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Letting Noncitizens Vote In U.S. Elections Is Foreign Interference

BY: J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS | MARCH 17, 2023

Voting sign with arrow and American flag

This week, a law went into effect allowing foreign nationals — here legally or illegally — to vote in D.C. municipal elections. The only requirement other than age to vote in D.C. elections now is living in the District of Columbia for 30 days.

Most alarming about this new law is the foreign interference this law invites into the elections in our nation’s capital. Now, foreign nationals working at Russian, Chinese, and other embassies can vote in American elections. So much for concerns about foreign influence in American elections that was so en vogue in 2016.

Worse, this expansion of the right to vote to people who aren’t United States citizens undermines the very notion of citizenship. With citizenship comes loyalty to America and a shared interest in the future of the country. These foreign nationals living in D.C. have no investment in the future of America. No doubt some are in this country to spy on it.

Opposition to the proposal is bipartisan, with 42 Democrats opposing it in the House. The resolution was introduced in the Senate, but Majority Leader Chuck Schumer refused to allow a vote.

Don’t think this law is a fluke. New York City passed a law allowing foreign nationals to vote in municipal elections, and we are challenging it in federal court because it was enacted with a racial motivation. San Francisco also passed a law allowing foreign nationals to vote in school board elections.

The D.C. Council didn’t appear to act with an illegal motivation, so the prospects of overturning the law in court are slim, at best. It’s up to Congress to undo this growing threat to American sovereignty.

Citizenship should mean something. Many foreigners spent years coming to our country and achieving citizenship status. Along with citizenship came responsibilities and the cherished right to vote. These laws allowing foreign nationals to vote are a slap in the face to people who came here legally and worked hard to gain citizenship status.

It also diminishes the century-long struggle of black Americans to gain the right to vote. From Reconstruction to the civil rights movement in the 1960s, black Americans fought hard to secure the ability to vote. Now black Americans are having to fight again to stop foreign nationals from diluting their votes.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) is fighting these foreign citizen voting laws. In New York City, PILF filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of four black New York City voters to have the city’s foreign voting bill declared unconstitutional for violating the 15th Amendment and the Voting Rights Act. And in San Francisco, PILF filed an amicus curiae brief to support the striking down of San Francisco’s law allowing foreigners to vote.

Only Americans should be voting in our elections. This is an issue with strong bipartisan support. The real foreign interference in our elections happens when we allow foreign nationals to vote in them. We need to stop allowing people who can leave our country at any moment to have a say in its future.

We must protect the cherished right to vote and stop letting American citizens’ votes be diluted by foreign nationals.

J. Christian Adams is the President of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a former Justice Department attorney, and current commissioner on the United States Commission for Civil Rights.

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Republicans Can’t Beat Democrats’ Election-Industrial Complex By Adopting Its Strategies

BY: JOSEPH ARLINGHAUS AND WILLIAM DOYLE, PH.D. | MARCH 16, 2023

ballot box — The sudden rise of well-funded election activist nonprofits represents a paradigm shift away from persuading and motivating voters, and toward manipulating the election process to benefit Democrats.

JOSEPH ARLINGHAUS AND WILLIAM DOYLE, PH.D.

Over the last several months, a growing number of Republicans, including Donald Trump himself, seem to be having a change of heart about universal mail-in voting and ballot harvesting.

While few Republicans are ready to completely abandon policies that support election integrity and transparency, more and more seem willing to follow the old adage “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” and suggest that Republicans become significantly more reliant on universal mail-in voting and ballot harvesting to win elections. There is no worse idea in politics today.

Conservatives do not have the institutional or financial support to match Democrats in election activism and ballot harvesting, nor are they likely to be able to any time in the near future. The advantages Democrats have accrued over the last 20 years in election manipulation and “lawfare” are nearly insurmountable.

But this is not necessarily a portent of gloom and doom. The growing number of ultra-left Democratic candidates are deeply unpopular and would be unelectable outside deep-blue areas under the election norms that prevailed prior to the Covid-19 lockdowns and the 2020 presidential election.

Democrats’ performance in 2020 and 2022 would almost certainly have been far worse under conditions that involved persuading voters to go to the polls on Election Day, rather than relying on a complex web of wealthy nonprofits and armies of election activists to churn out mountains of mail-in ballots, submitted by indifferent voters, during greatly extended early voting periods.

Raw Institutional Power

Republicans need to better understand the vast institutional power that is arrayed against them on the left in the form of lavishly funded 501(c)(3) nonprofits and charitable foundations, along with legions of election lawyers, data analysts, and election activists.

Consider the shadowy Arabella Advisors, a nonprofit consulting company that guides the strategy, advocacy, impact investing, and management for high-dollar, left-leaning nonprofits and individuals. Arabella provides these clients a number of services that enable them to enact policies focused on left-of-center issues such as election administration and “voting rights.”

Arabella Advisors also manages five nonprofits that serve as incubators and accelerators for a range of other left-of-center nonprofits: the New Venture Fund, the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the Hopewell Fund, the Windward Fund, and the North Fund. The New Venture Fund was the second-largest contributor, behind Mark Zuckerberg, to the Center for Tech and Civic Life in 2020. The Sixteen Thirty Fund spent $410 million during the 2020 election cycle, which was more than the Democratic National Committee spent.

These nonprofits have collectively supported hundreds of left-wing policy and advocacy organizations since the network’s creation. In 2020, Arabella’s nonprofit network boasted total revenues exceeding $1.67 billion and total expenditures of $1.26 billion and paid out $896 million in grants largely to other left-leaning and politically active nonprofits.

There is no comparable organization with anything close to this level of financial clout in the Republican world.

Beneath philanthropic foundations and holding companies such as Arabella, there is a world of left-of-center 501(c)(3) nonprofits focused on elections. The Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute has identified at least ten 501(c)(3) nonprofits that we believe played key roles in the 2020 election on behalf of the Democrat Party.

These groups were already in place and ready to implement strategies calculated to give Democrats an electoral advantage long before state-by-state legal barnstorming transformed the norms of American voting systems in the name of Covid-19.

Some of these groups are mainly policy-oriented, focused on increasing Democrat votes by promoting vote-by-mail, ballot drop box initiatives, extended early voting periods, and the relaxation of voting standards such as voter ID. These organizations ranged from local efforts such as the New Georgia Project to national projects like Democracy Works, The Voter Project, and the National Vote at Home Institute.

Another group of nonprofits sprang into action in 2020 to finance the implementation of the Democrats’ election agenda, including hiring new personnel, voter canvassing, ballot harvesting, new election infrastructure such as ballot drop boxes, targeted public relations campaigns, and expensive ballot “curing” efforts.

These organizations, which ended up spending well more than $400 million in 2020, include the now infamous Mark Zuckerberg-funded Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), the Center for Secure and Modern Elections (CSME), and the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), among others. Once again, there is no similar complex of election-oriented institutions in the Republican world.

Democrats’ ‘Election-Industrial Complex’

These organizations are not arms of political campaigns nor “dark money” partisan advocacy groups, both of which are normal parts of the traditional electoral process. They have nothing to do with persuading voters or “getting out the vote” in the traditional sense, but are instead devoted to gaining an advantage for Democrat candidates by changing election laws, manipulating the election process, and promoting new voting technologies.

This complex web of lavishly funded nonprofits and foundations is not just large and extremely powerful: It is without comparison on the right.

The institutions that support the left’s election activism are so large and so powerful, one might refer to them as an “election-industrial complex.” Election activism is a multi-billion-dollar per year business in the world of Democratic Party politics.

“ELECTION-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX“

The Democrats’ election-industrial complex burst into full view in 2020 with CTCL’s $332 million Covid-19 Response Grant Project, funded almost entirely by Facebook founder Zuckerberg, which was aimed at gaining control of election offices in areas that were critical to Democrat campaigns in 2020 through large, “strings attached” grants.

The bulk of that money was spent in a sophisticated effort to increase turnout among a specific profile of voter in order to benefit Democrat candidates. All large CTCL grant recipients were required to “encourage and increase absentee voting” mainly through providing “assistance” in absentee ballot completion and the installation of ballot drop boxes, and to “dramatically expand strategic voter education & outreach efforts, particularly to historically disenfranchised residents.”

It has yet to sink in among many Republicans that the CTCL, and the myriad other election activist nonprofits they partnered with in 2020 to carry out their plans, represent a substantively different challenge than Democrats outspending Republicans in conventional election spending.

The sudden rise to prominence of these institutions represents a paradigm shift in the way elections are organized, away from persuading and motivating voters, and toward manipulating the election process, introducing new voting rules, and supporting voting technologies that benefit Democrats and handicap Republicans.

This is the paradigm that many Republicans now propose to embrace, with virtually no institutional or financial support.

Conservatives Must Rebuild Classic Electoral Norms

Conservatives are supposed to be involved in conserving things, and there are few things more worth conserving than the U.S. election system as it has existed throughout most of American history. U.S. elections used to be the envy of the world even 10 years ago, but since then have deteriorated to the point where a large and growing proportion of the population views election results with deep skepticism.

Viewing the grotesque Covid-19 era distortions in the present electoral landscape as an unalterable fait accompli means abandoning our election system to a vast institutional complex that seeks to make the voting booth a relic and Election Day an anachronism.

Even worse, the left’s election-industrial complex seeks to reshape voting into a private activity, to be undertaken at home at the initiative of community organizers and activists, as opposed to a public activity that takes place in a neutral public square, and which relies on the initiative of the voters. In the liberal election utopia, the sanctity of the voting booth and the secret ballot must give way to the collective intimacy of the kitchen table and the oversight of neighborhood political bosses.

For Republican activists to commit to a long-term strategy of universal mail-in voting and ballot harvesting would not only be a losing proposition from a practical standpoint, it would also contribute even further toward the transformation of our political system away from the control of civically engaged voters, and toward the consolidation of control in the hands of a small cadre of partisan activists and community organizers, as well as their numerous partners in the nonprofit world and administrative state.

There is a larger argument to be made, that universal absentee ballots and ballot harvesting must be opposed, not just from a practical standpoint, but also from a moral and philosophical point of view. We will have much more to say in the future about how universal mail-in ballots represent an objectively disordered way of deciding elections, which must therefore be unconditionally opposed.

Joseph Arlinghaus is the president and founder of Valor America, a conservative federal election SuperPAC founded in 2016 to use the latest social science research and randomized controlled election experiments that revolutionized the Democratic election world after 2005. He serves on the advisory board to the Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute. William Doyle, Ph.D., is research director at the Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute. He specializes in economic history and the private funding of American elections.

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Here’s Where GOP Election Officials Stand On Their State’s Ties To A Leftist-Controlled Voter Roll ‘Maintenance’ Group

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | MARCH 15, 2023

A bunch of 'I voted' stickers on a surface — The Federalist pressed GOP state election officials about their participation in the Electronic Registration Information Center.

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Since Missouri, Florida, and West Virginia’s recent withdrawal from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) — a widely used voter-roll management group with ties to left-wing activists — last week, America’s legacy media have been in freak-out mode. In uniform fashion, leftist outlets have labeled the legitimate concerns raised by the aforementioned states as “conspiracy theories” promoted by “election deniers” and “right-wing media.”

As The Federalist’s Victoria Marshall reported, publications like The New York Times and Associated Press have gone out of their way to run grossly dishonest headlines such as “G.O.P. States Abandon Bipartisan Voting Integrity Group, Yielding to Conspiracy Theories” and “Election conspiracies fuel dispute over voter fraud system.” Predictably, these articles whitewash the issues surrounding ERIC, particularly its refusal to “require member states to participate in addressing multi-state voter fraud” and allowance “for a hyper-partisan individual to be an ex-officio non-voting member on its governance board.”

While painted as a nonpartisan venture by corporate media, ERIC is a voter-roll management system founded by far-left activist David Becker that was sold to states as a “quick and easy way” to administer their voter rolls. When states become ERIC members, they give voter data to the group — including the records of unregistered voters. Currently, ERIC has control of voter-roll data in more than half of states and the District of Columbia.

In addition to founding ERIC, Becker is also notable for launching the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), one of the major groups that received millions of dollars from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in the lead-up to the 2020 election. Such grants were then poured into local election offices throughout the country to push Democrat-backed voting policies. Analyses have shown these “Zuckbucks” were heavily skewed toward Democrat municipalities, especially in swing states, effectively making it a giant Democrat “get out the vote” operation.

As The Federalist reported, ERIC transmits the voter-roll data it receives from states to CEIR, which “then develops targeted mailing lists and sends them back to the states to use for voter registration outreach.”

While currently a non-voting member of ERIC’s board, Becker announced on Tuesday he “will not accept renomination” to the board “when [his] term expires this week,” citing Republican criticisms of the group.

Despite these alarming ties, there are still several leading GOP state election officials who continue to participate in ERIC. In light of Missouri, Florida, and West Virginia’s collective withdrawal from the coalition, The Federalist reached out to these officials to inquire whether they’re reconsidering their state’s ERIC membership.

Alaska

While speaking with state lawmakers last week, Alaska’s Division of Elections director Carol Beecher revealed she was reconsidering the state’s partnership with ERIC, citing membership costs as the primary reason. A spokeswoman from the Alaska lieutenant governor’s office confirmed this assertion but noted the state “has not decided on whether to continue” as an ERIC member.

“List maintenance is an essential process to ensure our voter list is as accurate and current as possible, and ERIC is one of the tools that Alaska uses to assist in this process,” spokeswoman Tiffany Montemayor told The Federalist. Montemayor did not, however, address whether Alaska shares the concerns about ERIC raised by Missouri, Florida, and West Virginia.

Georgia

When pressed by The Federalist on whether Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger was reconsidering his state’s ERIC membership and if he shared the concerns espoused by the three aforementioned states, Raffensberger spokesman Mike Hassinger declined to answer, instead replying, “If you really believe that ERIC is ‘an interstate alliance controlled by Democrat operatives that encourages partisan outreach efforts under the guise of simple voter roll maintenance,’ you’re an idiot.”

Ohio

While once describing ERIC as “one of the best fraud-fighting tools that we have,” Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose has reversed course and is threatening to withdraw his state from the organization. In a letter sent to ERIC Executive Director Shane Hamlin last week, LaRose demanded the group comply with his proposed reforms in its Friday meeting.

“I will not accept the status quo as an outcome of the next meeting,” LaRose wrote. “Anything short of the reforms mentioned above will result in action up to an[d] including our withdrawal from membership.”

As The Federalist reported, “LaRose’s proposed reforms include removing ‘ex-officio membership positions’ from ERIC’s bylaws so as to cut left-wing activist David Becker from its board, as well as no longer requiring states to send out voter registration mailers to unregistered residents.”

Iowa

According to the Associated Press, Iowa GOP Secretary of State Paul Pate is among the nation’s leading Republican election officials “who said they [have] no intention” of leaving ERIC and who have “signaled strong support for the effort.”

“ERIC is an effective tool for ensuring the integrity of Iowa’s voter rolls,” Pate told the outlet.

Texas

In Texas, state lawmakers have introduced legislation that, according to The Texas Tribune, would end the state’s participation in ERIC. Under HB 2809, the Texas secretary of state would be required to “cooperate with other states and jurisdictions to develop systems to compare voters, voter history, and voter registration lists to identify voters: whose addresses have changed,” “who have been convicted of a felony,” or “who are registered to vote in more than one state.”

A companion bill (SB 1070) has also been introduced in the state Senate.

Virginia

Unlike most U.S. jurisdictions, Virginia doesn’t have a secretary of state, meaning the state’s elections department is tasked with overseeing election administration. When pressed on whether the department is reconsidering its participation in ERIC in light of Florida, Missouri, and West Virginia’s decision to withdraw, an agency spokeswoman didn’t provide a definitive answer on the matter.

“The Department of Elections engages in ongoing and extensive list file maintenance processes,” she said. “If there are any changes made to any of these processes, they will be announced publicly.”

South Carolina

In a statement provided to The Federalist, South Carolina State Election Commission spokesman John Catalano said that while the commission has “many sources of information to remove unqualified voters for a variety of reasons,” ERIC is currently their “only source for access to critical sets of data,” including the Social Security Administration’s death files and the “list of South Carolina voters who have registered in other states.”

“While our state’s health department provides us with reports of people who have died in South Carolina, these reports do not include South Carolinians who die outside the state’s borders. The Social Security Administration death data we receive through ERIC allows us to identify these voters and make them inactive,” Catalano said. “The State Election Commission’s view is that ERIC is a valuable and currently irreplaceable tool that allows us to remove unqualified voters from the voter registration rolls.”

Leading GOP state election officials from Kentucky, Texas, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Utah did not respond to The Federalist’s request for comment.

This article has been updated to include a statement from South Carolina’s state election commission.

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

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

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | MARCH 01, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Zuckbucks 2.0 Recipients Turn Down Money After Leftist Nonprofit Fails Transparency Test

BY: VICTORIA MARSHALL | FEBRUARY 14, 2023

roll of "I voted" stickers on a table at a polling place — **Unless more localities reject these private funds and membership, CTCL will once again undermine election integrity in 2024 and beyond.**

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Three of the 10 counties chosen as beneficiaries of a program from the nonprofit that helped fund the private takeover of government election offices in 2020 are refusing to accept those dollars leading up to the 2024 cycle.

Election officials from Brunswick and Forsyth Counties in North Carolina and Ottawa County in Michigan have chosen not to accept funds from the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, a program that plans to funnel $80 million in election grants to jurisdictions across the country over the next five years. The alliance is a project of the Center for Tech and Civic Life, one of two groups that funneled over $328 million of private money from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, known as “Zuckbucks,” to government election offices mostly in the blue counties of swing states, mobilizing Democratic get-out-the-vote efforts and swinging the race in Joe Biden’s favor.

Many of the jurisdictions chosen as recipients for the 2024 cycle lean heavily Democrat and are located in swing states, indicating CTCL is hoping to replicate its successful scheme in the next presidential election in purple states Democrats need to win, such as Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin, and North Carolina. While CTCL might once again try to hide its efforts by claiming the alliance is also giving money to red counties, expect more than double or triple the funds to be spent on Democratic-leaning counties compared to Republican ones, just like in 2020.

