is even cast.

Elle Purnell is the elections editor at The Federalist. Her work has been featured by Fox Business, RealClearPolitics, the Tampa Bay Times, and the Independent Women’s Forum. She received her B.A. in government from Patrick Henry College with a minor in journalism. Follow her on Twitter @_etreynolds.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Exclusive: How A Left-Wing ‘Alliance’ Skirted Arizona’s ‘Zuckbucks’ Ban To Meddle In Key County’s Elections

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | JANUARY 08, 2024

Author Shawn Fleetwood profile

SHAWN FLEETWOOD

VISIT ON TWITTER@SHAWNFLEETWOOD

Abevy of emails obtained by The Federalist reveal how Coconino County officials have been violating the spirit of Arizona law by colluding with a coalition of left-wing nonprofits tasked with influencing election operations in key battleground states ahead of the 2024 election.

Last year, Coconino County — a Democrat stronghold that delivered Joe Biden a margin of 17,646 votes in 2020, greater than the margin of votes by which Biden won the state — became one of several localities to join the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence. The Honest Elections Project describes the “Alliance” as an $80 million venture launched in 2022 by left-wing nonprofits to “systematically influence every aspect of election administration” and advance Democrat-backed voting policies in local election offices. Several of the organizations participating in the project include the Center for Civic Design, The Elections Group, and the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), the latter of which interfered in the 2020 election to the benefit of Democrats.

During the 2020 contest, CTCL and the Center for Election Innovation and Research collectively received hundreds of millions of dollars from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. These “Zuckbucks” were poured into local election offices in battleground states around the country to change how elections were administered, such as by expanding unsupervised election protocols like mail-in voting and the use of ballot drop boxes. To make matters worse, the grants were heavily skewed towards Democrat-majority counties, essentially making it a massive Democrat get-out-the-vote operation.

With Arizona and 26 other states having passed measures restricting the use of private money in elections in the years since, CTCL and other left-wing nonprofits devised the Alliance as a way to skirt these “Zuckbucks” bans. In a 2023 report, the Honest Elections Project and John Locke Foundation revealed how the Alliance seeks to provide election offices with “scholarships” to cover membership costs, which can then be “converted into ‘credits’ that member offices can use to buy services from CTCL and other Alliance partners.”

Obtained via open records request, the communications reviewed by The Federalist document the process by which Coconino County officials worked behind the scenes to make their county an Alliance member. The extensive coordination between the county and coalition involves regular meetings on election administrative issues and the crafting of election-related materials to distribute to voters ahead of Arizona’s 2024 elections.

Working Behind the Scenes to Skirt State Ban on Private Election Funding

While the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence wasn’t publicly launched until April 11, 2022, Coconino County’s connections with CTCL — an Alliance participant — date back to the 2020 election cycle. According to the Capital Research Center, Arizona received $5.1 million from CTCL ahead of the November 2020 contest, with more than three-fourths of that money ($3.9 million) going towards four of five counties won by Joe Biden. Coconino County — which Biden won by more than 24 points — received the third largest grant per capita, behind Apache and Navajo Counties.

Coconino’s established connection with CTCL made the Arizona locality a perfect target upon the Alliance’s spring 2022 launch. While Coconino wasn’t a part of the coalition’s 2022 inaugural cohort of participating election offices, county recorder Patty Hansen, a Democrat, sought to gain her jurisdiction access to the Alliance in the weeks following its reveal to the public.

On April 28, 2022, Hansen submitted an application on behalf of Coconino to join the Alliance, which asks applicants to disclose specific information regarding their election administration. The questions included in the application goad local election offices into revealing the size of their elections team, any “improvement” the office would like to make ahead of future elections, and “[h]ow much additional funding would make a meaningful difference” in altering office operations, among other information.

While Hansen received an automated email nearly a month later from CTCL confirming Coconino’s application had been received, Hansen didn’t appear to get a response from CTCL Associate Director Sophie Lehman until Nov. 22, 2022. In her email, Lehman notified Hansen that the Alliance had received Coconino’s application and expressed the coalition’s continued interest in making Coconino an Alliance member. Lehman further informed Hansen that she would receive an Alliance membership agreement after Thanksgiving and that CTCL was “meeting with Alliance partners and our expert legal team to design a membership structure so jurisdictions from across the country can participate in the program.”

“To be clear, this is a pivot from our original vision that would have offered Alliance programming for free,” Lehman wrote.

Honest Elections Project Executive Director Jason Snead previously told The Federalist that CTCL shifted its “original model to a fee-based membership model” as a way of skirting existing “Zuckbucks” bans. “For jurisdictions that are permitted to receive grants, those fees are effectively waived. But jurisdictions that cannot receive private grants can still buy their way in for a relatively small sum, allowing the Alliance to spread its influence even in states where lawmakers have tried to prevent it,” Snead explained.

On Dec. 13, 2022, Lehman informed Hansen that Coconino County had been designated as “a finalist in the inaugural cohort of Centers for Election Excellence” and provided a list of “next steps” for the county to take to become an Alliance member. According to the Alliance membership agreement, counties are given the option of joining the coalition as a basic or premium member, costing $1,600 or $4,800 a year, respectively.

A basic membership grants participating counties access to “a selection of off-the-shelf, publicly-accessible election administration resources, document templates, and training materials,” and “center-specific coaching and consulting from select Alliance partners, in the form of a $800 credit towards the fair market value of Alliance partners’ hourly consulting services,” among other services. Premium members are offered similar services, but are granted $3,040 in credit and “additional multi-center group coaching and consulting sessions hosted by select Alliance partners on an hourly basis.”