Ottawa County Clerk Justin Roebuck told RealClearInvestigations he will refuse the grant money offered to his county because of transparency concerns. When Roebuck asked the alliance about its criteria for the amount of money given to each county, those running the program refused to give a clear answer.

Tim Tsujii, director of elections for the Forsyth County Board of Elections, told RealClear that Forsyth will not take any grant money because the county has adequate funds to administer its elections. Forsyth and Brunswick Counties will still be part of the alliance, but Tsujii raised concerns about members having to pay a fee for being part of the program.

“There is all this talk about the money going to elections offices and the counties, but what about the money going from the counties to the alliance?” Tsujii said.

To be a part of the alliance, election offices must pay an annual fee, $1,600 for a basic membership or $4,800 for premium, which the CTCL-created program says gives officials access to “coaching,” tutorials, consulting, and any other as-needed handholding, such as revamping voter forms and websites. The alliance also obligates members “to make non-monetary (but highly significant) contributions to the broader activities of the Alliance,” such as participating in its events and sharing election data, documents, and forms.

While the program goes to great lengths to stress its “commitment to nonpartisanship” — “We will never attempt to influence the outcome of any election. Period” — its own founding organization, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, has demonstrated the catastrophic and deeply partisan consequences of welcoming outside groups to infiltrate government election offices.

These three jurisdictions are not the only beneficiaries raising concerns about the integrity of the alliance and the problems associated with accepting its funds. The town of Greenwich, Connecticut, narrowly approved a $500,000 grant from the program after town representatives and concerned residents wrote a letter to their local newspaper signaling their opposition to accepting the grant. The letter cited outside influence by the partisan groups in Greenwich’s election process as one reason to reject the funds.

As RealClearInvestigations noted:

When [Greenwich] residents heard that its elections office was tapped to receive $500,000 in grant money from the CTCL, a member of the town’s legislative council sent an email to the center seeking more information, including audits of the group’s books, a copy of the group’s annual report, and its conflict-of-interest policy.

The CTCL declined to provide the documents, insisting that its audited financials and conflict policies “are not publicly filed documents.”

The alliance has also failed to disclose how exactly the grant money will be used, instead keeping things vague and saying it will vary depending on each office. But if CTCL’s past is prologue, that could mean working with left-wing third-party groups to create absentee ballot forms, targeting likely-Democratic voters by harvesting and curing their ballots, and crafting automatic voter registration systems. The Center for Tech and Civic Life is already hoping to do this on a much broader scale than in 2020. As The Federalist previously reported, CTCL has an elaborate plan to infiltrate more than 8,000 local election departments across the country by 2026.

That county election officials and town leaders are suspicious of the alliance and are starting to opt out of its grant money should set off alarm bells for other jurisdictions committed to conducting free and fair elections. Unless more localities reject these private funds and memberships, CTCL — under the guise of its new U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence program — will once again undermine election integrity in 2024 and beyond.

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

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If Biden’s Federal Elections Takeover Is ‘Free and Fair,’ Why Are the Plans Completely Redacted?

BY: VICTORIA MARSHALL | FEBRUARY 09, 2023

"vote here" sign — **Despite finally fulfilling a FOIA request, Biden’s Department of the Interior sent Citizens United a heavily-redacted document.**

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After several executive agencies in the Biden administration were sued for refusing to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests from conservative advocacy group Citizens United over the White House’s attempt to federalize elections, the Department of the Interior’s (DOI) Bureau of Indian Affairs finally turned over its first batch of requested documents. There’s one problem: More than half of the 54-page document is completely redacted.

“The Biden administration is the least transparent in history, and these absurd redactions are just the latest example. What are they trying to hide from the American people?” Citizens United President David Bossie told The Federalist.

As The Federalist previously reported, in March 2021, President Joe Biden issued an executive order directing hundreds of federal agencies to engage in a federal takeover of election administration. It also permitted federal agencies to work with “nonpartisan” third-party entities to get voters registered, yet left-wing dark money group Demos publicly admitted it’s worked with federal agencies, “in close partnership with the ACLU and other allies,” to advance the aims of Biden’s directive.

Such an order set off alarm bells among Republicans and good government groups, reminiscent of the widespread takeover of government election offices by Democratic activists and donors in the blue counties of key swing states during the 2020 presidential election. Through their infiltration of state and local offices, Democrats were able to conduct partisan get-out-the-vote operations and swing the election in then-candidate Biden’s favor. This order is a taxpayer-funded version of that effort, turning federal agencies — including those that dole out federal benefits — into voter registration hubs and partisan get-out-the-vote centers.

Citizens United wanted to find out more about it, which is why last June, it filed FOIA requests with the DOI and State Department seeking email and text messages that mentioned both the executive order and the Hatch Act, a law that prohibits executive branch employees from engaging in election activities. When the agencies failed to comply, Citizens United sued. On Jan. 31, DOI sent its first round of documents per Citizens United’s request.

But the 54-page PDF sent to Citizens United is mostly redacted, save for logistical emails between White House staff and agency department heads. The plan and implementation scheme for the “Promoting Access to Voting” executive order itself are completely redacted.

In a cover letter sent with the documents, the Biden administration defended the redactions under U.S.C. § 552(b)(5), which allows agencies to withhold information under the “Presidential Communications Privilege” (exists to ensure “the President’s ability to obtain candid and informed opinions from his advisors and to make decisions confidentially”) and the “Deliberative Process Privilege” (“protects the decision-making process of government agencies and encourages the frank exchange of ideas on legal or policy matters”).

But according to Jason Foster, president and founder of Empower Oversight, a transparency and government accountability group that frequently files FOIA requests, these redactions are a prime example of the federal government’s blatant over-redacting and censorship.

“Federal bureaucrats do everything in their power to conceal information from the public,” Foster told The Federalist. “Whether it’s over-classification or improper redactions and stonewalling Freedom of Information Act requests, they instinctively err on the side of hiding information to avoid embarrassment, conceal misconduct, or cover up corruption. It’s up to Congress to reform the FOIA process, and in the meantime, it’s up to independent organizations to sue aggressively to force the federal government to comply with transparency laws.”

While good government groups can sue over improper redactions, this process can usually take about a year to uncover just one document from a series of files, those familiar with the matter said. Now that Republicans control the House of Representatives, however, they have the power to compel the federal government to produce non-redacted versions of requested documents, a Citizens United official told The Federalist.

During the 117th Congress, nine House Republicans wrote a letter to the White House raising concerns about the executive order, specifically regarding the fact that the order supplants the authority of the states to set election law and administer elections under the Constitution. When asked about the Biden administration’s secrecy over its election’s directive, Freshman Rep. Harriet Hageman, R-Wyo., who chairs the Natural Resources Subcommittee on Indian and Insular Affairs, echoed her colleague’s sentiments.

“Everyone should have concerns about this executive order and the involvement of any federal agency in our election process,” Hageman told The Federalist. “First and foremost, elections are the constitutional responsibility of the states, not our federal bureaucracy. This is yet another example of the federal government overstepping its authority and infringing upon states’ rights. Even if this order was well intended — and I have serious doubts that it was — it is unconstitutional.”

Hageman emphasized that the White House cannot get away with such extensive redactions of election-related processes.

“Large-scale redactions are not in the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act,” Hageman added. “This is one of the few tools we have to hold our government accountable. Are we to accept that the information is classified to such an extent that the document is unable to be coherently interpreted? Sunshine is the best disinfectant, and the federal government cannot be allowed to continue to obscure and obstruct.”

Of particular interest in the 54-page document is a draft letter on page 32 from Indian Affairs Assistant Secretary Bryan Newland to White House Domestic Policy Advisor Susan Rice, formerly President Obama’s national security advisor and “right-hand woman” who is known for her involvement in spying on the Trump campaign in 2015 and lying about it. In that role, she also spread lies about the terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, helped Obama staffers target Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, and turned a blind eye to the Biden family’s foreign business affairs.

One line in the draft letter reads: “The plan promotes voter registration and voter participation (REDACTED) and the Department’s agency action to achieve these objectives.” The redacted portion might point to a Hatch Act violation, a Citizens United official told The Federalist.

“These documents relating to the Biden White House’s efforts to turn the federal workforce into a partisan voter registration committee must be released to the public in their entirety,” Bossie said. “Congress must investigate this executive order to see if the Biden Administration is violating the Hatch Act on a massive scale.”

When asked why the Interior Department isn’t being transparent with the public about Biden’s federal takeover of elections, the Bureau of Indian Affairs referred The Federalist to the U.S.C. § 552(b)(5) exemptions in the cover letter sent to Citizens United.

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

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Classified Documents Are a New Potential Trap for Any Politician Who Crosses the Deep State

BY: JOY PULLMANN | JANUARY 30, 2023

Chuck Schumer and Merrick Garland talking — **The Trump years saw a massive acceleration in the trend of unelected bureaucrats exercising power over elected officials, including by weaponizing classified information.**

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Procedural complaints about classified documents are quickly turning into a catch-all trap that can depose duly elected officials, especially those tasked with oversight of U.S. intelligence agencies. Last August, an unprecedented classified document complaint provided a pretext for an FBI raid on former President Donald Trump’s home, in an eerie echo of the use of police and military resources against opposing politicians typical of banana republics.

That administrative power flex has now been turned into the unprecedented appointment of three special counsels, most recently against the deeply unpopular current Democrat Party figurehead, Joe Biden. This all reverses the American structure of elected officials maintaining oversight of unelected permanent administrators. Instead, we now have unelected bureaucrats performing selective “oversight” of elected officials.

Of course, that pattern erases Americans’ deepest political birthright: government of the people, by the people, and for the people. A government not ultimately controlled by elected representatives of the citizenry is not a republic, nor is it any kind of democracy. Without elections truly affecting government policies, the original United States is no more, and its elections are a sham.

The subversion of elected representative government via weaponized intelligence has been expanding for some time. The Trump presidential years saw a massive acceleration in this pre-existing trend of unelected bureaucrats exercising increasing power over elected officials, including by weaponizing classified information, usually via highly selective leaks to leftist media.

Recall that Michael Flynn, a would-be reformer of U.S. intelligence, was neatly precluded from becoming Trump’s national security advisor via leaks of classified intel to the media that a (still) gullible Vice President Mike Pence bought hook, line, and sinker. Rather than the leaker being sought, caught, and punished, Flynn was. The selective and deceptive leaks were shanghaied into a Justice Department investigation that ended with Flynn narrowly escaping jail time and professional repercussions for his son so long as he promised to disappear from public view.

The same pattern occurred in multiple cycles with Spygate, the wholly manufactured projection of treasonous collusion with Russia from the Democratic Party onto Trump. Rep. Adam Schiff, who has been recently kicked off the House Intelligence Committee, repeatedly used his access to classified intelligence to fan the Spygate flames as well as the two impeachments of Trump. So did multiple other deep-state actors, including the Hillary Clinton campaign.

Notice there’s no probe into Schiff’s blatant and repeated misuse of the classified information he was privileged to receive on the House Intelligence Committee. But there could be if he stopped being such a useful Democrat.

This is how, as Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer threatened Trump early in the latter’s term, intelligence agencies “have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” It is how the intelligence tail can — and now does — wag the congressional dog. This has been ongoing now for decades and is perpetually expanding its reach.

This allows the document-holders to function as a shadow government that essentially controls the elected government by picking what bits of information to release to achieve its own ends rather than the priorities of American voters. This selective deployment of intelligence has been even used to goad the United States into wars it doesn’t win that expand the military-industrial complex and distract U.S. officials while defenestrating U.S. national interests. It was used to lie to Trump about U.S. military activities and prevent him from exercising his due presidential authority over U.S. military affairs.

Those who presented unreliable, counterproductive, and false intelligence to presidents from George W. Bush to Barack Obama to Trump have not been punished, nor often even identified. Neither has the person who compromised the safety and collegiality of the U.S. Supreme Court by leaking the pro-life Dobbs decision last May.

Curiously, neither have there been any administrative-state leaks about the many connections between the Biden family and the Chinese Communist Party. This is not a tool to be applied equally, you see, or in service of the public good. It’s only yet another knife to pull out against those who cross the wrong people.

That’s how expansive, vague, and proliferating laws, regulations, and bureaucracies all work: as tools of selective prosecution to be wielded at the whims of the powerful against those who threaten their power. The erasure of self-government and the rule of law go hand in hand, collapsed by the administrative state’s erasure of the separation of powers that protect individual liberty and justice for all.

This expanding weaponization of classified intel into selective probes of those who have access to at least some of it allows deep-state entities even more control over elected officials. This standard of probes for possessing “unauthorized” classified documents can be applied to any current or former president, as well as many other officials.

As a Project for Government Oversight lawyer told USA Today: “I’d bet you that if they go back to all of the living presidents and root through their homes and their libraries and their warehouses and garages, they’re going to unearth some classified documents there.” Other presidential experts told USA Today that essentially every presidential administration since 1978 has mishandled classified documents.

The same applies to numerous other elected and unelected officials, such as those on House and Senate military intelligence committees and in the executive branch. This is partly because U.S. intelligence agencies improperly classify “millions” of materials, partly to hide their activities by lying that materials elected representatives seek implicate “national security.” It’s a convenient, unfalsifiable excuse that allows U.S. intelligence agencies to function as poisonous self-licking ice cream cones.

U.S. intelligence agencies improperly classify “millions” of materials, partly to hide their activities by lying that materials elected representatives seek implicate “national security.” It’s a convenient, unfalsifiable excuse that allows U.S. intelligence agencies to function as poisonous self-licking ice cream cones.

This all recalls one of the famous lines of one of the world’s most famous of secret police, Joseph Stalin’s NKVD chief, Lavrentiy Beria: “Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime.” That is how secret police function. It is how U.S. intelligence agencies function now, with help from their administrative-state allies such as the Department of So-Called Justice. Their use of selective prosecutions and investigations to hamstring and punish their enemies may not be unlimited now, but it is expanding.

All members of Congress must be aware of this and use all the powers at their disposal to fight it, for as the administrative apparatus strengthens, the American republic dissolves.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her just-published ebook is “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. Her many books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. Joy is also a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

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With 25,000 Mysterious Votes and Missing Documents, Maricopa’s 2022 Election Process Marked by Chaos and Uncertainty

BY: VICTORIA MARSHALL | JANUARY 18, 2023

ballot drop box — **Arizona law requires the county recorder to show the origins of and chain-of-custody documents for every drop box ballot obtained.**

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While the GOP and conservative media have largely moved on from Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and the systemic failures that occurred in Maricopa County on Nov. 8, court testimony and eyewitness reports from the Lake trial include allegations that Arizona’s largest county violated state law by failing to implement chain-of-custody documentation for Election Day ballots, resulting in a mysterious 25,000 extra votes added to Maricopa County’s official tally within a 24-hour period — more than the margin of victory between Lake and gubernatorial victor Katie Hobbs.

It was about 10:00 on election night when Maricopa County’s ballot tabulation vendor, Runbeck Election Services, received its first truckload of Election Day drop box ballots. While Runbeck received seven truckloads total (the last was completed about 5 a.m. the following morning), Runbeck staff thought it odd the deliveries did not come earlier throughout the day. But that wasn’t the only glitch. There were no chain-of-custody forms delivered with the ballots, a stark departure from typical procedure.

According to Runbeck employee Denise Marie, prior to Nov. 8, drop box ballots were “delivered in red bins with a chain of custody form” from the Maricopa County Tabulation and Election Center (MCTEC), which listed how many ballots were delivered.

But on election night, “instead of receiving the ballots in red bins, the ballots from the drop boxes had been placed in mail trays and loaded onto mail cages. MCTEC did not include the Maricopa County Delivery Receipt forms with any of the Election Day drop box ballot deliveries. There were no chain of custody forms with the ballots and no count of the number of ballots that were delivered,” Marie wrote in a sworn affidavit.

Maricopa County Co-Director of Elections Reynaldo Valenzuela even testified that while the county’s election workers count drop box ballots and record the counts on documents as required by law prior to Election Day, they did not count the ballots retrieved from drop boxes on Election Day itself. During the Lake trial, Valenzuela was asked whether Maricopa County election officials know the precise number of drop box ballots on Election Day, and he told the court, “On Election Day, no, because we’re not doing drop box courier process at that time. It’s a different process for Election Day.”

According to Lake attorney Kurt Olsen, this is in direct violation of Arizona state statute, which requires the county recorder to maintain records that log the chain of custody for ballots “during early voting through the completion of provisional voting tabulation.”

Per Arizona’s Election Procedures Manual, when ballots are taken from drop boxes, they must either be counted at the local vote center or be placed in secure ballot transport containers to be taken back to the county for tabulation. When the county recorder or elections official opens the container, he or she must count the number of ballots inside and note it on a retrieval form.

Because Maricopa County tabulators received more Election Day drop box ballots than they had ever received before, as County Recorder Stephen Richer testified, they removed the ballots from the ballot transport containers without counting or recording the number on a retrieval form for each drop box, as witnessed by Republican poll watcher Leslie White. This is a violation of the chain-of-custody requirements the county recorder is tasked with implementing.

The ballots were then put in mail trays and loaded onto mail cages, which were then put on trucks and delivered to Runbeck to be scanned and counted, according to supply-chain auditor and Lake trial witness Heather Honey. And notably, according to Marie’s sworn affidavit, this loading of ballots into the trucks also occurred without any documentation or record of the number of ballots on each.

Since Maricopa County failed to create its own chain-of-custody documents for the Election Day drop box ballots, Runbeck made its own (called “MC Inbound Receipt of Delivery Forms“), which logged the seven truckloads of drop box ballots on election night. On the delivery forms, Runbeck estimated the total number of Election Day drop box ballots to be 263,379 by multiplying the maximum number of ballots a mail tray can hold by the number of trays received, as Honey explained to The Federalist.

Runbeck CEO Jeff Ellington gave his staff a similar estimate of the number of ballots received via an email on Nov. 9, saying, “we started getting mail packets dropped off from Maricopa around 10pm last night and received mail packets about every hour through sunrise this morning. Likely between 250 and 275K packets were dropped off at the polls yesterday.”

At a press conference that evening, Richer affirmed Runbeck’s estimate by saying the county had received an unprecedented 275,000 drop-off ballots on Election Day. That same day, Maricopa County reported the total number of ballots cast in the 2022 general election to the Arizona Department of State: 1,136,849 ballots, with 407,664 ballots left to count — 1,544,513 ballots total.

However, on that same day, around 5:30 p.m., Maricopa County asked Runbeck to calculate the total number of Election Day drop-off ballots received, according to Marie, who was tasked with running the tabulation herself. Marie found that Runbeck’s records showed 298,942 drop box ballots had been received and scanned on Election Day.

As a result of such a discrepancy between the estimate and the official tally, Maricopa County sent a new vote tally to the Arizona secretary of state’s office on Nov. 10 (earlier that day, Richer had sent an email to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors admitting he could not reconcile the differences between the county’s numbers and the secretary of state’s listing, demonstrating that even the supposed expert official in charge of the counting process couldn’t figure out where the extra ballots came from). Instead of the original 1,544,513 total ballots reported for the 2022 general election in Maricopa County, the secretary of state’s website now listed 1,569,603, a more than 25,000-vote discrepancy with no explanation. That same day, Maricopa County gave another press conference, stating it had received 292,000 Election Day drop box ballots without batting an eye.

What This Means

Arizona law requires the county recorder to show the origins and chain-of-custody documents for every drop box ballot obtained. According to Runbeck employee Denise Marie and Maricopa County Co-Director of Elections Reynaldo Valenzuela, Maricopa County violated state law by failing to create any chain-of-custody documentation for the drop box ballots received on Election Day. Because of this failure, no records exist to dispute or reconcile the discrepancy between the number of ballots Runbeck first reported (263,379) and its final tally (298,942), a more than 35,000-vote change. As Olsen remarked in his closing argument for the Lake trail, “If you don’t have a count from MCTEC when those ballots are being transported to Runbeck, how do you know whether that count is secure?”

Nor do there appear to be chain-of-custody documents, a violation of Arizona law, showing how Maricopa County was able to add more than 25,000 ballots to its final tally. That addition is more than Hobbs’ margin of victory, which was about 17,000 votes.

“On November 9th, the reported count is 25,000 ballots less, which is beyond the margin here, than on November 10th,” Olsen said. “So the day after the election, they put out what the count is and then magically 25,000 ballots appear on November 10th, and well, hey, that’s the race.”

While part of the argument Lake’s attorneys used in their lawsuit seeking to challenge Arizona’s gubernatorial election was that Maricopa County violated its own Election Procedural Manual by failing to implement chain-of-custody documentation, Arizona Superior Court Judge Peter Thompson rejected the claim due to the county’s assertion that such chain-of-custody documents exist, even though it failed to produce them. At the time of the trial, Maricopa County hadn’t fulfilled a public records request for the documents.

But while such documents do exist for drop box ballots counted prior to Election Day, no such chain-of-custody paperwork exists for the Election Day drop box ballots themselves, Honey reiterated to The Federalist. The judge did not consider this alleged violation of state law and ruled against Lake’s challenge, saying she failed to present clear and convincing evidence of widespread misconduct.

Arizona has an impossibly high bar for overturning elections on the grounds of misconduct, as the judge himself noted. Lake not only had to allege misconduct but intentional misconduct, such to affect the outcome of the election. Lake has since filed two appeals — one with an appeals court, the other with the Arizona Supreme Court. The appeals court agreed to expedite her case.

When asked about its alleged failure to implement chain-of-custody documentation for the Nov. 8 election, Communications Manager for the Maricopa County Elections Department Matthew Roberts told The Federalist: “There are robust tracking and security procedures in place to document and ensure proper chain-of-custody of early ballots on Election Day. These policies and procedures were followed on Election Day, as well as throughout the early voting period. At no point during the process were chain of custody policies broken or procedures not followed and documented.”

The Maricopa County Elections Department did not respond to The Federalist’s request for documentation of the chain-of-custody process for the Election Day drop box ballots.

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

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Ranked-Choice Voting Keeps Rigging Elections

BY: VICTORIA MARSHALL | JANUARY 11, 2023

As different states and municipalities across the country adopt ranked-choice voting, it’s become obvious this mind-boggling election system deserves a new name: rigged-choice voting.

After nearly two months of tabulation, Alameda County, California, — one such ranked-choice voting (RCV) adoptee — announced it got the count wrong for its Nov. 8 election. As The Wall Street Journal reported, the California county admitted it made systemic errors while tabulating ballots. As a result of the snafu, an Oakland School Board race flipped: The top vote-getter (and certified winner) must now hand his board seat over to the third-place finisher.

While gross negligence on the part of some Alameda County election officials is not only probable but likely, RCV’s Byzantine election system must also take the blame. In it, voters rank candidates in order of preference. If no candidate receives a majority of votes in the first round, the last-place finisher is eliminated, and his voters are reallocated to the voter’s second-choice candidate. The process continues until one candidate receives a majority of votes. For the Oakland mayor’s race, it took nine baffling rounds of RCV for one candidate to receive the narrow majority. The local NAACP chapter demanded a manual recount but scrapped it due to the expense.

In the case of the Oakland School Board election, officials blame a software configuration problem for the error (even the machines were confused about how to count the RCV-way). But is it right for a candidate who receives a plurality of votes on the first go-through to eventually lose to someone who finishes last? Often, the victors that emerge from ranked-choice voting are not the candidates a majority of voters favor. Case-in-point: Democrat Mary Peltola won Alaska’s lone congressional seat despite nearly 60 percent of voters casting their ballots for a Republican.

What’s behind the RCV takeover? As The Federalist has previously reported, partisan Democratic activists and moderate Republicans are pushing RCV as a legal mechanism to push out more revolutionary (read: populist) candidates in favor of establishment-backed contenders. As Project Veritas has documented, the moderate, nominal Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski was behind the campaign to change Alaska’s primary to an RCV system, ensuring the defeat of her Trump-backed challenger Kelly Tshibaka. Had Alaska not implemented RCV, Tshibaka likely would have defeated Murkowski in the primary.

There is a myriad of problems with RCV, as the Alameda County debacle shows. The Foundation for Government Accountability notes that ranked-choice voting causes ballot exhaustion (when a ballot is cast but does not count toward the end election result), diminishes voter confidence, and lags election results. It can take weeks or even months for a ranked-choice race to be counted, threatening the security of the process.

If Americans desire democracy and election integrity, rigged-choice voting is clearly not the way to go.

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

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Harvesting Low-Effort Votes Is Working Great for Democrats, So They’re Going for More

BY: VICTORIA MARSHALL | DECEMBER 28, 2022

Election 2020 — **While some congressional Republicans might think the post-2020 election integrity fight is over, that couldn’t be farther from the truth.**

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The dust of the 2022 midterm contests has barely settled and Democrats — invigorated by the Red Wave that evaporated under extended lax voting policies — are out to make sweeping changes to our nation’s election laws once again.

Think back to 2020, when Democratic governors and unsuspecting Republican lawmakers made unprecedented changes to state election policies in the name of Covid that included mandating universal mail-in balloting and a month of early voting. Some states have kept these changes permanently. But Democrats are not satisfied, and why should they be? With their gubernatorial power retained (they kept all but one of the governor’s offices) and newfound control of state legislatures in both Michigan and Minnesota, Democrats are keen to ram through a whole gamut of unprecedented and unconstitutional changes. It’s working, so they’re going to keep doing it.

As The New York Times reported, Democrats’ list of policy proposals for 2023 includes expanding automatic voter registration systems, preregistering teenagers to vote, granting the franchise to felons, and criminalizing what the left thinks is election “misinformation.” Of course, all these policy prescriptions have little to do with “voting rights,” but Democrats package them as such, and slander their opponents as — you guessed it — racists.

Make no mistake about what these proposals are meant to accomplish. Take automatic voter registration. The New York Times notes that such a system — already adopted by 20 states — “adds anyone whose information is on file with a government agency — such as a department of motor vehicles or a social services bureau — to [a state’s] voter rolls unless they opt out.”

During the 2020 election, Michigan’s Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson sent out automatic voter registration forms to all eligible Michigan residents. As a result of the mailer, 114,000 people were automatically added to Michigan’s voter rolls. Many were duplicate and otherwise inaccurate registrations. By padding state voter rolls with new unlikely voters, Democrats can target unsuspecting blocs of voters, harvest their ballots, and put their candidates over the top. Various leftist 501(c)(3) nonprofit organizations are solely dedicated to this.

As I’ve previously reported regarding Democratic attempts to court high school-age kids, multiple left-wing organizations are targeting young people to effectively propagandize them into future Democratic Party voters. As two-thirds of Gen Z voters backed Democrats this past midterm election cycle, Democrats are hoping to capitalize on this emerging voting bloc while also setting their sights on even younger kids. While leftist organizations have tried to couch their outreach efforts as bipartisan, Democrat politicians admit they’re going after younger voters to benefit the left.

“[Targeting young people] is something the left’s been pushing for quite a while — along with enfranchising noncitizens and automatic restoration of felon voting rights,” executive director of the Honest Elections Project Jason Snead told me earlier this month. “They’re always looking for new people to bring into the election system and calculating the targeted groups who will be more likely to vote Democratic.”

Along with making the state a key player in their efforts to pad voter rolls in their favor, Democrats are also intent on criminalizing any information that could hurt their electoral prospects. Known Democratic Party hack and Michigan Secretary of State Joycelyn Benson told the New York Times that she wants new rules and penalties for individuals peddling “misinformation” in election mailers or language on proposed ballot amendments.

“The greatest threats to our democracy right now continue to be the intentional spread of misinformation and the threats and harassment of election officials that emerge from those efforts,” Benson said.

With Democrats’ history of using Big Tech to label the New York Post’s verified story on Hunter Biden as misinformation and its subsequent censorship during the 2020 election, as well as myriad true scientific claims that countered the bureaucracy’s Covid narrative, it’s clear Benson and fellow Democrats’ desire to censor “misinformation” is code for cracking down on any information Democrats don’t like.

What’s To Be Done

Republicans must be wary of Democratic efforts to fortify elections in 2023 and beyond. While some congressional Republicans might think the post-2020 election integrity fight is over, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Democrats have a massive ground game advantage over Republicans already, and if they pass these policy proposals — under the insufferable label of “voting rights” — in key swing states, that advantage will only grow to an insurmountable one. Republicans must realize election integrity is not a seasonal push nor a battle isolated to 2020. Rather, they must be on offense for years to come.

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

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GOP Can’t Be Successful Until Mitch McConnell Is Gone

BY: MOLLIE HEMINGWAY | DECEMBER 21, 2022

Mitch McConnell speaking, close-up — **Republican voters are desperately concerned about the country and are looking for bold and persuasive leadership instead of comfort with a few small, intermittent successes.**

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Comments Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made on Tuesday show why he has become the single biggest obstacle to GOP success.

The Kentucky Republican claimed giving more money to Ukraine is “the No. 1 priority for the United States right now, according to most Republicans.” The new $1.7 trillion Democrat spending bill he enthusiastically supports would give Ukraine another roughly $45 billion in assistance, bringing the total over the past eight months to more than $100 billion, a staggering figure even if it weren’t happening during a time of inflation, looming recession, and other serious domestic problems.

McConnell: "Providing assistance for Ukrainians to defeat the Russians is the number one priority for the United States right now according to most Republicans. That's how we see the challenges confronting the country at the moment." pic.twitter.com/NPmzWRzoz1
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 20, 2022

The comment about Republican priorities is so false as to be completely delusional. Among the many concerns Republican voters have with Washington, D.C., a failure to give even more money to Ukraine simply does not rank.

A large coalition of conservative groups, including the Heritage Foundation and the Conservative Partnership Institute, publicly opposed ramming through more Ukraine support during the lame-duck session before Republicans take over control of the House on Jan. 3, 2023. Strong pluralities and majorities of Republicans have told pollsters they want decreases, not increases, in foreign spending and global military involvement.

Many Republican voters support helping Ukraine fight Russia’s unjust invasion, but it is absolutely nowhere near their top issue, contrary to McConnell’s false claim. It ranked higher as a priority before American taxpayers gave Ukraine more than was given to their war effort by nearly every other country in the world combined. But even at the height of support for the effort, before it turned into a massive proxy war with an unclear relationship to the U.S. national interest, it was not the top issue for Republicans, coming behind the economy and the U.S. border.

A majority of Americans polled a few months ago said more money should be given to Ukraine only after wealthy European countries match what Americans have already sent — something nowhere near happening.

Republicans care deeply about borders and national sovereignty, but they rank the protection of their own open border far above the protection of the borders of other countries. It is worth remembering that the longest government shutdown in U.S. history occurred in 2019 over a fight between Congress and President Donald Trump over whether to commit a relatively paltry $5 billion to protect our country’s southern border, which Congress had refused to fund.

About that $1.7 Trillion Spending Package

Another comment from McConnell also shocked Republicans. Of the $1.7 trillion left-wing spending spree McConnell is working so hard to help Democrats pass, he said, unbelievably, that he was “pretty proud of the fact that with a Democratic president, Democratic House, and Democratic Senate, we were able to achieve through this omnibus spending bill essentially all of our priorities.” As an indication of how deeply sick and broken and unserious the Senate is, no one had even begun to read the lengthy bill, which was put forward just hours before votes began.

McConnell: "I'm pretty proud of the fact that with a Democratic president, Democratic House, and Democratic Senate, we were able to achieve through this Omnibus spending bill essentially all of our priorities." pic.twitter.com/RuVcsvNX0B
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 20, 2022

The American people voted for Republicans to take over control of the House of Representatives, and House Republicans had begged McConnell to push for a smaller, short-term bill to keep the government funded while also giving them a rare opportunity to weigh in on Biden’s policy goals. McConnell allies dismissed House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy and other House members who tried to persuade Republican senators not to support Democrats’ spending frenzy.

Budgets are policy documents, and the only leverage Republicans have is to wait a few weeks for when they will have a much stronger hand to weigh in on every issue that matters. By ramming through the $1.7 trillion package during the lame-duck session, Republicans will have significantly less ability over the next year to fight against Democrats’ destruction of rule of law in the Department of Justice, the failure to protect American borders, the destruction of the military, and Democrat collusion with Big Tech to suppress conservatives and their ideas.

The spending bill McConnell asserted was good for all of his priorities rewards the FBI with brand new headquarters and ups the funding for the DOJ to enable it to go after even more of its political opponents while protecting its political allies.

It’s perhaps worth remembering that during the 2020 Georgia runoff campaign, McConnell blocked efforts to increase funding for Americans who had their businesses and jobs shut down by government mandate during the response to Covid-19. Spending is not a problem for him, so long as the right people receive the funds.

Republicans Need a Leader Who Shares Their Goals

What support McConnell has from Republicans largely comes from doing his job well when it comes to judicial nominations. I myself co-wrote a book on the topic. He is rightly praised for his work in getting conservative judges and justices confirmed and for stopping one liberal judicial nominee, Merrick Garland. It is not praiseworthy, however, that he encouraged President Trump to nominate Garland as attorney general and voted to confirm him when President Biden did nominate him.

It is noteworthy that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has matched McConnell’s record on judges, and with far less fanfare from his allies. Perhaps Democrats demand more of their leaders than competence at only a few aspects of their job. That Schumer is capable of doing what McConnell has done shows it’s not a particularly unique skill set.

McConnell allies also like to say McConnell is good at stopping Democrat legislation. Indeed, McConnell did contribute to what few successes there were in the last two years, such as stopping the poorly named Equality Act. Certainly, he played small ball well enough to keep Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona from voting to get rid of the filibuster. Again, whatever frustration Republican voters have with McConnell should not keep them from acknowledging these limited successes.

However, Republican voters are desperately concerned about the country and are looking for bold and persuasive leadership instead of comfort with a few small, intermittent successes. They also seek leaders who don’t hate them. Frustration with McConnell’s well-known and long-established disdain for Republican voters is becoming a serious problem.

The politically toxic McConnell has continuously ranked as the country’s least popular politician, well behind Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. He is so disliked by Americans that he is underwater by an average of 35.3 points in polls gauging his favorability.

Unfortunately for Republicans, he has been the top elected Republican in the country for the last two years, a period marked mostly by inexcusable impotence, fecklessness, and muddled messaging from the GOP.

Rather than present a coherent and persuasive vision of what Republican control of the Senate might look like, or even demonstrating consistent opposition to Democrat policies, too often McConnell overtly or covertly helped Democrats pass their signature policy goals. He had his deputy Sen. John Cornyn negotiate a bill to restrict Second Amendment rights. He notoriously and embarrassingly caved on a promise to help Democrats get huge numbers to pass their CHIPS subsidy, giving Biden a huge win he could celebrate with Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo two weeks before the midterm elections.

McConnell also famously trashed Republican candidates and the voters who selected them, refused to advocate strenuously for the candidates, and failed to develop or pursue a persuasive message to Americans for voting to give Republicans control of the Senate.

When Democrats poured $75 million — not even counting the outside spending — into defending Mark Kelly’s Senate seat in Arizona, McConnell left Republican challenger Blake Masters high and dry. Masters had only $9 million. Instead, McConnell interfered in Alaska’s Senate race even though the top two contenders were both Republican. He gave his valuable cash to weak Republican Lisa Murkowski, the candidate who did not even win the Alaska Republican Party’s endorsement! Murkowski is known for not voting to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, among other notable decisions.

After the disappointing midterm loss, McConnell blamed others. He also allowed a dozen Republican senators to vote for a bill that would enable assaults on Republican voters who, on religious grounds, oppose redefining marriage.

So long as Mitch McConnell is the top elected Republican in D.C., eagerly trashing Republican voters, vociferously advocating for Democrat policy goals, pushing $1.7 trillion Democrat spending packages, and weakly fighting for whatever Republican goals he can be bothered to pursue, Republicans have a major problem. This is beyond obvious.

Everyone outside D.C. knows this even if few inside D.C. are willing to acknowledge it. Until they do, the Republican Party will continue to suffer.

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

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The Twitter Files Illustrate How Intelligence Agencies Can Rig Politics

BY: JOY PULLMANN | DECEMBER 14, 2022

Twitter icon close-up on black phone screen — **Perhaps the most important outcome of these releases is the broadening recognition that Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al., are part of government propaganda operations.**

JOY PULLMANN

VISIT ON TWITTER@JOYPULLMANN

It’s not clear whether Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter is hostile.