Hansen notified Lehman on Jan. 3, 2023, that Coconino County would be subscribing to the Alliance as a basic member and disclosed that she had discussed the legality of the county joining the coalition with “our civil division’s chief deputy county attorney,” who purportedly believed that Coconino joining the Alliance did not “violate[] any state laws.” Lehman replied two days later congratulating Hansen on Coconino becoming an official member of the Alliance.

Hansen did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment on whether taxpayer money was used to pay for Coconino County’s Alliance membership fee.

County Officials Briefed on Left-Wing Partners’ ‘Vision and Goals’

With Coconino County’s 2023 membership secured, the Alliance wasted no time in bringing the Arizona locality into the fold of its operations. On Jan. 4, 2023, Lehman offered Hansen the opportunity to participate in a panel discussion on “election funding” at the Alliance’s “Debrief” event in Chicago the following month. As The Federalist previously reported, “The Debrief” was a three-day “inaugural” event designed “for election officials and election experts to come together to distill key lessons learned from the 2022 election cycle and to plan for the years ahead.”

While Hansen initially expressed interest in participating in the panel, she ultimately backed out of attending the event in person due to her partner’s medical issues. Additional communications indicate Hansen and her “team” attended the event virtually.

But “The Debrief” was just one of many Alliance-sponsored meetings Coconino election officials participated in throughout 2023. Shortly after joining the coalition, Hansen and her team were invited to and took part in a virtual “Centers for Election Excellence kickoff call” on Jan. 25, in which participants would “hear about the Alliance vision and goals,” meet other election offices “who have committed” to the Alliance, and meet the Alliance’s participating organizations.

Hansen and her colleagues were also invited in April 2023 to attend an in-person Alliance “cohort convening” in Las Vegas from May 22-24. Communication records confirm Ray Daw, Coconino County’s Native American elections outreach coordinator, represented the locality’s elections team in Las Vegas. Hansen and at least two colleagues opted to attend the event virtually.

Lehman would continue to email Hansen throughout summer 2023, inviting the Coconino recorder and her team to various meetings hosted by Alliance partners. These events included an Aug. 14 Zoom conference hosted by the Elections Group on “election cybersecurity” and several virtual “monthly cohort call[s]” launched on Aug. 23. Emails also confirm Hansen attended the Alliance’s in-person “cohort convening” in Chicago from Nov. 29-Dec. 1.

Hansen did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment on whether taxpayer money was used to pay for her and Daw’s respective travel-related expenses to Alliance events.

Coconino County Divulged Election Administration Data to Alliance

While Coconino County officials’ meetings with Alliance partners and fellow members were a major facet of the election office-coalition relationship, the Arizona county’s willful exchange of sensitive information and collusion with the Alliance on election-related matters remains equally concerning.

In addition to its invasive application questions, the Alliance requested Hansen disclose information regarding Coconino County’s election office practices. On March 8, 2023, for example, Lehman emailed Hansen several surveys that, once completed, would provide the Alliance with a “snapshot of [Coconino’s election] office’s current practices around poll workers, and which practices [Hansen is] most interested in improving.” Lehman further noted that the Alliance would like to “conduct an hour-long interview” with Hansen’s office to learn more about Coconino County’s poll worker program.

“The surveys and interviews will help the Alliance as a whole decide which resources to prioritize building and what kind of support to provide,” Lehman claimed. While Lehman noted that the aforementioned survey questions were “optional,” a follow-up email sent to Hansen in April indicated Hansen completed the surveys.

County Recorder Pushed Biden Agenda at Alliance’s Request

The Coconino-Alliance relationship was also very collaborative when it came to pushing leftist causes. On March 9, 2023, Hansen received an automated email from CTCL asking recipients to encourage their congressional representatives to support a provision in President Joe Biden’s 2024 fiscal year budget that included “$5 billion over 10 years for state and local election departments.” In an email sent to a CTCL representative the following day, Hansen expressed her desire to “offer my assistance with contacting my representatives to urge them to support” including the provision in the 2024 budget. In her email, Hansen predicted that her congressman, GOP Rep. Eli Crane, would not support the initiative, noting Crane’s role as a member of the House Freedom Caucus and referring to the Arizona Republican as a so-called “election denier.”

Hansen further noted that she would “be happy” to reach out to several Democrat members of Arizona’s congressional delegation, including Rep. Ruben Gallego and Sen. Mark Kelly, to push the initiative forward. A March 27 email from CTCL’s Sofia Martinez indicates Hansen submitted funding requests to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, an independent who caucuses with Senate Democrats, and Kelly.

Alliance Partners Helped Design Voter Guide

But Coconino and the Alliance’s collusive efforts didn’t stop there. Roughly a month after the Alliance’s February 2023 “Debrief” event, Hansen emailed Lehman requesting the Center for Civic Design’s (CCD) assistance in creating a new version of Coconino County’s 2024 Voter Guide. Hansen included “a couple of these mailings” her office used leading up to prior elections and noted how the county sends 90-day notice mailings “to all of the registered voters in the county every two years” to verify the accuracy of its voter rolls.

“In 2016 we decided to do a Voter Guide for the upcoming state elections. It’s been very well received by the voters, but I think we can improve it,” Hansen wrote. “Arizona also has a complicated system for our Active (used to be called Permanent) Early Voting list mailing. We’d like to see if [CCD] can help us develop a less legalize mailing to our voters that explains the process.”

Donna Casner, Coconino County’s chief deputy recorder, later sent Hansen templates of the county’s 2022 90-day notice on March 28, 2023, which Hansen then forwarded to Lehman the same day.

Coconino’s collaboration with the Alliance on these new election materials continued into the fall, at which point Lehman connected Hansen with CCD’s Tasmin Swanson. After a series of emails, the two women scheduled a Zoom meeting for Oct. 18, which Hansen indicated would be attended by herself, Casner, and their colleague, Sedona Stone. Less than a week later, Casner emailed Swanson three “variations” of Coconino’s 2022 90-day notice templates “including variable data fields, along with an excerpt from [the office’s] procedures manual that outlines the mandatory requirements for the notice.”

Collaboration between Coconino County election officials and CCD continued into November, at which point CCD’s Randy Hadzor was brought into the mix to assist the Arizona locality on redesigning its 90-day notice. In her Nov. 2 email providing Hansen and Casner with CCD’s proposal for the redesign, Swanson noted that the project would likely use up the remaining credit Coconino County received upon subscribing to the Alliance. A Dec. 8 email from Hadzor to Casner indicated the new redesign was “coming along nicely,” with Hadzor expressing hope that he would “be able to send over some preliminary concepts for your review soon.”

The Road Ahead

The Alliance’s efforts to influence and acquire information about local election operations is hardly exclusive to Coconino County. Localities in battleground states throughout the country, such as Georgia’s DeKalb County, for example, have become targets of the Alliance’s scheme to replicate CTCL’s 2020 election shenanigans. Rather than allow states and localities to manage their elections, as the Constitution prescribes, leftist groups such as those comprising the Alliance are intent on dipping their hands into the electoral process to steer elections in Democrats’ favor.

While speaking with The Federalist, Republican National Committee spokesman Gates McGavick referred to the Alliance as a “trojan horse for far-left dark money to influence elections,” and called on Coconino County to be transparent about its active relationship with the coalition.

“Arizona has a ban on third-party ‘Zuckbucks’ to prevent groups just like the [Alliance] from unduly influencing local election administration,” McGavick said. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and Coconino County should answer for its collaboration with [the Alliance].”

Communication records show that the Alliance has since offered Coconino County the opportunity to remain an Alliance member throughout 2024.

Hansen did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment on whether, as of Monday, Coconino County completed and submitted the 2024 Alliance membership agreement or intends to do so.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served 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

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

How A Left-Wing Appeals Panel Is Rigging Trump’s J6 Case Through Bogus Fast-Track Process

BY: MOLLIE HEMINGWAY | DECEMBER 19, 2023

Author Mollie Hemingway profile

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY

VISIT ON TWITTER@MZHEMINGWAY

For Democrats to succeed with their 2024 presidential campaign strategy of imprisoning the current front-runner in the race, they need a massive assist from key judges.

District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan has done everything in her power to speed up the process for one of the complicated cases Democrats have filed against former President Donald Trump. Whereas the standard federal fraud and conspiracy case takes about two years to get to trial, controversial Special Counsel Jack Smith and Chutkan have worked in concert to get the trial started in March, a breathtaking seven months after Trump’s indictment.

Likewise, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Florence Pan is doing her part to assist the effort to give Trump far less time than other defendants to prepare for a trial against him. Last week, she led a panel to fast-track an appeal in order to facilitate Smith’s goal of securing a quick conviction before one of Washington, D.C.’s notoriously partisan juries.

“Any fair-minded observer has to agree” that Smith and Chutkan are acting based on the election schedule, conceded former federal prosecutor and left-wing pundit Elie Honig. “Just look at Jack Smith’s conduct in this case. The motivating principle behind every procedural request he’s made has been speed, has been getting this trial in before the election.”

Election interference isn’t incidental to this prosecution, then, it’s the entire point.

While hundreds of defendants in the relatively simple Jan. 6 cases brought by the Department of Justice have had a few years to prepare for trial, Trump and his attorneys have to prepare for one of the most complicated and unprecedented cases in American history in just a matter of months. “Donald Trump is being given far less time to prepare than other defendants,” Honig said.

In September, Trump’s legal team asked Chutkan to recuse herself due to her personal bias against the former president and his supporters. Chutkan, the foreign-born “scion of Marxist revolutionaries,” has received attention for her partisan and incendiary commentary against Trump and his supporters. She denied the request. In October, Trump’s attorneys asked for the suit to be dismissed on multiple grounds, including presidential immunity, violation of the freedom of speech clause, violation of the double jeopardy clause and due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, and several other issues. By Dec. 1, Chutkan ruled against Trump in each case.

A week later, Trump announced his plan to appeal Chutkan’s ruling. The next court to hear the case would be the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

On Dec. 11, Smith did two things. He asked the D.C. Circuit to expedite Trump’s appeal, and he asked the Supreme Court to expedite an appeal as well. He explained to the lower court that while the Supreme Court is considering the petition, the D.C. Circuit has jurisdiction. The singular goal of rushing the process is to make sure that one way or another, Democrats can ram through the trial and conviction of their main political opponent to control the outcome of the election.

In the D.C. Circuit Court, Smith asked that Trump’s attorneys be forced to prepare and file their opening brief within 10 days, that the government get an additional week to respond, and that Trump’s attorneys have three days to respond to that government brief.

Trump’s team was given two days to prepare an argument against Smith’s request for this shockingly abbreviated schedule. In its 16-page response, Trump’s legal team noted that the case was among the most complex and unprecedented in history, that it presented serious constitutional questions, and that rushing the process would violate Trump’s due process and Sixth Amendment rights. Trump’s lawyers also noted how the issues in this trial would affect every president, not just the one Democrats are consumed with hatred toward.