Musk could be motivated by deeply personal reasons to battle Big Tech’s enforcement of Marxist identity politics. Or he could be attempting to do damage control for the regime by duping people who have reason to distrust the regime into believing Twitter is now more trustworthy. There are many other possibilities, too, and it’s impossible for outsiders to know which is true.

After all, the Twitter Files haven’t so far released that much new information. We already knew Big Tech was colluding with federal officials to deny Americans free speech and therefore self-government. We already knew the internet’s dominant infrastructure is completely rigged. We already knew Donald Trump’s Twitter defenestration was based on Twitter employees’ personal animus against him, not any objective reading of company policy.

We already knew Joe Biden is likely owned by foreign oligarchs who pay his son Hunter for access and influence, and that the Hunter Biden laptop story’s suppression was a deep state influence operation that tipped the 2020 election.

Whatever is going on behind the release of the Twitter Files, good things can come of it. This wormhole likely goes very deep, and even what we’re seeing now, quite close to the surface, is alarming and indicative enough. Perhaps the most important outcome of these releases is the broadening recognition that Twitter, Facebook, Google, et al., are part of government propaganda operations.

This is very likely why we’ve been hearing increasing alarms about “protecting democracy.” The existence and prevalence of this chant online is itself a strong indicator that democracy, or the concept of self-rule through free and fair elections, as the basic bloke thinks of it, doesn’t really exist anymore. At least, that’s certainly the case if Big Tech, in collusion with unelected officials who are almost as far-left as Twitter’s employees, selects what information voters may receive.

Twitter censorship directly or indirectly is what led to the horrendously regressive COVID policies, Biden's presidential victory, and why we got the record inflation, energy, crime, illegal immigration and Fentanyl crises.
We are here today because of what Twitter did.
— Rising serpent 🇺🇸 (@rising_serpent) December 13, 2022

This Twitter-capade reveals further details about Big Tech’s function as an arm of U.S. “national security” and “intelligence” agencies. Decades ago, these agencies started going rogue on the formerly inalienable constitutional rights of American citizens, with tacit acquiescence from Congress through repeat authorizations and increased funding. These agencies and the entities they’ve colonized now treat the American people like occupied foreign territory, subject to psychological manipulation and institutional infiltration in a manner reminiscent of the Chinese Communist Party.

In fact, this whole affair emits more than merely a whiff of totalitarian collectivism, both communist and fascist. For one thing, the Twitter Files details about the revolving door between U.S. intelligence agency employees and Twitter — and surely also Google and Facebook — recall that Germany’s infamous National Socialists embedded party operatives on “private” company boards. So does today’s Chinese Communist Party.

One must also consider the possibility, if not absolute likelihood, that many of these “former” U.S. military and intelligence agents working at Twitter and Co. are not actually former, but covert government agents. I hear the practice is called “sheep dipping.” Former Twitter Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker certainly fits that description. So does Vijaya Gadde.

Over the weekend, while we both dealt with obstacles to new searches, it was @BariWeiss who discovered that the person in charge of releasing the files was someone named Jim. When she called to ask “Jim’s” last name, the answer came back: “Jim Baker.”
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 6, 2022

It’s also noteworthy that a number of these types, including Baker and big fat lying former CIA Director John Brennan, seem to be laundered through CNN and MSNBC stints as “security analysts.” I.e. to use TV to spread regime-desired disinformation, such as to help quash the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020.

"…multiple episodes suggesting that Twitter had been penetrated by foreign intelligence agencies and/or was complicit in threats to democratic governance" pic.twitter.com/6Nm4ds0rtk
— Matt Beebe (@TheMattBeebe) December 11, 2022

So, twitter employees were working with the FBI and foreign intelligence. And the higher ups were warned and were totally cool with it to the point they fired the whistle blower to silence the story. Just amazing. https://t.co/FxUsK8wajF
— The Dank Silent Knight, Holy Knight 🎄🦇 (@capeandcowell) December 12, 2022

This use of spycraft against American citizens seems to be an increasingly recurring and increasingly visible aspect of our post-2016 dystopia. Recall that it appears to have been a feature of the Jan. 6, 2021 “insurrection,” the 2020 Michigan tyrant “kidnapping” false flag operation, the Spygate operation, the attempted FBI entrapment of Sen. Ron Johnson, and many more.

While the vast majority of Americans don’t use Twitter, it has a massive, outsized influence on every American’s everyday life. We saw that in real-time with the consent spiral manufactured, possibly by national security agencies, to impose unprecedented lockdowns in 2020.

Twitter has a fraction of the users of every other major online network, yet it controls the political conversation because of who uses it and how they use it. It’s helpful, even if not literally true, to think of Twitter as an influence operation targeted at Congress, the executive agencies, the corporate media that control the ruling Democrat Party, and other members of the ruling class. That’s who its users overwhelmingly are, especially the most active.

Twitter is where people go to link up to the woke hive mind. That’s why it’s poison to everyone, but especially Republican officeholders.

This is why Republican politicians make some of their stupidest decisions when framed by what they see on Twitter, because the Twitter “consensus” reflects the opposite of their constituents’ views. (This disconnect is a major reason The Federalist exists.) It’s simply a pressure tool for the leftist mob. That’s also why big business leaders are idiots to respond to Twitter mobs — the majority of their customers don’t pay any attention to Twitter.

This information asymmetry has been highly destructive to the American republic but highly useful to the nefarious actors who run our deeply corrupt federal agencies. For one thing, it has allowed the veiled imposition of a vast information iron curtain across Western countries where many people believe themselves to be free citizens. Twitter is the tip of the spear for this growing censorship regime now consisting of a shadowy web between federal officials, social media-sponsored “fact checking” censorship hacks, Big Tech, corporate media, intelligence agencies, and who knows what other entities.

Twitter has been the typical initiator of bans on a person, organization, idea, or conversation from an online voice — and sometimes from basic life necessities such as banking. Then Facebook, Apple, Google, and others follow suit. The other colluding entities get Twitter to do the heavy lifting of canceling a dissenting person, political movement, conversation, or idea, then just file behind and copy Twitter so they avoid blowback.

We now have more evidence to add to the growing pile establishing that Twitter wasn’t just functioning this way because almost all of its employees were far-left Democrat activists. It also has been rigging public conversation, and therefore public life and elections themselves, at the behest of elected and unelected Democrats using their public positions for deeply partisan gain.

The Biden administration admitted it was flagging specific posts for Twitter to take down. It called for Big Tech to inflict “consequences” on those who disagreed with Democrats, and attempted to publicly formalize its evisceration of this vital tool of democracy — free speech — with a “Disinformation Governance Board.” The Biden administration’s national security apparatus openly declared that anyone who doesn’t agree with Democrat politicians could be investigated as a potential “domestic terrorist”!

These government-entwined monopoly platforms obviously exist to disseminate coordinated information operations and kill competing information. They are staffed with de facto or actual intelligence agents at levels high enough to disappear key internal records. Anyone who claims these are simply “private companies” is either not intellectually competent, in denial, or part of the ongoing psy-op to deny Americans the right to make their own political decisions based on genuinely free and open public discussions.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Here’s her printable household organizer for faith-centered holidays. Sign up here to get early access to her next ebook, “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” Her bestselling ebook is “Classic Books for Young Children.” Mrs. Pullmann identifies as native American and gender natural. She is the author of several books, including “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books. Joy is also a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs.

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Scrutinizing Arizona’s Election Administration Does Not Make Kari Lake An ‘Election Denier’

BY: AUGUSTE MEYRAT | NOVEMBER 21, 2022

Kari Lake clapping standing outside at campaign event — **The media’s ‘election denier’ smear is an attempt to silence Americans concerned about election integrity.**

Author Auguste Meyrat profile

AUGUSTE MEYRAT

VISIT ON TWITTER@MEYRATAUGUSTE

Even though the Arizona governor’s race has been called in favor of Katie Hobbs, Hobbs’ opponent Kari Lake has not conceded and vote counting and vote correcting are still happening. As has been reported (in mainly conservative media), many voters were turned away on Election Day because of broken printers or given provisional ballots that wouldn’t be counted. Furthermore, many ballots were not counted because of a non-matching signature or some mistake in filling out the ballot. This means voters are being contacted about their ballot being rejected and given a chance to correct or “cure” it. The window for doing this just ended on Nov. 17.

Considering how laughably convoluted this process is, along with its many vulnerabilities to fraud and error, it’s more than understandable to see why Lake, someone projected to win big and who faced a meek candidate who refused to debate her or even do much campaigning, refuses to give up. The glacially slow counting, the numerous malfunctioning printers and ballot machines, and the recent history of gross irregularities from the previous election all give ample reason for suspicion. There’s also the added wrinkle of Hobbs refusing to recuse herself from the role of supervising the election — somehow this didn’t constitute a conflict of interest.

And yet, for all this, the corporate media are blasting Lake for daring to challenge the election result, living up to her reputation as a dirty, rotten “election denier.” Here’s just a small sampling of headlines: “Election denier Kari Lake refuses to concede Arizona governor race she lost” in The Guardian, “Katie Hobbs elected Arizona’s 5th female governor, defeating election denier Kari Lake” in the Arizona Republic, “Kari Lake Is Denying Her Election Loss” in New York Magazine, and “Democrat Katie Hobbs defeats election denier Kari Lake for Arizona governor, AP projects” in Yahoo News.

As David Harsanyi has argued, this charge of election denier — that is, a person who questions and/or challenges elections — is a ridiculous criticism that stigmatizes perfectly rational behavior in a democracy. Furthermore, it’s a label that applies far more to Democrats despite being exclusively directed at Republicans. This insult (coupled with “the big lie”) became popular in 2020 after Donald Trump and many of his supporters claimed the presidential election was stolen.

It’s no secret that the left continues to call its opponents election deniers because it has been an effective tool to silence dissent. It casts people like Trump and Lake as unhinged losers who are ready to smash the whole system because they didn’t win. Thus, to give even the slightest credence to their objections is tantamount to undermining “Our Democracy.” And if anyone thinks that is an exaggeration, they should know that hundreds of Jan. 6 protesters have been thrown in prison and denied bail because they were “election deniers” who ostensibly posed a threat to the country.

However, the more successful it is to slander people as “election deniers,” the more destructive it becomes. First, it is an accusation that immediately groups the accused with every crackpot imaginable. Even though Lake has plenty of reasons to question her election, she is nonetheless associated with the QAnon Shaman and other disturbed crackpots who had their own theories about fraudulent elections and the deep state. This in turn pushes away her supporters and other conservatives who want to be taken seriously.

If the claim that an election is rigged is false, it should be easy enough for the left to simply prove it instead of delaying vote counting. But even if they can, the guilt-by-association still does more harm to conservatives who will start fighting one another instead of working together on getting accurate election results. This can be seen as Lake and her team toil away at curing votes and rooting out errors while her fellow Republicans have given up and have instead complained about candidate quality and messaging.

This attempt to move on not only demoralizes all efforts to challenge elections, but it also leads to faulty analysis. It’s completely useless to criticize the direction and composition of the GOP and its leadership when so many elections might very well be rigged. If Democratic candidates are stuffing ballot boxes and throwing out Republican ballots with impunity, it doesn’t matter who’s running for office, what they say, or even who’s voting. At the very minimum, Democrats’ relentless demands for mail-in ballots and remote voting, which are particularly susceptible to fraud, are a major threat to the integrity of our elections.

Second, and more importantly, the election denier accusation increasingly removes all recourse for justice. If an election is fraudulent, laws were broken, and large swaths of the electorate are effectively disenfranchised, there is nowhere they can turn because the well has been poisoned. As was shown in 2020, no judge, not even the U.S. Supreme Court, will dare hear the case and examine the evidence, and few conservative writers or pundits will bother talking about it. Rather, they will demand proof, knowing quite well that no amount of evidence will change their mind or any election outcome. Over time, it becomes an unprovable claim that guarantees political anathema to the conservative who makes it.

While Lake might not be able to overturn the result of her election, she should be commended for trying. Far from threatening the legitimacy of the election, she is breathing life into it, giving a voice to people who rightly want answers and accountability. Rather than being election deniers, they should be recognized as election defenders, putting their faith in the voters and the American political system.

Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He holds an MA in humanities and an MEd in educational leadership. He is the senior editor of The Everyman and has written essays for The Federalist, The American Conservative, and The Imaginative Conservative, as well as the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter.

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Why Did Gen Z Turn Out to Vote for Democrats and Against Their Own Interests?

BY: AUGUSTE MEYRAT | NOVEMBER 16, 2022

girl in red sweater holding her phone sitting next to a girl friend — **No one challenges the kids, so they grow up soft and slow, making them the perfect sheep to be manipulated en masse.**

AUGUSTE MEYRAT

VISIT ON TWITTER@MEYRATAUGUSTE

There’s plenty of blame to go around for the disappointing results of the last week’s election: the current post-Covid rules (or lack thereof) for voting, mismanaged ballot collection and counting, Republican leadership, and American voters. Naturally, all of these factors played a role in helping a party that has failed on multiple fronts to stay securely in power.

However, one major reason for Democrats winning was Gen Z voters coming out in large numbers to vote for them — though this was not quite as big a reason as Democrats believe. This cohort was responsible for electing cognitively impaired man-child John Fetterman and incompetent shrew Kathy Hochul as well as reelecting Covid tyrant Gretchen Whitmer. Less unsurprisingly, they’re also responsible for supporting the legalization of marijuana and expanding abortion.

Why did these young people feel motivated enough to go and vote against their interests and keep the country on a downward trajectory? Do they like rising crime, high inflation, mass illegal immigration, homeless encampments, high gas prices, and a shrinking economy? Did they really think Biden would pay off their student loans? Are they just brainwashed zombies who comply with the narratives of TikTok?

Based on my extensive experience as an English teacher, I would say that yes, the average Gen Z American is largely indifferent to important issues that affect the country, even ones that affect their general quality of life. Every day, I witness their lack of reasoning skills and personal drive. This in turn causes them to be disturbingly introverted and handle most of their interactions with people through social media. Many have no real community or deep-seated beliefs and act more on feelings than principle.

Instead, they spend most of their waking life on the internet, consuming mindless content and dreaming up fake personas for themselves. And as a result, they are largely immature, lonely, and neurotic.

This much is argued by writer and former English professor Mark Bauerlein, who writes that Gen Z, “will be the most conformist cohort in American history, already favoring cancellation more than any other age group, and politics will be a primary mode of grouping.” This generation is told what to think by various online influencers, and they passively comply. Because of screen addiction, they will never learn to think or act for themselves, nor will they ever really want to.

The propagandizing effect of heavy social media usage cannot be overstated. For young people, nearly every narrative and social phenomenon now originate from the internet. This means that it’s the dumb and disturbed “influencers” online, not parents or teachers, informing this next generation about politics, economics, and culture. And the algorithms of popular social media sites are designed to curate and amplify this same defective messaging a million times over. The subversive effect on people with still-developing frontal cortexes is not all that different from the “Ludivico technique” in “A Clockwork Orange” in which criminals are forcibly bombarded with images and music in order to condition them against misconduct.

Why is Gen Z so glued to their screens? Two friends and fellow teacher-writers Jeremy Adams and Shane Trotter have examined this question in depth. In his book “Hollowed Out,” Adams argues how the breakdown of family, schools, and the culture at large has left today’s young people morally and intellectually adrift: Not working? Not supporting oneself? Playing video games all day on somebody else’s dime? Not feeling a crumb of shame about it — even describing such a state as happy? That is hollowness.

The many norms and standards (these things that would “fill in” a person) that used to be reinforced by their parents, pastors, teachers, politicians, entertainers, and artists simply aren’t anymore. Should it surprise people that the kids carelessly withdraw from the world and play on their phones?

In Trotter’s book “Setting the Bar,” he attributes the failures of Gen Z to low standards and a permissive parenting culture that coddles kids:

The typical modern youth experience — from the school environment, to the parenting norms, to the broader cultural value structure — is ingraining limiting beliefs and destructive habits that leave our kids ill-equipped for the challenges that lie ahead of them.

No one challenges the kids, so they grow up soft and slow, making them the perfect sheep to be manipulated en masse.

Adams and Trotter demonstrate how circumstances have turned many Zoomers into sad, confused individuals doomed to have an impoverished adulthood. Instead of receiving lessons on independence, critical thinking, and disciplined living, too many of them are protected from all forms of adversity and given an iPad to keep them pacified. This treatment insulates them so much from reality that they never come to know themselves and are bored to the point of despair.

Ironically, understanding this dark reality may be the key to generational reform. True, it might be easy to agree with Bauerlein that Gen Z is hopeless and will probably bring the rest of the nation down with them, but this theory assumes that the Gen Z lifestyle is actually sustainable. The students in my classes all share a natural desire to be better people. I do what I can to offer them a way out; that is, I talk to them and push them to do more. At first, they resist and resort to their phone for comfort but this attitude changes when they feel the profound joy of actually learning and accomplishing something.

Conservatives can shake their heads at today’s young adults refusing to grow up, or they can actually try to reach these kids. It’s not like they want to be lonely, ignorant, or “neurodivergent.” And most, if they’re being honest, don’t want to be slaves to their smartphones. Rather, like everyone else, they want goodness, beauty, and truth. They want loving relationships, authentic experiences, and some degree of mastery over their emotions and impulses. Above all, they want meaning.

If they have those things, then they will stop voting for corrupt mediocrities and suicidal social policies. More importantly, they will stop wasting away their lives on frivolity and enjoy a fruitful and fulfilling adulthood. Although election results are technically a political matter, what they reveal about voters is a cultural and moral one. We should treat this midterm as the Gen Z cry for help. It’s time for us to go out and save them.

Auguste Meyrat is an English teacher in the Dallas area. He holds an MA in humanities and an MEd in educational leadership. He is the senior editor of The Everyman and has written essays for The Federalist, The American Conservative, and The Imaginative Conservative, as well as the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter.

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Media Can’t Fathom Why ‘Democracy’ Wasn’t A Top Concern for Voters Who Spent Their Day Doing the Whole Democracy Thing

BY: KYLEE GRISWOLD | NOVEMBER 08, 2022

media outlet CNN's Dana bash talking about recession — **Democracy was never on the ballot. Everyone who participated in the democratic process on Tuesday knows it.**

Author Kylee Griswold profile

KYLEE GRISWOLD

VISIT ON TWITTER@KYLEEZEMPEL

Election results hadn’t even started rolling in yet when the Very Smart People covering election night for CNN began making fools of themselves with their go-to 2022 talking point: democracy on the ballot.

“The numbers in these [exit polls] do not line up with what we were seeing in the polling data going into this election about what people cared about and the order in which they ranked it,” announced the network’s Chief National Affairs Analyst Kasie Hunt, stating what was obvious to anyone who understands that polls aren’t primarily designed to reflect public opinion; they’re intended to shape it to benefit Democrats and rack up donor dollars.

If CNN’s out-of-touch poll analysis is a joke, then the punchline came from CNN’s Chief Political Correspondent Dana Bash: “And you know what’s missing from this — one, two, three, four, five — top-five issues? Democracy. It’s not even in here.”

It’s not shocking that “democracy” doesn’t crack the top list of issues on the minds of voters, who care far more about how much it cost them in gas money just to get to their polling place and what gender-bending nonsense their kids could be learning in math class at the very moment they were casting their ballots. What is shocking is that the media elites nestled inside the Acela Corridor and D.C. Beltway ever thought Americans were buying the “democracy under threat” propaganda they were selling. Of course, “democracy” is not a top issue for a voter who has just finished casting a ballot — the most fundamental way he participates in democracy.

I’m SHOCKED that voters’ #1 concern after freely taking part in the democratic process isn’t ✨democracy✨ https://t.co/4K0uV8fkhH
— Kylee Griswold (like the family vacation) (@kyleezempel) November 8, 2022

As President Joe Biden and his administrative state ran the country into the ground in the midterm lead-up, voters repeatedly voiced their concerns loud and clear. Americans suffering under unsustainable gas prices and grocery bills have consistently cited inflation as their No. 1 issue, followed by the economy and jobs generally, and then the humanitarian crisis at the southern border that’s been seeping into non-border states. Out-of-control crime and drugs are next on the list, with the left trying and failing to scare Americans into worrying above all else about a woman’s “right” to kill her preborn child and about “democracy.”

Add to those concerns Americans’ exasperation with the sexualization of their kids in schools funded by their own tax dollars, the continued dumping of beaucoup bucks into a foreign war and even more to satisfy climate alarmists, and nagging memories of the deadly Afghanistan withdrawal, Covid tyranny, and every time Democrats feigned “nothing to see here” for an incoherent Biden. Election Day motivations are no mystery.

As The Federalist’s Senior Legal Correspondent Margot Cleveland wrote this week, “It’s difficult to say whether the ‘democracy at risk’ pitch speaks more of desperation or of stupidity, but either way, the promotion of this buzz-phrase in the final days of the election season proves an implicit acknowledgment that it is Democrats who are at risk in Tuesday’s election. … A red wave will not be an end to our representative democracy. It will just be an end to the Democrat representatives.”

If the media really cared about democracy, they would be talking about Maricopa County in the battleground state of Arizona, where the Democrat in charge of running elections is on the ticket for governor and untold Election Day voters (which skew overwhelmingly Republican, as opposed to mostly blue early voters) may have been prevented from casting a ballot due to machine issues. If they were really worried about threats to democracy, they would stop “election denying” and concocting wild conspiracies whenever they lose. And they’d stop shattering voter confidence by pushing mass mail-in balloting and laughing about Election Day turning into election month.

Though the left fantasized otherwise, many things about the 2022 election were obvious from the start: Pollsters would be wrong, Roe would be overemphasized, Trump candidates would overperform, Beto O’Rourke was never going to happen — and democracy was never on the ballot. CNN is just catching up.

Kylee Griswold is the editorial director of The Federalist. She previously worked as the copy editor for the Washington Examiner magazine and as an editor and producer at National Geographic. She holds a B.S. in Communication Arts/Speech and an A.S. in Criminal Justice and writes on topics including feminism and gender issues, religion, and the media. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

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Voting Machine Issues Spread To Pennsylvania As Midterms Are Underway

By JACK MCEVOY, ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT REPORTER | November 08, 2022

Corey Threatt, chairman of the West Columbia #3 polling station, right, assists Tim Nicholson at a voting machine for the South Carolina Republican presidential primary at American Legion Post 79 on February 20, 2016 in West Columbia — **(Photo by Sean Rayford/Getty Images)**

Several states are experiencing problems with voting machines as Americans continue to cast their ballots at polling centers across the country.

Voters in Pennslyvania’s Luzerne County are claiming that voting machines ran out of paper, meaning that some voters had to cast provisional ballots while a poll worker drove to get more paper, according to ABC News affiliate WNEP. Luzerne County election officials told WNEP that voters who were forced to cast a provisional ballot should not be worried about whether their vote will be counted.

Just hours after polls opened on Tuesday, tabulation machines began malfunctioning in Arizona’s Maricopa County and voting machines are experiencing issues in Mercer County, New Jersey, according to county officials. The Maricopa County Elections Department announced that there are problems with precinct-based tabulators that paper ballots are fed into and said that they are sending technicians to address the problem, according to a tweet.

“Technical staff are working to resolve an issue with tabulators and investigating the cause … people can still check in and then vote their ballot at the voting booth,” the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office said in a statement provided to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Once complete, they can insert their ballot in the secure slot on the ballot box where it will be counted at the Tabulation and Election Center.”

Maricopa’s elections department also said that people can still cast their votes into secure ballot boxes if the tabulator at their voting site is not working. Roughly 20% of polling places were experiencing the issues, according to a reporter from 12 News in Phoenix.

In Maricopa County, about 10% of polling places are experiencing problems with tabulators. One machine became operative after it was cleaned. Voters can still place their ballots in a slot in a locked container; they will be counted at the downtown tabulation center tonight.

— YvonneWingettSanchez 🏜 (@yvonnewingett) November 8, 2022

Advice for Voters: If a tabulator is not working at a site, you can still vote! You have the option to cast your ballot and place it into the secure ballot box. The poll workers on site at the voting location are best equipped to help you ensure your ballot cast. pic.twitter.com/iobrOHmy86

— Maricopa County Elections Department (@MaricopaVote) November 8, 2022

In addition, election officials in Mercer County, New Jersey, announced early Tuesday it was experiencing multiple issues with voting machines.

“The Board of Elections has advised the county of issues with voting machines. Poll workers will be on hand to walk voters through the process. The board is working with Dominion, the machine maker, to resolve the issue,” the county announced on Facebook.

A notice on the website of the West Windsor township said that voting machines in “each district across the county” were down.

“On behalf of our NJGOP legal counsel and election integrity team, I want to make crystal clear to the voters of Mercer County that in spite of reported problems with scanners on voting machines in Mercer County, this issue does not affect their voting experience at all,” New Jersey GOP Executive Director Tom Szymanski said in a statement. “Voters can be completely rest assured that NJGOP is ensuring voters’ rights are protected at all phases of the process and that their vote counts.”

The Mercer County Board of Elections, the Mercer County Democratic Party and the Luzerne County Bureau of Elections did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.

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Michigan Is Hiding A Children’s Constitutional Right To Genital Amputation In Its Abortion Amendment

BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | OCTOBER 12, 2022

Author Margot Cleveland profile

MARGOT CLEVELAND

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In less than one month, if Proposal 3 passes, children will have a right under the Michigan constitution to walk into one of Planned Parenthood’s 12 so-called “gender affirming” facilities in the state and, without parental knowledge or consent, obtain puberty blockers. And with Planned Parenthood of Michigan promising “gender affirming” care “via telehealth in the coming months,” Michiganders’ kids won’t even need to leave their house to obtain these sterilizing drugs.

Passage of Prop 3 will also give boys a constitutional right to be castrated and girls the right under Michigan’s constitution to be sterilized by way of a hysterectomy or the removal of their ovaries — all without their parents’ consent.

Deceptive marketing by Planned Parenthood and far-left politicians, such as Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, hides this reality from Michigan voters, leading Prop 3 to be uniformly referred to as “the abortion amendment” even though the expansive language of the proposed constitutional amendment reaches far beyond abortion. And on abortion alone, notwithstanding proponents’ claims that “passing this amendment simply restores the same protections that Michiganders had for five decades under Roe v. Wade,” Prop 3 goes far beyond the controlling Roe-Casey precedent: If passed, the constitutional amendment would create an extreme regime in Michigan of abortion on demand, at any time, for any reason, without informed or parental consent, and paid for by taxpayers.

The expansive and legalistically worded language of Prop 3, crafted by Planned Parenthood and left-wing backers, however, extends beyond abortion to create a constitutional right to several aspects of what transgender activists call “gender-affirming care,” despite it being neither affirming nor caring. And Prop 3 extends that right to all individuals, including children.

This is not merely a political point, and it is not a worst-case-scenario argument based on how some liberal activist judge or justice might interpret Prop 3. This reality flows from the plain language of Prop 3 and rests on general legal principles of constitutional construction.

It’s Right in the Text

Here is the pertinent language Prop 3 would etch into the Michigan constitution as Article 1, Section 28, with the key language underscored:

“(1) Every individual has a fundamental right to reproductive freedom, which entails the right to make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy, including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, contraception, sterilization, abortion care, miscarriage management, and infertility care. An individual’s right to reproductive freedom shall not be denied, burdened, nor infringed upon unless justified by a compelling state interest achieved by the least restrictive means. …

(2) The state shall not discriminate in the protection or enforcement of this fundamental right.

* * *

(4) For the purposes of this section:

A state interest is “compelling” only if it is for the limited purpose of protecting the health of an individual seeking care, consistent with accepted clinical standards of practice and evidence-based medicine, and does not infringe on that individual’s autonomous decision-making.

* * *

(5) This section shall be self-executing….

Prop 3 Applies to Men and Women AND Boys and Girls

By its express terms, Prop 3 applies to “every individual” and guarantees an “individual’s right.” The proposed constitutional amendment further provides that “the state shall not discriminate in the protection or enforcement of this fundamental right.”

As a matter of constitutional interpretation, then, the rights guaranteed by Prop 3 would be rights that both adults and children possess as “individuals,” and the rights apply equally to males and females.

This proposal represents a huge demarcation from controlling Michigan law, under which minors must have parental consent to obtain medical treatment or receive prescription medications, with the only current exception being the judicial bypass provisions governing minors seeking abortions. Specifically, Michigan law currently provides that to obtain an abortion, females under the age of 18 must have the written consent of one parent or legal guardian, but the law allows a girl to seek permission for an abortion from a judge, called a “judicial bypass.” A court must grant a judicial bypass if the judge finds either that “the minor is sufficiently mature and well-enough informed to make the decision regarding abortion independently of her parents or legal guardian,” or “the waiver would be in the best interests of the minor.”

In the context of abortion, Prop 3 guts Michigan’s requirements for either parental consent or a judicial bypass, first by declaring that the amendment applies to all “individuals” and second by expressly providing that “the state shall not discriminate in the protection or enforcement of this fundamental right.” Treating females under 18 differently than those 18 or over is a textbook example of discrimination.

Section 4 of the amendment further cements the reality that minors must be treated equivalent to adults for purposes of the rights Prop 3 would establish. That section of the proposed amendment expressly limits the justifications allowed for regulating abortion or the other rights Prop 3 would inscribe in the constitution.

Under Section 4, the state may only regulate abortion and the other rights covered by the proposed constitutional amendment if it is necessary to “protect[] the health of an individual seeking care,” and “does not infringe on that individual’s autonomous decision-making.”

The rights of parents do not matter; Mom and Dad have no rights. And even the health of the girl does not matter because, under the plain language of the amendment, the state’s interest cannot “infringe” on the “individual’s autonomous decision-making.”

This legal analysis flows straight from the plain language of Prop 3, but case law from other states where a state constitutional right to abortion exists confirms this analysis. For example, in Alaska and Florida, courts have declared parental consent and parental notification statutes unconstitutional. And courts in California, Massachusetts, and New Jersey have struck parental consent statutes.

Prop 3’s grant of such “autonomous decision-making” is not limited to abortion, however. Rather, the plain language of the proposed constitutional amendment provides that the right to “reproductive freedom,” “entails the right to make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to pregnancy, including but not limited to … sterilization … or infertility care.”

Under Michigan law currently, minors cannot be chemically or surgically sterilized (or rendered infertile) without their parents’ consent, and even then most physicians would refuse to sterilize a minor — except in the case of transgender-identifying patients.

The modern medical community has embraced the transgender ideology that teaches that human beings can be born “in the wrong body,” and that the appropriate treatment for such individuals consists of making their bodies appear to conform to their “internal sense” of gender.

The first step in such wrongly named “gender-affirming” medical response consists of prescribing puberty blockers to children. Puberty blockers, at a minimum, render children temporarily infertile by preventing them from maturing sexually, and a longer-term use renders them sterile. The surgical procedures used under the guise of “gender confirmation” — castration, hysterectomy, and the removal of ovaries — likewise sterilize the patients.

In fact, it is this very destruction of children’s future fertility and the medical rendering of them sterile that has led to several states banning the use of puberty blockers and surgical “gender confirming” procedures on minors. For instance, in Iowa, the Legislature made these legislative findings to explain its proposed ban on puberty blockers and surgical procedures that sterilize children:

Puberty blockers prevent gonadal maturation and thus render children taking these drugs infertile. Introducing cross-sex hormones to children with immature gonads as a direct result of pubertal blockade is expected to cause irreversible sterility. Sterilization is also permanent for those who undergo surgery to remove reproductive organs[.] … For these reasons, the decision to pursue a course of hormonal and surgical interventions to address a discordance between an individual’s sex and sense of gender identity should not be presented to or determined for children who are incapable of comprehending the negative implications and life-course difficulties resulting from these interventions.

But in Michigan, if passed, Prop 3 guarantees children the right to “make and effectuate decisions about all matters relating to … sterilization,” and without “discrimination,” giving boys and girls the right to obtain puberty blockers and surgical sterilization without parental notice or consent.

If passed, Section 4 of the proposed constitutional amendment will further guarantee that the Michigan Legislature cannot interfere in transgender minors’ decisions to obtain puberty blockers or surgical “gender reassignment” through castration, removal of ovaries, or a hysterectomy. That section, as excerpted above, provides that the state may only regulate such procedures for the limited purpose of “protecting the health of an individual seeking care, consistent with accepted clinical standards of practice and evidence-based medicine,” and then, only so long as it “does not infringe on that individual’s autonomous decision-making.”

But the “accepted clinical standards of practice” by the supposed “mainstream” medical organizations is, at a minimum, to provide puberty blockers to children, with a steady movement toward the cash cow that is surgical interventions for minors.

Planned Parenthood Targets Kids One Way or Another

Again, these conclusions flow directly from the plain language of the proposed constitutional amendment. But here the public would be wise to note two significant facts: Planned Parenthood Advocates of Michigan helped lead the ballot initiative to amend the Michigan constitution through the passage of Prop 3, deceptively described as the “Reproductive Freedom for All” amendment, and Planned Parenthood now represents “the second largest provider of ‘gender-affirming hormone therapy.’” In fact, less than two weeks ago, Planned Parenthood launched an ad marketing puberty blockers to minors.

What Planned Parenthood and its extremist political partners don’t want publicized, however, is that a “Yes” vote for Prop 3 will not merely make abortion-on-demand, for any reason, at any time, and without informed or parental consent the law of Michigan: It will guarantee that children have an unfettered “right” to “transition” by obtaining puberty blockers and surgical sterilization, parents be damned.

With less than one month to go before Michiganders cast their final ballots, little time remains to give proof to the left’s lie that Prop 3 is about codifying Roe. It is not. It is about sacrificing the children of the state — both born and unborn.

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

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Colorado’s Democratic Secretary of State Sent ‘Get Out The Vote’ Postcards To 30,000 Noncitizens

BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | OCTOBER 10, 2022

The office of Colorado’s Democrat secretary of state admitted to “mistakenly” sending “get out the vote” postcards to roughly 30,000 noncitizens ahead of the state’s upcoming elections, according to a new report.

As reported by the Associated Press (AP), Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s office blamed “the error on a database glitch related to the state’s list of residents with driver’s licenses” and claimed that “none of the noncitizens” would be permitted “to register to vote if they [tried].”

“The error happened after department employees compared a list of names of 102,000 people provided by the Electronic Registration Information Center [(ERIC)] … to a database of Colorado residents issued driver’s licenses,” the AP report reads. “That Department of Revenue driver’s license list includes residents issued special licenses to people who are not U.S. citizens. But it didn’t include formatting information that normally would have allowed the Department of State to eliminate those names before the mailers went out.”

Under state law, Colorado may issue driver’s licenses to non-U.S. citizens and is able to automatically register eligible citizens to vote when they acquire their license from the Department of Motor Vehicles.

As reported by Federalist Staff Writer Victoria Marshall, a group known as ERIC was kickstarted in 2012 “by far-left activist David Becker and the left-leaning Pew Charitable Trusts” and “shares voter roll data — including records of unregistered voters — it receives from the states with [the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR)].” CEIR was one of two leftist groups used to funnel Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s $419 million into U.S. states that resulted in the “private takeover of government election offices” during the 2020 election.

“CEIR then develops targeted mailing lists and sends them back to the states to use for voter registration outreach,” Marshall writes. “As part of their agreement with ERIC, states are not allowed to disclose any data they send to nor receive from ERIC, however, ERIC is not under the same constraints and is able to work with CEIR.”

In response to the proclaimed “error,” Griswold’s office told the AP that it is purportedly in the process of sending notices to the 30,000 noncitizens that received the postcards and that it’s developing practices “to prevent or reject anyone not eligible to vote from registering, including comparing Social Security Numbers required for each application, on a daily basis.”

In Colorado, all registered voters are automatically sent a ballot in the mail, regardless of whether they intend to vote in-person on Election Day. This election cycle, the state plans on sending out ballots to voters as early as Oct. 17.

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

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Flint, Mich. Clerk Resigns After Elections Group Calls Out Lopsided Number Of Democrat Poll Watchers

BY: VICTORIA MARSHALL | SEPTEMBER 23, 2022

Flint, Michigan’s longtime city clerk is retiring after an election integrity group sent a letter to her office demanding she balance out the number of Democrat and Republican election inspectors.