“Could President George W. Bush face criminal charges of defrauding the United States and obstructing official proceedings for allegedly giving Congress false information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, to induce war on false premises? Could President Obama be charged with murder for allegedly authorizing the drone strike that killed Anwar Al-Awlaki and his sixteen-year-old son, both U.S. citizens?” Trump’s attorneys asked.

The team noted how rarely the circuit court expedites such legal procedures, and never in cases even close to the sensitivity of this one. Trump’s attorneys said Chutkan’s speed contributed to her making sloppy mistakes and failing to give thoughtful consideration to arguments.

Citing the court’s own “handbook of practice and internal procedures,” Trump’s attorneys said the court should set a reasonable schedule of providing Trump 40 days to serve and file his initial brief, 21 days to file a reply brief, and 45 days to prepare for oral argument.

“Anything less would result in a heedless rush to judgment on some of the most sensitive and important issues that this Court may ever decide,” Trump’s attorneys wrote.

Instead, the three judges on the D.C. Circuit did precisely what Smith asked them to. They gave Trump until Saturday, Dec. 23 to file his initial brief.

Liberal Panel Lassos the Case for Itself

Each month, the D.C. Circuit has a panel of three judges who consider motions that come before the court. The panel changes each month. While many of the motions that come before the court are simple and administrative, others relate to complicated cases that will require hearings and other court actions. The panel of judges that begins hearing appeals usually keeps the case as it progresses.

This is important because the December panel is particularly left-wing, even for the left-leaning D.C. Circuit. Karen Henderson, the 79-year-old appointee of George H.W. Bush, is on the panel. More importantly, two relatively young Biden appointees named J. Michelle Childs and Florence Pan are also on the panel.

Panels in the coming months will reportedly not be as left-wing as the December panel. The scheduling question, then, becomes one of how hostile the panel of judges will be to Trump’s appeal. By setting an aggressive schedule, the December panel can keep with the case and help ensure Democrats can get their conviction in time for it to affect the election.

Judge Florence Pan has shown a particular interest in lassoing the case for herself. Appointed in 2022, Pan is the wife of Max Stier, a longtime associate of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Stier is also known for being one of the Democrats eager to join the smear campaign against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Stier and Kavanaugh had been on opposite sides of the Whitewater investigation in the late 1990s. When Democrats ran their unseemly attack on Kavanaugh, Stier told the FBI and two anti-Kavanaugh reporters at The New York Times a weird story about how freshmen at Yale might have done something to an inebriated Kavanaugh and a young woman that was inappropriate. The woman, for her part, told friends she has no recollection of what Stier claimed.

“Stier has always held himself out as a consummate civil servant and above politics, but he provided information wildly irrelevant but calculated to inflame the situation. He’s a malign actor,” said one attorney about the stunt.

Pan is also the judge who wrote the D.C. Circuit’s opinion upholding the reinterpretation of an obscure financial crimes statute to imprison Republican protesters for years. The Supreme Court announced it would be hearing an appeal of her decision in the current term. Many constitutional scholars agree with the dissent, which stated the government’s use of the statute to go after protesters is “implausibly broad and unconstitutional.”

On December 18, the D.C. Circuit announced it was scheduling oral argument for January 9, another example of the way Democrats are rushing to give Trump less time to prepare for argument than other defendants receive. Judge Henderson, the lone Republican appointee on the panel, took the rare step of publicly noting she disagrees with the extreme path chosen by her Democrat-appointed colleagues on the panel.

“Judge Henderson would stay any further action by this court until the United States Supreme Court has taken final action on the Government’s Petition for Certiorari before Judgment now pending before it in this case,” noted the Court order.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College and a Fox News contributor. 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

Category:

Law, Political

Tagged with:

Mollie Hemingway Op-ed: To Win, Republicans Have To Be Smarter And Tougher Than Sen. James Lankford

BY: MOLLIE HEMINGWAY | DECEMBER 04, 2023

Read https://thefederalist.com/2023/12/04/to-win-republicans-have-to-be-smarter-and-tougher-than-sen-james-lankford/more at

James Lankford and George Stephanopoulos

Author Mollie Hemingway profile

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY

VISIT ON TWITTER@MZHEMINGWAY

Career Democrat and ABC host George Stephanopoulos completely emasculated Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma this weekend on his Sunday show. Right at the beginning of the interview, Stephanopoulos advanced a flurry of disinformation and lies, to which Lankford, who purports to be a conservative senator of the burgundy-red state of Oklahoma, bowed down in complete supplication:

Stephanopoulos: Your party’s leading candidate for president was on the stump yesterday repeating lies about the 2020 election. He’s called those convicted in the Jan. 6 insurrection hostages. He faces 91 separate felony counts himself. He’s raised the prospect of executing the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and terminating parts of the Constitution. In the face of all that and more, are you prepared to support Donald Trump if he’s your party’s nominee?

Oh, for crying out loud. What an absolutely preposterous line of questioning. Any Republican elected official with a room-temperature IQ and even a modicum of self-respect would be livid at the propaganda and lies and immediately push back. But not Lankford. Here’s how he responded:

Lankford: Yes, we haven’t had a single vote yet, George. This is still weeks and weeks away from our first votes that are happening actually in Iowa, then New Hampshire and South Carolina. And there are a lot of people that are going to make that decision. That’s not going to be me making that decision, that’s going to be the American people that actually make that decision.

Stephanopoulos pressed him, and Lankford remained impotent in the face of the questioning. In fact, he was so bad throughout the interview, he even quoted Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s controversial homeland security secretary, as a role model on immigration enforcement. The entire state of Oklahoma looked worse as it went on.

Now, Lankford is more than welcome to stay out of the Republican primary or endorse whomever he thinks is the best candidate, but what he should not feel free to do is allow the corrupt media and other Democrats to destroy the country through propaganda and lies. Americans are absolutely desperate for even the tiniest bit of Republican backbone and leadership, not mealy-mouthed kowtowing to the press.

When you claim to be a conservative senator of a state so Republican that two out of every three voters in 2020 voted for Trump, and a lifelong Democrat operative in the media asks you a completely loaded agitprop question, you should hit it out of the park. Like so:

“First off, George, your audience should know that you just regurgitated back a diatribe of lies, mistruths, and Democrat propaganda. I’m not surprised, given your professional background and track record of maliciously pushing the false and dangerous Russia-collusion scam for so many years during and after the 2016 election, but I can’t allow your lies to go uncorrected.

“The public knows full well there were major issues in how the 2020 election was conducted — from Mark Zuckerberg’s more than $400 million on partisan get-out-the-vote efforts in key swing states, to the deliberate Hunter Biden laptop suppression that the major news and tech companies along with 51 intel officials participated in, to the tens of millions of mail-in-ballots and voting changes that did not follow state laws. So drop the dishonest, holier-than-thou nonsense about 2020 being the cleanest, most perfect election with nothing allowed to be scrutinized or discussed.

“Second, the public is also wising up to the fact that what the corporate media have spun to them about Jan. 6 hasn’t exactly been the complete truth. Yes, we know your line that this was the worst moment in the history of the world, requiring our FBI to do nothing other than arrest people who were anywhere near the event. Well, that, and arrest pro-lifers who are praying and parents who are attending school board meetings.

“But most Americans know that we have not gotten good answers about why Nancy Pelosi turned down security provisions ahead of what intelligence suggested would be a very contentious day, or what exactly was being done by the federal informants and federal agents who were present for the day’s events. They’re extremely worried about how left-wing rioters and criminals seem to be able to do whatever they want with very few repercussions, even when they’re attacking the Supreme Court, federal courthouses, the White House, churches, homes, and police precincts. And now with the release of some of the videotapes from that day, we see that most of the activity that day was not in any way what was hyped up and presented by the Democrats’ Jan. 6 show trial.

“Finally, the Biden administration is at this moment doing everything in its power to put their leading political opponent in prison. They raided Mar-a-Lago, George. When other countries do things like this, when Putin does stuff like this, we say that means they don’t have free and fair elections. It seems the Democrats’ main strategy this election cycle is to attempt to put effective Republicans in prison, to bankrupt them, and to prevent them from speaking out about what is being done to destroy this country. I’ll note this isn’t working with the American people, as Trump now leads widely in almost all polls against Biden, a strong renunciation of what’s going on.

“So I ask you, George, are you prepared to start focusing on the major policy issues facing the country, or will you continue to push lies and propaganda to help put your political opponents in prison?”

You know, something like that.

To state the obvious here, using small words so that even the absolutely feckless and embarrassingly lame Senate Republicans can understand, praising Mayorkas, failing to correct lies about Republicans, and mumbling about how you’ll vote Republican if you are forced to is not a way to win elections. Yes, I’m sure it’s what Mitch McConnell told Lankford to go out and do, but it yields nothing but failure. The people of Oklahoma deserve an actual man to represent them, not whatever it is they’re getting in Lankford.

You win elections by saying truthful things, not being sad and scared like Lankford and most other Republican senators are. He should be lambasting Stephanopoulos for not covering the major issues facing the country in an even remotely evenhanded or honest way.

That’s how you go from being a party full of absolute losers who are on their back heels constantly to one that makes people want to vote for you.

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is the Editor-in-Chief of The Federalist. She is Senior Journalism Fellow at Hillsdale College and a Fox News contributor. 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

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

The Real Conspiracy Theorists About U.S. Elections Are Legacy Media

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | NOVEMBER 29, 2023

A bunch of 'I voted' stickers on a surface

Not a week goes by in which America’s ethically bankrupt media aren’t pushing lies about the state of the country’s elections, and their latest attack on Republican voters is no different.

On Wednesday, Stateline joined its fellow leftist “news” outlets in fomenting a Democrat-manufactured conspiracy theory that U.S. election workers everywhere are facing constant harassment from constituents. The insinuation, of course, is that these threats are coming from conservative voters who dared to raise questions about the conduct of the 2020 election.

At the center of Stateline’s hit piece is the recent spate of letters filled with fentanyl and other substances sent to local election offices in states such as Washington, Nevada, and Oregon. Instead of disclosing to its readers the evidence indicating the letters were potentially sent by far-left radicals tied to Antifa, Stateline immediately pivoted from reporting on the issue to advancing the left’s “election workers are under attack” narrative and pinning the blame on former President Donald Trump and his supporters.

“Since the 2020 presidential election, state and local election officials nationwide have been bombarded with threats, as lies perpetuated by former President Donald Trump and his allies around ‘rigged’ elections have fueled conspiracy theories and inspired violent reactions to the bureaucrats and temporary workers who run the United States’ democratic process,” the outlet claimed in hyperbolic fashion.

JUST IN: Video emerges of woman testifying that multiple absentee ballots we’re being received in sequential order with the date of November 0, 2020..