On Sept. 6, Pure Integrity Michigan Elections (PIME) and attorney Erick Kaardal of the Thomas More Society sent a demand letter to Flint and City Clerk Inez Brown threatening legal action if they do not balance out the number of partisan poll watchers before the November general election. As previously reported, during Flint’s Aug. 2 primary, the city hired 422 Democrats compared to just 27 Republican election inspectors — in direct violation of a Michigan state statute that requires equal representation of party election inspectors.

On Sept. 8, Brown, after serving as Flint’s city clerk for 25 years, abruptly announced her resignation effective Sept. 30 — roughly one month before the November election. Brown gave no reason for her resignation and caught city officials by surprise.

“My administrative office was taken by surprise,” Flint Mayor Sheldon Neeley told the Flint Beat. “I had no foreknowledge of this occurring this soon.” Because of Brown’s resignation, Neeley reached out to Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson’s office for help running the city’s elections. Benson is up for re-election this year, raising questions about the ethics of her involvement in Flint’s elections.

“Can her office be considered impartial in running the elections in Flint?” Patrice Johnson, chair of PIME told The Federalist. “The law states that if you are running for office, you cannot be an election inspector in the precinct in which you’re running.”

Despite such questions, Johnson sees Brown’s resignation as a step in the right direction. Brown’s tenure as Flint city clerk has led to multiple controversies, including giving mayoral candidates the wrong filing deadline in 2015 and alleged failure to process absentee ballots.

“The pressure we’ve put on the city led to this,” Johnson said. “This is a HUGE win.”

Regardless of Brown’s resignation, Johnson expects Flint to fully comply with PIME’s demand letter and balance its number of partisan election inspectors in time for the November election.

“In a state with more than 7 million registered voters, and where an election inspector need not live in the precinct in which they work, there is no excuse for an unhealthy imbalance of workers at our township and municipal elections,” she said.

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

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Democrats Are Dangerously Close to Changing Laws So Our President Is Elected by Popular Vote

BY: ANDREW MORGAN | JULY 28, 2022

The left’s push for a popular vote for the presidency directly undermines the electoral system established by our Constitution.

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The left is at it again, and conservatives need to be on high alert. The left has been pushing for a national popular vote to elect the president of the United States for years. Since 2017, 10 more states have either signed the National Popular Vote bill into law or approved the bill in one state legislative chamber. This should be a grave concern because it directly undermines the electoral system established by our Constitution. If not stopped, the American system of presidential elections will be changed potentially forever.

The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. It has been enacted by 15 state legislatures plus Washington, D.C., and passed in 41 legislative chambers in 24 states. For the proposal to become the law of the land, enough states totaling at least 270 electoral votes would be required to enact the law, and states would then commit their electoral votes to the candidate with the most popular votes nationally, regardless of which candidate won at the state level.

The states that have enacted the compact represent 195 electoral votes: Delaware, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Vermont, Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, California, New York, and the District of Columbia. States with passage in one chamber include Arkansas, Arizona, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Virginia. Successful passage in all of these states represents 283 electoral votes, enough to change the law and make our presidential election decided via popular vote rather than the Electoral College.

Democrats have long been unhappy with the electoral process, unless, of course, their candidate won. When their candidate loses, debate begins anew about how unfair the Electoral College is. The argument is always the same. Since we conduct our elections by democratic process, it makes sense to elect our nation’s executive according to the will of the majority with a voting plurality.

Five times, presidential candidates have won elections without the popular vote: John Quincy Adams (1824), Rutherford B. Hayes (1876), Benjamin Harrison (1888), George W. Bush (2000), and Donald Trump (2016).

Minority and Less Populated Areas Would Lack Representation

The commonly heard sentiment during election cycles is “every vote matters.” However, what is not fair is that if the president is elected based on a plurality, then the minority would not have a chance of having their candidate elected. Only the concerns and interests of more heavily populated areas, such as the East and West coast cities, would be represented. Interests of the minority and less populated areas would naturally be set aside and of little interest to future presidential candidates. Worse, the executive would be beholden and accountable solely to the majority.

This condition was not the intent of our founders. Their intent was to ensure that the nation’s highest executive, as well as the executive branch, represented the interests of all Americans regardless of political affiliation. A future president would need to appeal to those concerned about not just national but also regional issues.

Further, the Electoral College provided a means to disburse and decentralize power. State electors are elected just days before and are unknown until just prior to an election to prevent undue influence to stay true to the people’s votes in their states. Our founders framed it so as to prevent collusion and cabalist (their word) behavior, preclude violence, and thwart involvement of foreign powers.

Cabalism Comes to Light

Following the 2020 election, our founders’ concerns came to light and fruition. Our national elections have been fraught with cabalist behavior, undue influence, numerous forms of cheating, as well as foreign interference. The tyranny they feared came to pass, driven by collusion among the administrative state, the legislative branch, legacy media, Big Tech, and nongovernmental organizations. An independent executive branch separate from the legislature has become an illusion.

In Federalist Paper 68, Alexander Hamilton wrote, “the process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of the president will never fall with a lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue and a little arts of popularity may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first owners of a single state, but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole union.” Hamilton would have been appalled today to have witnessed the travesty undermining his sentiment.

So why does all this matter?

An Oppressive Majority

It matters because the idea of a national popular vote is gaining steam and if adopted by enough states, the Electoral College will become irrelevant. Minority voter interests will no longer matter at the national level. Only the whims of the majority will. And the result will be precisely why Socrates opposed a democratic form of government. Once a majority is established, it finds a way to remain permanent, and the majority class will become oppressive to the minority class. There will be no means to overturn the majority, no matter how skewed the majority’s view may be.

The implications for the country are vast and would make the United States just another oppressive tyrannical state. The ultimate reason for the success of the U.S. was that its founders held a belief that we are created and guided by a higher power, and they recognized that men are inherently corruptible. They implemented controls to prevent those with ambitions from achieving outright power over the minority, thus making the U.S. unique among nations.

Left Looks to Crush the Right

The left’s tactics are in high gear, accelerating in an attempt to overwhelm conservatives and Republicans to a tipping point at which the left acquires complete control and the right becomes powerless.

The left’s all-out assault has become abundantly clear since President Joe Biden took office. As soon as Democrats attained the presidency and the narrowest of majorities in the House and Senate, they pressed forward with their agenda, nearly unimpeded had it not been for the likes of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and perhaps divine intervention.

Whether changing voting laws in its favor, creating crises to circumvent the laws already in place, continually flooding the courts with litigation designed to throw sand in the gears of transparent elections, or changing the electoral process altogether, the left’s efforts to gain and retain control, by any means necessary, will not relent.

In addition to ongoing election integrity efforts across the nation, it is imperative that conservatives push back attempts to advance a national popular vote. It is incumbent upon individual citizens to tell their state representatives that it is not the desire of the people to circumvent the constitutional process for electing our president.

Failure to stop a national popular vote could take generations to reverse.

Andrew Morgan is a former deputy assistant secretary of the Army, a senior executive within the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and a retired U.S. Navy captain. He received his MBA from George Washington University and master’s from National Defense University.

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NeverTrump’s Latest Attempt to Dismiss Election Concerns is Particularly Dishonest

BY: MOLLIE HEMINGWAY | JULY 19, 2022

If they want to convince voters outside their bubble, they should try far harder than they did with this report.

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A group of establishment Republicans released a report last week claiming to make “The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election.”

It is not news that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. The report’s strawman-slaying title is intended to suggest that concerns about the integrity of that election are without merit. But the report itself simply goes through court decisions and recounts, listing how they turned out. It focuses on questions about “fraud,” rather than the significant and extremely well-substantiated concerns Republican voters have about the election.

“Their methodology obscures the vast majority of actual material to consider if one were honestly engaging the problems,” said Capital Research Center President Scott Walter. His group has documented the significant role played by Mark Zuckerberg’s private funding of government election offices, a massive issue that the report almost completely elided.

Other major issues were also downplayed or ignored, even as court cases and investigative reports vindicate some of those concerns. In just the last few weeks, the Wisconsin Supreme Court, for example, ruled that unsupervised ballot drop boxes and third-party ballot trafficking both violate state law. In its report, the group claimed its conservative Republican bona fides were beyond question, asserting that no members “have shifted loyalties to the Democratic Party, and none bear any ill will toward Trump and especially not toward his sincere supporters.”

In fact, the group is a combination of NeverTrumpers and people who thought the Republican Party had gone off the deep end long before Trump’s arrival. The report uses misdirection and red herrings regarding “voter fraud” to avoid talking about genuine and substantiated concerns regarding illegal voting and election integrity. And it is sourced to left-wing corporate media outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, hardly places to go to make any case, much less a credible or conservative one, about the 2020 election.

From the Voter-Rejected Wing of the GOP

Report co-author Thomas Griffith, a former federal judge whose enthusiastic support of Ketanji Brown Jackson was singled out by President Biden in his speech when he nominated her to the Supreme Court, told NeverTrump publication The Dispatch: “The idea is that it’s written by conservatives, for conservatives. We recognize the people who are watching [Morning Joe and CNN] are probably not the people we’re primarily interested in.”

Paul Ryan’s former chief of staff David Hoppe, another co-author, admitted the group got much support for its project from volunteers at high-powered, inside-the-Beltway law firms. Still, corporate media accepted the group’s framing of itself as “conservative.” Even a cursory look at the list revealed that to be overly generous if not completely misleading.

Ted Olson served as former President George W. Bush’s solicitor general, but he is most well known for being the brains and muscle behind the legal campaign to redefine marriage to include same-sex couples. When President Trump sought to have his help to fight against the Russia collusion hoax that so undermined the country, Olson declined to help. He did go on television to publicly disparage the president after declining his request. Olson even tried to get Mitch McConnell to backtrack on his policy of not holding hearings for Justice Antonin Scalia’s replacement until after the 2016 election. Olson is routinely derided by critics as a “conservative attorney for sale,” and someone who has “always been a hired gun.”

Former federal judge Michael McConnell argued on PBS in support of the second impeachment trial for President Trump.

Former federal judge Michael Luttig is already well known for helping out the Democrats’ Ja 6 Committee. He rather famously left the federal bench for Boeing — “taking his toys and going home,” as some put it at the time — after President George W. Bush didn’t put him on the Supreme Court. The Wall Street Journal noted that his resignation letter pointedly didn’t mention the younger Bush.

Luttig also serves on the advisory board of “The Safeguarding Democracy Project,” led by Richard Hasen, an election law professor who criticizes voter ID laws. Its mission statement claims Republicans who questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election were acting in bad faith, and that election integrity laws passed after the 2020 election “threaten the cornerstone of American democracy.”

Gordon Smith, one of the report’s co-authors, wasn’t even considered a conservative in the old Republican Party back when he served as a senator from Oregon from 1997-2009. Before he became a high-paid lobbyist for the National Association of Broadcasters, he was assessed the fourth most liberal GOP senator after Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, both of Maine, and Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter, who officially joined Democrats in 2009. By 2008, when he was defeated, Smith scored only a 33 out of 100 by the American Conservative Union. Just this year, he declined to endorse a Republican for Oregon’s gubernatorial race.

Former Sen. John Danforth of Missouri, another co-author, thought the Republican Party was too conservative by 2005, arguing in The New York Times that it had become a party overtaken by conservative Christians. Danforth, an Episcopal priest, was a public supporter of efforts to redefine marriage to include same-sex couples. He has said the worst mistake he ever made was supporting Sen. Josh Hawley’s political aspirations.

All of the report’s authors are or were Republican, including Hoppe, but they tend to inhabit parts of the old Republican Party that voters are increasingly rejecting, not just for their weak policy proposals but for their habit of cooperating with left-wing media in its unceasing attempts to undermine the new Republican Party’s political strengths.

The Man Who Lost the Decades-Long Battle for Election Integrity

Two days before the razor-thin 2020 presidential election, report co-author Ben Ginsberg, the long-time dean of establishment Republican election lawyers and former counsel to Bush’s presidential campaigns and Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns, did one of the most hostile things imaginable to Trump and his voters. He went to The Washington Post to beg Americans to vote for Democrat nominee Joe Biden (“My party is destroying itself on the altar of Trump.”) He and other NeverTrumpers represent exceedingly little of the Republican Party outside of the Beltway, but in an election that came down to 43,000 votes across three states, they should get at least some credit — or if you’re a Republican voter, blame — for pushing Biden and other Democrats over the finish line and bringing the country to where it is today.

Ginsberg, it turns out, bears more responsibility for how the election turned out than most, and his op-ed explains why. It wasn’t just that Ginsberg used his Republican pedigree in order to elevate his hatred of Trump when Republican campaigns desperately needed unity and strength. By November 2020, such tantrums were common among the Republicans who used to control the party. No, it was that he went on an absolute tirade against election integrity itself, adopting every Democrat Party talking point against Republican efforts to secure the ballot box. Two days before the 2020 election had even occurred — and long before this report came out last week — his mind was made up. Proof of systemic fraud simply “doesn’t exist.” He compared concerns about election integrity to a hunt for the “Loch Ness monster.”

He praised practices enabling widespread unsupervised voting, including unattended ballot drop boxes, drive-through voting operations, and third-party ballot trafficking. He belittled concerns about even weak and insufficient verification systems, such as signature matches. He said Republican lawyers fighting against such practices were engaging in “voter suppression,” a common Democrat talking point.

Months after Ginsberg’s 2020 op-ed mocking election concerns, Time magazine itself confirmed what many Republicans suspected: the existence of a “conspiracy” by powerful Democrats to push through these unsupervised voting practices, creating an election system to ensure the outcome they desired. As Time wrote, it was “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.”

The successful effort to change hundreds of laws and processes across the country to enable tens of millions of unsupervised ballots to flood the system was led by Marc Elias, the same Democrat attorney who had been behind the creation of the Russia collusion hoax, the lie that Trump didn’t win in 2016 but stole the election by colluding with Russia.

Democrats had been working for decades to accomplish these changes. For nearly four decades, it was Ginsberg’s job to fight them. As the Republican Party’s top election lawyer, Ginsberg was supposed to be the person responsible for pushing back against coordinated and well-funded Democrat efforts to expand unsupervised voting and to make it difficult to scrutinize the resulting ballots that were far more susceptible to fraud. It’s not surprising that Republicans fared so poorly against the coordinated Democrat campaign to water down election integrity over the last 20 years given that Ginsberg was the guy supposedly leading their fight.

Early on in my reporting for my best-selling book on the 2020 election, I spoke with dozens of Republican attorneys at the state and federal levels who had found themselves battling this widespread and coordinated takeover of the 2020 election. I asked some of them about Ginsberg’s op-ed and work, and how he compared to Elias.

They told me that Elias doesn’t have much going on in his life other than his election work, and he wakes up each morning with big plans on how to manipulate elections. (A look at his active social media presence supports the characterization.) They explained to me that Elias isn’t as good of an attorney as he promotes himself to be, but he’s the type who will argue whatever he needs to for a client. If that means arguing that voting machines aren’t secure — as his group did in 2020 when trying to overturn the results of Rep. Claudia Tenney’s election in New York, he’ll do it. If it means mocking the idea that voting machines aren’t secure — as his group did in 2020 when battling Trump election challenges that same year, he’ll do that too. He takes whatever side of an issue he needs to in order to secure a favorable outcome for his clients.

These sources noted that Ginsberg, by contrast, usually managed to help Elias and other Democrats in their efforts. They said he was a decent and well-connected Beltway attorney, but he didn’t seem to care much about election integrity, relative to his Democrat counterpart’s efforts. He was a fine lawyer who tended to do a mediocre job, they said. In fact, as soon as he retired, Ginsberg’s written and spoken statements have sounded like they could have come from Elias.

Ginsberg even recently co-founded a group to fight election integrity efforts, claiming that such efforts to ensure transparency and accountability put election officials at risk. His co-founder David Becker, formerly with radical left-wing group People for the American Way, now runs the Center for Election Innovation and Research, one of the two groups Zuckerberg funded during the 2020 election with $419 million. Those funds enabled the private takeover of government election offices in the blue areas of swing states. With Luttig, Ginsberg serves on the advisory board of the Safeguarding Democracy Project, the group opposed to election integrity efforts.

So, What About the Report’s Substance?

The report was presented as an exhaustive look at what happened in the 2020 election. In fact, it only really looked in a cursory fashion at a limited set of lawsuits officially raised by Trump attorneys in the days and weeks after the election.

The report’s co-authors admitted to The Dispatch that the information in the report wasn’t new. Indeed, it’s seemed mostly to be a summation of what law associates might find in Lexis-Nexis — a recitation of legal cases and brief mentions of a few reports and audits in six battleground states. It did not dig deep into any of them, merely restating the circumstances by which cases were dismissed or resolved. And it doesn’t even do a good job with that.

For instance, it characterizes a report from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty as finding, “no evidence of widespread voter fraud and no evidence of significant problems with voting machines — in fact, they found that Democratic candidates performed worse than expected in areas with Dominion machines.” Of course, “widespread voter fraud” and “voting machines” are red herrings, intended to divert people from dealing with what actually happened to control the election outcome in Wisconsin.

Contrast the report’s summation of the issue in Wisconsin with the actual first statement from the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty on its website for election integrity, which says, “It is almost certain that in Wisconsin’s 2020 election the number of votes that did not comply with existing legal requirements exceeded Joe Biden’s margin of victory.” The Supreme Court of Wisconsin has shown that claim isn’t even up for debate, and while that is not “voter fraud,” per se, many Americans would describe the efforts to enable illegal voting methods as “widespread election fraud.”

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty’s report was a particularly modest account. Other independent analysts and econometricians analyzing Wisconsin have found that Zuckerberg’s meddling had a far greater impact than they realized. Here’s what a team of academics wrote about the Center for Tech and Civic Life’s takeover of government election offices in Wisconsin’s biggest cities:

Without CTCL involvement in Wisconsin in 2020, Wisconsin would be a solidly red state. We estimate that CTCL’s investment in seven Wisconsin counties resulted in 65,222 votes for Biden that would not have occurred in CTCL’s absence. That’s more than three times as big as the final 20,800-vote margin between Biden and Trump in 2020.

Private funding of elections overwhelmingly went to Democrat areas of swing states, produced skewed results, and violated legal requirements prohibiting partisan effects to nonprofit work. The situation in Wisconsin was so bad that leftist activists funded by the Zuckerberg operation led to multiple resignations of local officials in protest.

The report barely mentions, and therefore fails to adequately deal with, Zuckerberg’s funding and what it paid for, merely mentioning that some legal challenges had cited it. This is despite its central role in the outcomes for multiple swing states, including Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia.

The report does a poor job dealing with Georgia as well. In its opening paragraph on Georgia, the report’s authors write, “Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a conservative Republican, conducted a full manual recount of the five million ballots cast, confirming Biden’s victory. At Trump’s request, election officials then conducted a post-certification recount, which also confirmed Biden’s victory. Secretary Raffensperger, with the assistance of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, evaluated and rejected numerous claims of fraud.”

There are multiple major problems with this characterization of Georgia. The report authors didn’t seem to understand, or failed to accurately convey, the situation with the Trump lawsuit filed there. To take just one example from that lawsuit, it alleged a serious problem with illegal voting. Shortly after the election, voting data expert Mark Davis noticed a problem of 40,000 votes cast by people who had registered to vote in a county different from the one they had claimed to move to. It was one of the dozens of categories mentioned in the Trump lawsuit, and in the intervening months, it has been confirmed that more illegal votes were cast in this manner than comprises the margin of victory for the race.

One could perform a recount a thousand times and not detect, much less deal with, that problem. A recount would simply recount the ballots, whether they were legal or not legal. As for the suggestion that Raffensperger took seriously, much less rejected, claims of illegal voting, the evidence does not support the claim. He fiercely fought the campaign’s efforts to determine the precise number of illegal votes during the time they needed the information for their lawsuit. After The Federalist reported on this issue last year, and a television station confirmed the existence of the problem, his office was cagey about whether they were going to investigate, much less do anything about it. His office also made excuses for the illegal voting, suggesting it was not a major concern for his office.

The issue isn’t even addressed in the report, and discussions of the lawsuit and how it was handled are completely inadequate and erroneous. The problem with the lawsuit — which did not allege fraud and which had many substantiated claims — was that it could not get a hearing before Jan. 6. The problems the campaign’s legal team had getting a hearing were Kafka-esque, and the report doesn’t seem to understand what the issues were, much less how they were handled.

Other major issues are neglected in the report. Because of the limited scope and lack of depth to the report, it doesn’t even acknowledge, much less give credit, to a 2022 Pennsylvania court decision ruling that all no-excuse mail-in voting in the commonwealth is unconstitutional. In its discussion of the Arizona audit, which found large and systematic problems in election administration, it quotes the response from the hostile Maricopa County Board of Supervisors as definitive. Likewise, it quotes news articles from the Associated Press, Washington Post, New York Times, and other left-wing media outlets as definitive responses to election concerns. This is laughably unserious.

Reports Like This Harm the Republic

When Luttig went to the one-sided Jan. 6 star chamber, he concluded his remarks by saying that Trump and his supporters were “a clear and present danger to American democracy” because of their ongoing concerns about election security. The report repeatedly asserts that the reason why there is a lack of trust in elections is because of Trump and his supporters. In fact, one of the most important reasons to fight the coordinated campaign to weaken election integrity is that the lack of controls that make fraud easier to commit and more difficult to detect is responsible for the lack of trust in elections.

Following the contentious 2000 election, former President Jimmy Carter and Republican James Baker co-chaired the bipartisan Commission on Election Reform. Its 100-plus-page report was called “Building Confidence in U.S. Elections,” and it treated election integrity as vitally important to that goal.

Rather than mocking or dismissing concerns about election integrity as unimportant, the Carter Commission stressed the problems caused by bloated and inaccurate voter rolls, nonexistent or faulty voter-identification procedures, and unsupervised voting. It said these practices threaten elections and democracy, as do misconduct by partisan election officials, the use of inconsistent procedures in different precincts, and an overall lack of transparency. The report noted that mail-in balloting is associated with higher risk of fraud and could also undermine faith in elections.

Making sure that voting is fair is one of the most important issues in the country. That’s why it remains a top concern to Republican voters, even as Washington, D.C., rolls out every member of the establishment to try to force them to fall in line with weak and insecure voting provisions.

If they want to convince voters outside their bubble, they should try far harder than they did with this report.

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

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Good Government Groups Ask State Officials to Stop Biden’s Federal Takeover of Elections

Reported BY: MOLLIE HEMINGWAY | JULY 07, 2022

Governors and other state officials don’t have to stand idly by as the Biden administration plots a federal takeover of elections. That’s the message being sent by the heads of two good government groups in a new memo to state officials.

“The Biden administration wants to use federal government resources for political, get-out-the-vote purposes, and it’s up to strong leaders in state and local government to stop them,” wrote Russ Vought of the Center for Renewing America and Tarren Bragdon of the Foundation for Government Accountability. “We strongly urge those in positions of power to stop President Biden’s power grab and act soon.”

Biden issued an executive order on March 7, 2021, directing all 600 federal agencies to submit a plan to the White House to increase voter registration and turnout. Many agencies subsequently developed a plan to turn federal facilities, particularly those that deliver federal benefits, into voter registration agencies.

For example, Housing and Urban Development is trying to turn assisted housing centers into get-out-the-vote hubs. Health and Human Services is doing the same with its public health centers. Even as labor problems are out of control, the Department of Labor is turning its American Job Centers into voter registration agencies.

The agencies are allowed to work with voting groups approved by left-wing partisans in the White House, reminiscent of the Zuckerbucks plot to destabilize the 2020 election by running get-out-the-vote operations in the Democrat areas of swing states.

It’s a “backdoor approach that’s designed to ensure Democratic victories at the polls in 2022 and beyond,” Vought and Bragdon wrote.

The two recommend that state officials take action to prevent Biden’s plot. Since the National Voting Rights Act provides states the authority to designate voter registration agencies beyond those already required by federal law, the federal government cannot designate additional agencies without a change to federal law enacted by Congress.

So when federal agencies send “guidance” memorandums to state agencies about turning federal benefit centers into voter registration agencies, Vought and Bragdon recommend state officials contact those agencies and “order them not to implement that guidance because it is illegal at worst and unethical and partisan at best.”

Further, they remind states that they can issue a gubernatorial executive order or the legislature can pass a law or resolution prohibiting state agencies from applying to become voter registration agencies.

“With increasing brazenness, President Biden is taking advantage of a loyal federal bureaucracy to wield the power and influence of the federal government to influence elections by increasing Democratic voter registration and turnout,” write Bragdon and Vought. They say the actions are particularly troubling given recent lawsuits filed by the Department of Justice against conservative efforts to fortify election integrity and make it more difficult to cheat.

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

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

REPORTED BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | APRIL 08, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the Left Opened This Battlefront

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

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

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

Activists Push for Ballot Trafficking Dropboxes

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

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

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

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

Equal Protection Problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other Evidence of Vote Mismanagement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REPORTED BY: WILLIAM DOYLE | FEBRUARY 15, 2022

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

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

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

CTCL’s Goal Was to Influence Absentee Voters

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

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

Wisconsin Illustrates Extravagant Plans

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

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

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

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

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

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

Violating Voting Booth’s Sanctity

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

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

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

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

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Exclusive: Systemic Voting Issues In Pennsylvania County Even More Extensive Than Previously Known

REPORTED BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | FEBRUARY 15, 2022

The video (and audio) hits just keep on coming from Delaware County, Pennsylvania, where a whistleblower secretly taped the aftermath of the chaos from the 2020 presidential election. Two recent recordings exclusively obtained by The Federalist from a source with knowledge of the recordings provide further evidence that systemic problems plague the large Pennsylvania county. The newest recordings provide some of the frankest discussion on how bad the behind-the-scenes situation was, with one election worker describing a part of the post-election situation as “abominable” and the attempt to do the impossible—reconcile some precincts’ voter sheets—as “a nightmare.”

The whistleblower, Regina Miller, began recording conversations involving Delaware County officials after she became concerned with what she saw as a contract worker assisting election employees. A source familiar with the videos explained that Miller made the recordings as election workers scrambled to find—and in some cases create—documentation in response to a “Right to Know” request that sought copies of the paperwork that would confirm the accuracy of the vote tallies certified for the 2020 election.

To date, the videos have exposed a wide array of problems with election integrity, including on-tape admissions that the election laws were not complied with, that 80 percent of provisional ballots lacked a proper chain-of-custody, that there were missing removable drives for some of the voting machines, and that election workers “recreated” new drives to response to the Right to Know request.

The most recent video, however, reveals a new area of concern related to the reconciliation of the voting totals in the precincts. Captured on film in this video was a conversation between one election worker and the whistleblower. With boxes of voting sheets lining the basement floor of a Delaware County building, the election worker tells Miller, “There were six precincts in one location and all of the machines were, all of the scanners were, programmed to accept any ballot of those six precincts.”

“It was a nightmare,” the Delaware County official explained, adding that “you couldn’t, there’s no way you could reconcile” the results.

The Pennsylvania Department of State checklist for the November 2020 election explained how the reconciliation process was to proceed. According to the Department of State, each precinct was required to compare the numbered list of voters created at the poll on election day to the number of votes recorded on the voting machines that appeared on the result tapes from the machines at the close of the polls. But with ballots from one precinct scanned into the voting machine of another precinct, as the Delaware County official noted happened, it would “be impossible to reconcile.”

The Pennsylvania election code required the election board to investigate any discrepancies or irregularities among the records. But, again, an investigation could not resolve any discrepancies because the ballots of six separate precincts were improperly comingled. More detail on the widespread problem of missing and comingled machine tapes was also revealed in a second conversation, with this discussion captured only on audio. That discussion began with the whistleblower again noting the chain-of-custody issues previously reported, where provisional ballots were transferred in unlocked bags.

This conversation added more insight to the potential risk caused by the lack of a chain of custody by exposing the number of hands the unsecured ballots passed through, each time providing a new opportunity for fraud. The unsecured ballots went from the “poll workers’ hands, then to return locations, then to the police officers, and then to us,” the whistleblower explained.

Miller then moved on to the issue of the machine tapes and inquired on the best way to have them returned to the county from each precinct. In response, an election worker is heard saying, “They have to be attached to the return sheet and they weren’t.” “We literally have two boxes that we got from the county of tapes,” the unnamed county official continued, “but they didn’t go with any ballot sheet.” Other machine tapes never made their way into the box, however, with the Delaware County official exclaiming: “It was abominable.” “When the community service people cleaned out the cages, they were finding tapes in there because someone just didn’t know what to do,” the election official noted in reference to the locked areas where the election machines are stored after the election. Then “we all panic, is that the fifth tape or the first tape?” he added. Some precinct workers thought if they just sent the tapes back, we’d figure out where they went, the recording continued. “You know, we couldn’t,” he told the whistleblower. When the whistleblower asked if it is a legal requirement or just the practice to staple the tapes to the return sheet, the election official said, “I think it’s a combination of both.”

He’s right. Under Pennsylvania’s election code, the return board must carefully review the tally papers and machine tapes and reconcile them with the general return sheets, but if the tapes are missing, such a reconciliation is impossible. That wasn’t the only reconciliation problem, however, as the undercover recording made clear. “We haven’t even talked about reconciling used and unused ballots,” the election worker noted, which Pennsylvania law also requires to be reconciled.

So now, added to the previous evidence of systemic defects in the 2020 Delaware County Pennsylvania election, we have additional details indicating the county’s mishandling of the last presidential election made it impossible for the county to fully reconcile the recorded votes to the number of votes cast and the number of ballots used and unused. Yet the county certified the election results.

What other counties in what other states likewise certified their election results notwithstanding similar, or worse, problems? We may never know, because what goes on in the canvasing of elections apparently stays in the basements and warehouses dotting every county in our country.

Without video evidence confirming cases of election malfeasance or fraud, politicians on both sides of the aisle will continue to put allegations—even from insiders—down as mere conspiracy theories. Sadly, even when there is video evidence such as here, the story is largely ignored by the corrupt press—or it will be until Democrats next take a beating at the polls.

Given the disaster Joe Biden has been, that is likely imminent.

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The Real Foreign Interference in Our Elections Is Happening at Your Local DMV

REPORTED BY: J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS | FEBRUARY 03, 2022

person filling out voter registration form

Foreigners are voting in our elections. It isn’t just in the sanctuary city of New York, where 800,000 foreigners just got the power to vote in municipal elections. Foreigners voting occurs all over the country. Over the past few years, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, of which I am president, has uncovered government records showing foreigners voting in Pennsylvania, Texas, New Jersey, and California.

Voter fraud deniers do not want to talk about the fact that foreigners are registering and voting in U.S. elections. They forget that the foreigners voting in American elections are sometimes victims of third-party voter registration drives that jeopardize their immigration status. These voter registration drives sign anyone up without regard to eligibility.

States are also victimizing these foreigners. Pennsylvania let aliens register to vote for more than two decades on a broken department of motor vehicles registration process. Unwitting aliens often don’t know they aren’t allowed to register and vote. Meanwhile, committing an election crime such as illegal voting subjects them to deportation. The only winner is the political party that reliably gets their votes.

Just this week, we uncovered more evidence of foreigners voting in our elections, this time in the swing state of North Carolina. In 2019, the North Carolina State Board of Elections denied the foundation access to documents relating to foreigners registering and voting, so the foundation sued the board. Following a ruling by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals affirming that the National Voter Registration Act requires disclosure of these documents, the board agreed to settle the case. In the settlement, the board agreed to disclose the records relating to foreigners registering and voting. There have already been 38 indictments of foreigners registering to vote and some casting ballots. These records will conclusively show how many foreigners have been voting in North Carolina elections.

Inspecting these list maintenance documents serves an important purpose by allowing one to identify how foreigners are getting registered to vote. That is a key first step to improve the system and ensure that these errors do not continue to happen.

Often, it is the fault of the government. For example, a voter registration form will have a question at the top asking if the potential registrant is an American. One may check “no” and, due to errors by local elections officials, still get registered to vote. The same mistakes can happen when the potential registrant leaves the checkbox blank. The mistake may also be on the part of the potential registrant, incorrectly checking the box attesting that he or she is a U.S. citizen. The bottom line is foreigners are registering and voting in states across the country.

Nobody should want this. Only Americans should be electing American leaders. States need to examine their voter list maintenance procedures and ensure they are keeping non-citizens off the voter rolls.

We will continue the effort to catalog and expose government mistakes and election malfeasance. Americans have a right to know about the vulnerabilities in our election system.

J. Christian Adams is the President of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a former Justice Department attorney, and current commissioner on the United States Commission for Civil Rights.

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Pennsylvania Court Strikes Down Mail-In Voting Law As Unconstitutional

REPORTED BY: MARGOT CLEVELAND | JANUARY 31, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

Every citizen 21 years of age, possessing the following qualifications, shall be entitled to vote at all elections subject, however, to such laws requiring and regulating the registration of electors as the General Assembly may enact.
1. He or she shall have been a citizen of the United States at least one month.
2. He or she shall have resided in the State 90 days immediately preceding the election.
3. He or she shall have resided in the election district where he or she shall offer to vote at least 60 days immediately preceding the election, 10 except that if qualified to vote in an election district prior to removal of residence, he or she may, if a resident of Pennsylvania, vote in the election district from which he or she removed his or her residence within 60 days preceding the election.

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

To ‘offer to vote’ by ballot, is to present oneself, with proper qualifications, at the time and place appointed, and to make manual delivery of the ballot to the officers appointed by law to receive it. The ballot cannot be sent by mail or express, nor can it be cast outside of all Pennsylvania election districts and certified into the county where the voter has his domicile.
We cannot be persuaded that the constitution ever contemplated any such mode of voting, and we have abundant reason for thinking that to permit it would break down all the safeguards of honest suffrage. The constitution meant, rather, that the voter, in propria persona, should offer his vote in an appropriate election district, in order that his neighbours might be at hand to establish his right to vote if it were challenged, or to challenge if it were doubtful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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ZuckBucks-Connected Private Organization Taught Election Officials To ‘Control the Narrative’ About Mail-In Voting

REPORTED BY: LOGAN WASHBURN | JANUARY 26, 2022

A left-leaning nonprofit instructed public officials how to “control the narrative” about mail-in ballots in the 2020 election. The National Vote at Home Institute (NVAHI) guided officials to sway public opinion in favor of mail-in voting with their “2020 Election Official Communications Toolkit.” The group shared this document with public officials in Wisconsin while working with the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) to influence the 2020 election.

CTCL used nearly half a billion dollars from Facebook tycoon Mark Zuckerberg to fund private action within government election offices. They spent most of the money in Democrat-saturated districts, which boosted Joe Biden’s narrow presidential win in 2020. As a partner for the “Zuckbucks” recipient, NVAHI gave public officials advice on how to “control the narrative” about mail-in ballots.

“Do not repeat myths as a way to refute them,” the document says. “Instead, control the narrative by presenting information that affirms the safety, security, and reliability of mail balloting.”

Mail-in voting is not only proven to be more susceptible to voter fraud and errors than in-person voting, it is well known to favor Democrats over Republicans. It essentially functions as a get-out-the-vote operation on behalf of Democrats, whose voters are less motivated to show up at the polls on election day. Republican voters far prefer to vote in person, accurately believing it is more secure.

The group also told election officials to push mail-in voting by placing articles in media outlets: “Reporters will likely already be writing up voter information guides as well as shaping their articles around how well or poorly the election is running. A proactive op-ed strategy is helpful here,” the document says.
NVAHI explained that officials should target free, popular local news publications: “For all these types of outlets, approach them about whether they would run an article on your behalf about the upcoming election,” the document says.
The organization recommended officials use public information strategies such as “playing up the security” of mail-in voting. NVAHI told election officials to dissuade concerns about mail-in ballots by claiming that they contain “over a dozen security features.”
“Voters may be reluctant to fill out a mail ballot because of concerns they’ve heard about stolen or lost ballots. Assuage those concerns without leaning into them,” the document says.
The guide also tells public officials to “instill a sense of urgency” about mail-in voting, recommending an appeal to popularity: “Voters may be unsure whether voting by mail is right for them. Social proof (showing how many people are taking up a behavior) is a powerful way of making mail-in ballots a compelling option.”
The document also recommended that government election offices use particular slogans for public information campaigns, such as “Voting by mail is easy and secure,” and “Let’s all vote safely. Choose to vote by mail.”