DOES THIS SEEM POSSIBLE?

pic.twitter.com/OdsXSxosN4
— Chuck Callesto (@ChuckCallesto) November 27, 2023

As I previously wrote in these pages, Democrat claims that election workers have experienced a spike in threats since the 2020 election are primarily based on “surveys” issued by leftist organizations and unsubstantiated statements from Democrat election officials. In November 2022, for example, The Washington Post published an article containing assertions by Colorado Democrat Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s office that it had “identified hundreds more threats against her since 2020.” Unsurprisingly, the Post gave no indication that it bothered to fact-check these claims.

Just like the Post, however, Stateline was forced to include data from President Biden’s own Department of Justice showing that Democrats’ sky-is-falling elections narrative is total bunk.

In its article, the outlet discloses that, “As of late August, the U.S. Justice Department’s Election Threats Task Force had charged 14 people with making threats to election workers and political candidates since the task force was created in 2021, so far leading to nine convictions that came with yearslong criminal sentences.” August 2022 testimony from a DOJ official and a subsequent agency press release further revealed that out of roughly 1,000 communications directed toward election officials that were deemed “threatening and harassing” by the Election Threats Task Force since the force’s inception, only about 11 percent of those contacts “met the threshold for a federal criminal investigation.”

Got that? In a country with a population of more than 335 million people, only about 100 individuals have been investigated by the DOJ for supposedly threatening election workers, and only 14 of them have been officially charged. That doesn’t exactly sound like a widespread crisis.

For a corporate press that loves to toss around the term “conspiracy theory” whenever reporting on legitimate Republican concerns about the integrity of U.S. elections, leftist media outlets such as the Post and Stateline are perfectly fine with fomenting their own conspiracy theories to dishonestly smear their political opponents. In reality, Democrats couldn’t care less about the “security” of American elections. All they care about is acquiring and maintaining power.

The media-wide effort to cast Republicans as threats to “democracy” isn’t just designed to scare away independents and moderate voters from the GOP. It’s to disincentivize conservatives from partaking in legitimate forms of election oversight, such as poll watching.

From elections to lawfare, Democrats have no interest in playing by the same rules as everyone else. And if that means they have to recruit their media allies to push debunked propaganda about Republicans, then that’s exactly what they’ll do.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served 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

Author Shawn Fleetwood profile

SHAWN FLEETWOOD

VISIT ON TWITTER@SHAWNFLEETWOOD

Category:

Media, Political

Tagged with:

Trump: Dems’ Opposition to Voter ID Exposes Them

By Eric Mack | Tuesday, 21 November 2023 02:23 PM EST

Democrats’ opposition to voter identification requirements was called out Tuesday by former President Donald Trump as “the biggest giveaway” of their alleged intention to stuff ballot boxes.

“No radical left Democrat politician has ever been able to explain why their party is so rabidly opposed to Voter ID — and that’s the biggest giveaway of all that they are cheating on a monumental scale,” Trump said Tuesday in one in a series of video statements posted to Truth Social. “They don’t want voter ID, because they want to cheat.”

Trump denounced Democrats’ past arguments that “voter ID is racist,” calling it “offensive” that Democrats attempted to suggest voters are incapable of getting a photo ID.

“What century are these radical Democrats living in?” Trump said. “Americans of all colors and creeds are fully capable of obtaining identification, which is required to drive a car, buy a beer, see an R-rated movie, get on an airplane, get a bank account, check into a hotel, and even to get cold medicine at a pharmacy.”

Trump cited polls showing “over 80% of Americans” supporting voter ID requirements.

“Yet in the last Congress every single Democrat in the House of Representatives voted to ban voter ID nationwide,” Trump said. “That because they cheat, and their policies which are so bad and so destructive — especially to our cities or inner-cities — no wonder they have to cheat, because nobody could get elected with those policies.”

Trump added only “two things are scared” in the anti-democracy party: “Open borders and no voter ID,” two policies he said are tied to stuff ballots for Democrats’ agenda.

“When I am reelected we will secure our borders and we will launch a nationwide campaign to get voter ID in every federal, state, and local election,” Trump’s video statement concluded. “What we really want to do is get down to paper ballots, one-day voting, and voter ID, and we’re going to have safe elections again.”

Eric Mack | editorial.mack@newsmax.com

Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

How Dark-Money Megadonor George Soros Hides Behind ‘Democracy’ PACs To Sabotage It

BY: SEAMUS BRUNER | NOVEMBER 15, 2023

Author Seamus Bruner profile

SEAMUS BRUNER

VISIT ON TWITTER@SEAMUSBRUNER

The following is an adapted excerpt from Controligarchs: Exposing the Billionaire Class, their Secret Deals, and the Globalist Plot to Dominate Your Life (Sentinel, Nov. 14).

In the United States, global financial speculator George Soros has been the single-biggest financier of overtly political causes for decades. In 2022, he poured $178.8 million into federal campaigns, making him by far the biggest campaign contributor in that cycle. Then there are his hidden and comingled political contributions — a vast web of dark money — that are intentionally designed to influence elections and avoid public scrutiny.

According to OpenSecrets.org, a research organization that tracks money in politics (coincidentally funded by Soros’ Open Society Foundations), Soros Fund Management was by far the largest single political contributor going into the 2022 midterm elections. The fund ranked first out of 31,955 contributor organizations with a known war chest of approximately $180 million. Not a single dollar went to a Republican candidate.

The political research group noted that organizations like Soros Fund Management cannot legally contribute directly to candidates or party committees. Instead, the fund funneled cash to political affiliates, the largest being an entity innocuously titled Democracy PAC II. The super PAC’s Federal Election Commission filing lists Michael Vachon as its treasurer. Vachon has served on boards of left-wing organizations tied to Soros’ Open Society Foundations, such as NYC Partners, Democracy Alliance, and Catalist. George Soros’ son, Alexander, runs the super PAC.

To be sure, Republican billionaires use the same methods of concealing how their dark money flows, but Soros’ dizzying political financing network is unparalleled. Other Democracy PAC II affiliates include ColorofChange.org, DNC Services Corp., Justice & Public Safety, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Democracy PAC, and Forward Majority Action, to name just a few (each with multimillion-dollar budgets).

Notably, the first iteration of Democracy PAC funneled more than $80 million to Democratic groups and candidates in the 2020 election cycle. In a statement to Politico, Soros said the massive spend was necessary for “strengthening the infrastructure of American democracy: voting rights and civic participation, civil rights and liberties, and the rule of law.” Incidentally, the Soros-linked America Coming Together political action committee was slapped with what was, at the time, the third-largest fine in the Federal Election Commission’s history following the unsuccessful bid to defeat President George W. Bush in 2004 and install Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., in the White House.

The group’s $137 million election effort spanned 90 offices in 17 states and employed more than 25,000 neighborhood canvassers and election staff. The FEC unanimously approved a $775,000 fine for using unregulated “soft money” to elect Democrats. The penalty was a pittance of accountability compared to the amount spent, though America Coming Together shuttered operations in 2005.

Soros had also given millions to the leftist MoveOn.org Voter Fund, which the FEC fined $150,000, to run television ads attacking President Bush. The progressive megadonor was an early supporter of Barack Obama. In 2004, he held a fundraiser in New York City for the community organizer from Chicago and his successful U.S. Senate bid in Illinois. Soros — the so-called “smart money” in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary — would go on to back Obama over Hillary Clinton.

Ironically, Soros would later say that Obama (whose 2012 opponent, Mitt Romney, suggested was the most anti-American president in the nation’s history) was his “greatest disappointment.” Not because Obama’s leftward lurch didn’t go far enough, but because Obama, in Soros’ view, stabbed him in the back, politically, and left him to operate outside the inner White House circle.

In 2016, Soros threw his full weight behind Hillary Clinton and against Donald Trump by pouring millions into her presidential election run. FEC filings in the summer of 2016 showed Soros had committed or personally donated more than $25 million — mostly for her benefit.

Upon Trump’s election, the Soros mission turned to getting rid of the 45th duly elected president of the United States. How that jibed with any honest notion of democracy is anyone’s guess.

Framing President Trump as a Russian agent guilty of colluding with Vladimir Putin to cheat Hillary Clinton out of the White House was always a Clinton campaign smear. The associated Steele dossier, named for the former British intelligence officer and Fusion GPS opposition research operative Christopher Steele, was laundered through the law firm Perkins Coie.

According to The Washington Post, Perkins Coie represented “the national Democratic Party, its governors, almost all of its members of Congress, and its campaign and fundraising apparatus.” The firm’s “Democratic superlawyer,” Marc Elias, was the Clinton campaign’s general counsel. Elias was not only involved in the Steele dossier fiasco, which the FBI used to obtain a surveillance warrant to spy on the Trump campaign — and led to subsequent FISA warrant renewals to spy on the Trump presidency — but Elias was simultaneously paid by George Soros to knock down election integrity laws in swing states.

Flash-forward to the 2019 impeachment of President Trump, and Soros surfaced again through his Open Society Foundations’ ties to Ukraine and the so-called whistleblower at the center of the controversy, identified by independent media reports as Eric Ciaramella. Breitbart journalist Aaron Klein found that Ciaramella was reportedly receiving email communications from a top director at Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Klein also noted that the Soros-funded Center for Public Integrity was fueling the impeachment narrative that President Trump acted improperly with respect to the purported temporary withholding of military aid to Ukraine in exchange for evidence of former Vice President Joe Biden’s alleged corruption.

Corporate media outlets with a collective loathing for President Trump used the Soros-backed group’s assertions to substantiate Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment effort. Trump was indeed impeached and acquitted by the Senate. Just as in previous elections, Soros reportedly told a group at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the 2020 election would determine the “fate of the world.” He said Trump was “a con man and a narcissist, who wants the world to revolve around him.” Previously at the World Economic Forum, Soros claimed Trump was “doing the work of ISIS.”

Soros spent $52 million in the 2020 presidential election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission filings. But there is no way to know how much money and influence originated from the billionaire activist, whether directly or indirectly via his Open Society Foundations.

One thing is certain: The 2020 presidential election, amid unprecedented Covid-era election changes and summer riots destabilizing dozens of American cities and the nation’s capital, was unlike any in American history. Soros-backed prosecutors are already swaying the 2024 presidential election via lawfare. Soros grant recipients are attempting to remove the leading opposition candidate from the ballot.

And George and Alex Soros are only just getting started.

Seamus Bruner is the author of the book “Controligarchs: Exposing the Billionaire Class, Their Secret Deals, and the Globalist Plot to Dominate Your Life,” and the Director of Research at the Government Accountability Institute (GAI). Follow: @seamusbruner

Category:

corruption, Political

Tagged with:

Biden DOJ Dispatches Feds to Polling Places to Interfere in an Election Near You

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | NOVEMBER 07, 2023

citizens voting in voting booths on Election Day

In its latest attempt to interfere in state and local elections, the Biden administration is deploying federal agents to monitor polling places in several states during Tuesday’s off-year elections.

The U.S. Constitution charges states — not the federal government — with primary oversight and administration of elections. But according to the highly politicized Department of Justice, state and local election officials can’t be trusted to uphold the law. Thus, the agency has decided to forcibly inject itself into the process.

According to a Monday press release, the DOJ is dispatching federal observers from its Civil Rights Division to “monitor for compliance with the federal voting rights laws” in numerous jurisdictions throughout the country. Among those listed are Union County, New Jersey; Pawtucket and Woonsocket, Rhode Island; Madison County and Panola County, Mississippi; and Prince William County, Virginia.

Regarding Union County, a U.S. district court approved a consent decree proposed by the DOJ earlier this year that forces local election officials to provide “a comprehensive Spanish-language election program for voters” during the state’s Nov. 7 elections. The consent decree — which also authorized federal observers to monitor polling places throughout the county — was filed in conjunction with a DOJ lawsuit, which claimed that a failure by Union County officials to provide such materials constituted a violation of the Voting Rights Act.

“The Civil Rights Division enforces the federal voting rights laws that protect the rights of all citizens to access the ballot,” the DOJ claimed. “The division regularly deploys its staff to monitor for compliance with the federal civil rights laws in elections in communities all across the country.”

Okay, I’ll say it. This is the closest we, as a nation, have come to pure Socialism.

In addition to New Jersey, Virginia, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and several other states will decide the outcome of critically important elections on Tuesday.

This is hardly the first time the DOJ has concocted this type of election meddling. In fact, the agency carried out this same scheme during last year’s midterm elections. As Victoria Marshall wrote in these pages, most of the 64 jurisdictions the DOJ “monitored” during the 2022 elections are “Democrat strongholds or swing districts in states with key midterm contests such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada.”

Much like last year, the jurisdictions being surveilled by the DOJ on Tuesday are mostly Democrat strongholds. During Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial race, for example, Democrat candidate Terry McAuliffe won Prince William County by nearly 15 points over now-Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican. Similarly, Union, Pawtucket, and Woonsocket Counties all went to Joe Biden during the 2020 presidential election.

The DOJ’s increasing efforts to “monitor” local and state elections appear to be aimed at curtailing GOP poll watchers’ legitimate right to oversee U.S. election administration. After it became clear more conservatives were going to partake in this legal form of election oversight, legacy media began running hit pieces leading up to the 2022 midterms warning that so-called “election denying” MAGA Republicans volunteering as poll watchers were plotting to disrupt elections throughout the country.

While the left’s doomsday predictions (unsurprisingly) never came true, that hasn’t stopped regime-approved media from furthering the lie that election workers are under constant threat from Republicans. Even the Biden DOJ’s own data shows that there is no widespread threat to election workers. Nonetheless, so-called “journalists” continue to parrot their Democrat allies’ falsehoods without a second thought.

Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served 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

Author Shawn Fleetwood profile

SHAWN FLEETWOOD

VISIT ON TWITTER@SHAWNFLEETWOOD

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Perspectives; Thoughts; Comments; Opinions; Discussions

Posts tagged ‘Elections’

By Jimmy Parker | October 16, 2025

The Reality Behind the Shutdown

What’s Actually Being Argued

The $1 Trillion Talking Point

The Real Issue: Federal Leverage and Political Optics

The Consequence of Power

A Shutdown Fueled by Political Theater

What Comes Next

Share this:

By: Brianna Lyman | April 10, 2025

Share this:

By: Elle Purnell | April 02, 2025

Share this:

Tuesday, 25 March 2025 05:23 PM EDT

Share this:

By: M.D. Kittle | November 19, 2024

‘Tool to Defend’

‘On the Other Foot’

‘We Can Get There’

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.

Share this:

By: M.D. Kittle | November 18, 2024

‘Tipping the Scales’

‘The Election Deniers are the Democrats’

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.

Share this:

By: M.D. Kittle | November 08, 2024

‘Being Diminished’

‘Common Sense’ Movement

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.

Share this:

By: Brianna Lyman | November 04, 2024

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2

Share this:

By: M.D. Kittle | October 25, 2024

Do Tell

They Do Not Accept

As has been well documented, Trump’s former chief of staff’s incendiary comments have been debunked by multiple sources, and the assertion that Trump “led a violent insurrection” is widely disputed.

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.

Share this:

By: The Federalist Staff | October 10, 2024

Arizona

Georgia

Michigan

Nevada

North Carolina

Pennsylvania

Wisconsin

Share this:

By: Shawn Fleetwood | October 08, 2024

Share this:

By: Brianna Lyman | October 01, 2024

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2

Share this:

By: Logan Washburn | September 20, 2024

Share this:

By Nicole Wells | Friday, 13 September 2024, 03:25 PM EDT

Nicole Wells ✉

Nicole Wells, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.

Share this:

By: Ben Weingarten | August 15, 2024

Rougher Weather Ahead

DHS’s ‘Slow-Walking’

‘Significant Inaccuracies’ in the Federal Database

Warning: Extended Lawfare Ahead

Share this:

By: Brianna Lyman | August 15, 2024

Georgia

Nevada

Arizona

Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2

Share this:

By Rep. Mike Johnson Fox News | Published August 12, 2024 5:00am EDT

Republican Mike Johnson is the 56th speaker of the United States House of Representatives and represents Louisiana’s 4th District in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Share this:

By Nicole Wells | Thursday, 01 August 2024 02:02 PM EDT

Nicole Wells ✉

Nicole Wells, a Newsmax general assignment reporter covers news, politics, and culture. She is a National Newspaper Association award-winning journalist.