NVAHI partnered with the organization Ideas42 to create this toolkit. According to its website, the group is “a non-profit that uses insights from behavioral science to improve lives, build better systems and policies, and drive social change.” Ideas42 works with CTCL partner Center for Civic Design, along with several offices of government secretaries of state.

After CTCL gave a grant of $1.6 million to the Wisconsin city of Green Bay in 2020, NVAHI gained access to absentee ballots and influence over election preparations in the area. NVAHI Wisconsin State Lead Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein emailed the elections guide to former Green Bay City Clerk Kris Teske in August 2020.

When reaching out to Teske, Spitzer-Rubenstein described the toolkit as “a groundbreaking resource that uses behavioral science insights from our partners at Ideas42 to help you connect with communities and get voters the information they need.”

Spitzer-Rubenstein, who worked for Democrat political campaigns in the past, emailed Teske to ask if his group could “cure” absentee ballots. This means altering absentee ballots after they are filed to allegedly fix errors, rather than counting improperly marked ballots as invalid. When Teske turned down the offer, Spitzer-Rubenstein emailed former Green Bay Mayor’s Office Chief of Staff Celestine Jeffreys, who ordered Teske to open the city elections’ ballot-curing process to NVAHI, a private special interest group.

A 2021 audit of Wisconsin elections found the state had counted enough illegal ballots in 2020 to potentially switch its Electoral College votes from Biden to Donald Trump. Vote curing in the election could have contributed to the state counting illegal votes, the audit found.

Also in 2021, a judge ruled that the state’s 2020 use of ballot drop boxes and ballot harvesting, both of which are only possible with mail-in ballots, was illegal. The majority of mail-in ballots in Wisconsin were votes for Biden, who won the state by a margin of 0.63 percent, or approximately 20,600 votes.

Before election day, Green Bay elections officials gave Spitzer-Rubenstein four out of five keys to the room in which the absentee ballots were stored, former Brown County Clerk Sandy Juno told Wisconsin Spotlight.

After the election, Juno expressed concerns that the Central Count location was “tainted by the influence of a person working for an outside organization influencing the election,” according to Wisconsin Spotlight. Teske said she felt that third-party groups such as CTCL and NVAHI excluded the clerk’s office from the election process.

“As you know, I am very frustrated, along with the Clerk’s Office. I don’t know what to do anymore,” she emailed a colleague. “I don’t understand how people who don’t have knowledge of the process can tell us how to manage the election.”

Logan Washburn is studying politics and journalism at Hillsdale College. He is a correspondent for Campus Reform and an outreach assistant for the Freedom Foundation.

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No, Requiring Voter ID Is Not ‘Jim Crow 2.0’ And It’s Offensive to Say That

REPORTED BY: CURTIS HILL | JANUARY 24, 2022

Whether Mitch McConnell’s boneheaded distinction between African Americans and “Americans” was a misstatement or something more sinister, the fact remains: America will not benefit from federalizing its elections.

The narrative that continues to be stoked by the radical left is that states all over the country are actively denying blacks the right to vote and only the federal government can stop it. At the center of this controversy is the “oppressive” requirement that all voters be required to produce a valid ID, which will disparately affect black voters because everyone knows blacks are more likely than whites to not have an ID.

Joe Biden’s risible claims about voting rights are true to what Malcolm X described as the “trickery” of the white liberal: “The history of the white liberal has been nothing, but a series of trickery designed to make Negroes think that the white liberal was going to solve our problems.” The trickery for today’s white liberal is to manufacture racism by creating the narrative that voter ID is racist and will disproportionately harm blacks. Or that limiting the amount of early voting and other measures that increase ballot vulnerability is inherently racist because blacks won’t vote unless the federal government prods them to the polls because blacks are so dependent on the federal government.

Not only is this narrative unsupported by facts, this lie covers the truth that Democrats don’t want any election laws passed that might catch or stop from voting illegally people Democrats believe will vote Democrat—including voters who don’t want to prove they haven’t voted twice in the same election.

Every black person I know has an ID. Can any supporters of the Freedom To Vote Act or the John Lewis Voting Rights Act produce black people who tried to vote but were turned away because they did not have a valid photo ID? That’s the rap on Georgia and other states’ laws requiring all prospective voters to prove who they claim to be as a protection against claims of voter fraud.

The big deal with these state legislatures tightening security measures is allegedly not that the measures are unnecessary, but that they are discriminatory, racist, and targeted to keep blacks from voting. Democrats must believe that blacks aren’t smart or interested enough to get a photo ID, the central security measure being added to state voting protocols.

For the past year, Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi have been “Jim Crowing” that the Georgia law and others like it are racist since black people are more likely than their white counterparts to not have an ID and therefore be denied their vote (for Democrats—because, according to Joe Biden, you ain’t black if you don’t vote Democrat). Really?

What is it about being black that makes one less likely to have identification? Seems like a racist sentiment. Assuming that there is a black adult without identification, we are supposed to presume that black voters without IDs would be so intimidated by a requirement to present an ID that they would rather not vote than stop by the local license branch and get an ID for the cost of a Big Mac and a Coke? Most states like Indiana will waive the minimal fee if necessary.

But if Democrats are right, and requiring identification is indeed racist, why are they only making noise about required ID voting? Shouldn’t they complain about driving, which would be racist because an ID is required to drive? What about opening a bank account, credit application, or ordering a cell phone, cable and ordinary utilities?

All these would have racist implications daily rather than just on Election Day. Yet there’s not a peep about blacks not being able to get a cell phone or cable TV, because that doesn’t get the Democrat his votes.

This all leads to the Democrat solution: kill the Senate filibuster. Of course, we are reminded that the filibuster was the procedural tool used by Democrats and Republicans to oppose civil rights legislation. But the use of the tactic that may have been used against what is now viewed as popular legislation does not make the tactic itself racist in its application.

The filibuster has evolved from its initial incarnation to a procedure that provides the minority party or position the opportunity to be heard. Since both parties have often been in the minority, both parties have benefited and suffered from its deployment.

I know it might be painful for them, but perhaps Democrats should open up their playbook and remember what they did to intimidate and suppress black voters in the first half of the 20th century.

It is unnerving that the Democrat Party draws comparisons to its champions of segregation Bull Connor and George Wallace suggesting that voter ID is a discriminatory tool, the same as the poll tax or the literacy test, that actually prevented blacks from voting in a notoriously humiliating manner. Such comparisons are a disgrace to the honored memory of all who fought and won victories in securing the right to vote.

In the continued invocation of Jim Crow, the euphemism for the abhorrent laws that legally sanctioned segregation, discrimination, and brutality, Biden and his race-baiting big government aim to racialize the filibuster so that all who support its continued use are brandished racist forevermore. I hope blacks in this nation are wearing thin to the leftist patronization that denigrates the proud history of black and white patriots who fought, bled, and died for freedom, independence, and our opportunity to vote.

Curtis Hill is the former attorney general of Indiana.

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It Doesn’t Matter That Voters Hate Joe Biden If Democrats Can Rig Elections

REPORTED BY: BOB ANDERSON | JANUARY 19, 2022

Just a month before the 2020 election, radio host Rush Limbaugh commented that Democrats “resent the whole premise behind elections. Look, they don’t believe they should have to persuade anybody to agree with them … The modern-day Democrats have to go through the motions of campaigning, and they have to go through the motions of trying to win the hearts and minds of voters. But they resent the h-ll out of it. And in their world, it’s the one thing standing in their way: This need, this requirement to win elections. And I’m just telling you: As soon as they can figure out a way to eliminate elections, they will do it.”

Today, Democrats are engaged in a full-court press to pass legislation that would brush state election safeguards aside and codify the shenanigans of 2020 into federal law. They’ll nuke the filibuster if they can, a step never taken previously for high-priority legislation but pursued now for a bill that nobody is marching in the streets for. Anything to cement themselves into a permanent position of power.

As Joe Biden himself said, “It’s about election subversion, not just whether or not people get to vote. Who counts the vote? That’s what this is about, that’s what makes this so different from anything else we’ve ever done.” Indeed.

Voters Aren’t Clamoring for Democrat Priorities

It’s hard being a Democrat lately. Just ask Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. After promising to hold a vote to eliminate the filibuster and force through passage of their “voting rights” bill by Martin Luther King Jr. Day (January 17), he had to push it back again. This, of course, comes on the heels of a stinging defeat of the Biden administration’s Covid vaccine mandate by the Supreme Court. That failure was preceded by the “Build Back Better” bill being stalled in the Senate, perhaps for good.

Party leaders are upset, but the truth is that voters are not enthusiastic about much of this. There are no marches for mandates. Nor is there any grassroots demand for Build Back Better or the federalization of state elections. And a recent poll found that support for the filibuster has only grown since Democrats began their push to eliminate it (now by a 53 percent to 27 percent approval to disapproval margin).

Democrats Mistakenly Double Down

Democrats may fail at policy, but they’ve always been reliably competent at the game of politics, zeroing in on votes with great precision. Have you noticed they haven’t been themselves lately, though? Even after taking a shellacking in statewide elections in Virginia and New Jersey last November, a moment when sane politicians typically learn from defeat, they instead doubled down. In her usual well-reasoned manner, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., commented after the electoral bloodbath that Democrats were beaten, not because of the president’s agenda, but because they hadn’t done enough to “excite, speak to, or energize a progressive base.” Never mind that voters knew what was at stake — and clearly rejected it.

One would have thought that older and more seasoned politicians might have guided the young House member back to reality, but the ragin’ Cajun himself, James Carville, only sparked her outrage in saying that “stupid wokeness” had cost the Democrats. James comes from the era of old-school politics, one that abided by the cardinal rule: “Never piss off voters.” He’s surely aware of its corollary: “If you do, then turn back – ASAP.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi should know better, but she responded, “no, no,” when asked if the election results in Virginia and New Jersey would cause Democrats to rethink their plans. Full steam ahead.

Democrats Out of Touch

The president lamented that his big ticket bills hadn’t been passed before Election Day, and then concluded, “but I’m not sure I would have been able to change the number of very conservative folks who turned out in red districts that were Trump voters.” For a politician who’s been in public office for nigh 50 years, that kind of logic seems disturbingly unhinged. How exactly does one surmise both that the party’s losses were due to not passing the big agenda soon enough (AOC’s position), and that it would not have mattered anyway because, you know, the red wave was coming? Excuses, blindness, or something else? It’s hard to tell.

We’re left to ponder: Have Democrats lost the ability to navigate public opinion? Does it even matter to them anymore? With the midterm elections just 10 months away, and the polls moving away from Democrats, will they continue to walk off the electoral cliff or bring themselves back to reality?

No Compromise

President Bill Clinton, who also saw his party shellacked in a midterm, acted in the way that sensible politicians normally do. He called up the new Republican speaker of the House and asked how they could work together. The result was a Democrat president signing on to welfare reform and abandoning his unpopular quest for government-run universal health care. Voters rewarded him with re-election.

Nothing seems to faze Joe, though. No compromise ever seems possible. There are, of course, times it’s noble to dig the heels in. Faced with an approaching enemy, Winston Churchill proclaimed, “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.” So where is the honor and good sense in ignoring voters who now give this president an embarrassing 33 percent approval rating?

Instead of finding common values to unite the nation, Biden calls those who disagree with him a bunch of racists. “Do you want to be the side of Dr. King or George Wallace?,” Biden pontificated in a speech pushing his “voting rights” bill. “Do you want to be the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis? This is the moment to decide, to defend our elections, to defend our democracy.”

Churchill battled the Nazis. Biden battles half of the country who simply disagrees with his party on a matter of policy — that is, who should control state elections — and whether we should suddenly abandon a Senate rule that’s existed for more than 200 years.

Not the Will of the People

Instead of being the moderate voters thought he was and simply calling up Republicans to find common ground legislation, policies for which voters would reward him, Biden remains ideologically ensconced in a White House driven by leftist special interest groups — venturing out to speak only to his own party’s caucus. Facing a headwind of opposition, he told the group of fellow Democrats on the Hill, “I don’t know that we can get this done … but I know one thing, as long as I have a breath in me … I’m going to be fighting to change the way these legislatures have moved.” Perhaps that’s the problem, Mr. President. You’re pushing a process rather than the will of the people.

Real Clear Politics notes that “it isn’t accidental that, in the generic ballot … the Democrats’ current vote share is 42.8%, nearly mimicking Biden’s.”

And “what does [RCP’s model] tell us about 2022? … a Republican-controlled Senate starts to come into the picture when Biden’s job approval falls to around 51% and becomes the most likely outcome at around 48%.” Biden is now at 42 percent approval in the RCP average, and that math should be clear to Democrats — but somehow, they seem unconcerned.

Maybe there’s a logical reason, a method to their madness. After pulling off the statistics-bending, six-fold swing-state wonder in the wee hours of election night 2020, perhaps Democrats now have reason to believe they’re no longer accountable to voters. Public opinion and polls become meaningless when you control the election process, when the courts turn a blind eye, and when the media blocks any honest inquiry.

Rush was right. Democrats are now working harder to change the election system than to change your mind because, as their actions demonstrate, they don’t care what you think. They just want to win.

Bob Anderson is a partner and CFO of a hotel development company and a former aerospace engineer who worked on the International Space Station and interned in Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) at the Pentagon. He is also a licensed commercial pilot.

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

Commentary BY: MOLLIE HEMINGWAY | JANUARY 13, 2022

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

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

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

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

The 2020 election was riddled with problems. Voters know this. Republican voters know this very well. Time Magazine described what happened with the election as “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.” They added that it was a “revolution in how people vote.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Senator Marco Rubio Op-ed: Democrats’ Voting Rules Takeover Is a Threat to Democracy

Commentary BY: Sen. MARCO RUBIO | JANUARY 12, 2022

When Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., announced Senate Democrats’ New Year’s resolution to abolish the filibuster and ram through a partisan federal takeover of election administration, he framed it as an attempt to protect “free and fair elections,” the “foundation of our democracy,” from state governments. In reality, it is the leftist elites and their corporate allies, not the states, that pose the greatest threat to our constitutional system.

Free and fair elections are the foundation of our democracy, but the Democrats’ concerns about election rights are totally baseless. Progressives from all over the country — from President Joe Biden to Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams and Schumer — claim that Republicans are passing “voter suppression laws” to exclude their political opponents from the vote.

In reality, it is easier to vote in 2022 than it ever has been. Voter registration has been streamlined, and record turnouts show that Americans of all backgrounds are freely exercising their rights.

The left’s proposed reforms would restrict Americans’ freedom, not expand it. Legalizing ballot harvesting, for instance, would present more opportunities for corruption.

More generally, taking election administration powers away from the states and handing them to the federal government would not eliminate the potential for abusing those powers, it would just make it easier for officials in Washington, D.C., to abuse them — and it would further undermine our system of federalism.

In 2020, when election integrity fears swept other parts of the country, the state of Florida conducted its elections with peace, security from interference, and respect for all citizens, all in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. This is proof that with strong leadership, state governments are perfectly capable of holding the responsibility of election administration. Ironically, this year will be the first time that the president’s home state of Delaware allows in-person early voting, whereas Florida has had it for years.

Left’s Broader Effort to Consolidate Power

Democrats’ campaign to centralize elections is part of a broader effort to consolidate power in the hands of a leftist elite class. This class wants to use that power to silence and disempower anyone who dissents from their radical progressive agenda.

Case in point: the very same people who said in 2005 that restricting the filibuster would mean losing to “the passions of the moment” and spell “doomsday for democracy” — Biden and Schumer — want to eliminate the rule now that they are in power.

This power grab masquerading as democracy reform is bigger than just what goes on in the Senate. In 2020, leftist politicians closed churches and restricted in-home religious services while they let political protests, and eventually full-scale riots, go unnoticed. In 2021, critical race theory advocates indoctrinated our children and tried to remove parents from our schools. And this year, the Biden administration will begin forcing millions of Americans to get a Covid-19 vaccine to keep their jobs.

Collaboration from Communists and Corporations

In this movement, the political left has been aided by social media giants and mega-corporations. To gain favor with the Marxists in Washington, D.C., Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter censor dissenting voices, labeling unpopular views as “misinformation.” Amazon blacklists conservative authors. And banks that taxpayers bailed out in 2008 cancel accounts based on Orwellian “reputational risk.”

Of course, behind closed doors many of these same companies are in bed with a genocidal regime, the Chinese Communist Party. While they are eager to appear human rights champions, they lobby for trading goods made with slave labor and protect communist propaganda from negative customer reviews. It makes sense that corporations comfortable with totalitarianism abroad would be happy to silence dissent in the United States.

Those of us who are not on board with the progressive agenda should take note. America is still a free nation, and it will take some time before the situation here begins to resemble the dystopia that is communist China. But if it can happen anywhere, it can happen here, and censorship and consolidation of power are two important steps on the road to tyranny.

Americans need to remember where the greatest threats to our democracy really lie. If we focus our attention on exaggerated problems and imaginary fears, rather than the leftist elite power grab unfolding before our very eyes, we do so at our own peril.

Marco Rubio is a U.S. senator from Florida. MARCO RUBIO MORE ARTICLES

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Wisconsin Elections Commission ‘Shattered’ Laws By Telling Nursing Home Staffers To Illegally Cast Ballots For Residents

Reported By Kylee Zempel | OCTOBER 29, 2021

**Photo Spc. Miguel Pena/U.S. Army 20/20**

Racine County, Wisconsin law enforcement blew the 2020 election integrity question wide open on Thursday after an investigation into one nursing home. It revealed not only that state election officials flagrantly broke the law and ordered health-care employees to help them, but that the problem likely runs much deeper throughout the swing state’s other 71 counties.

An “election statute was in fact not just broken, but shattered by members of the Wisconsin Elections Commission,” Sheriff Christopher Schmaling said during a Thursday press conference in which he and Sgt. Michael Luell detailed the findings of an investigation into Ridgewood Care Facility. The investigation came about when a woman named Judy signed a sworn affidavit with the Wisconsin Elections Commission after she discovered that her mother, who had died on Oct. 9, 2020 after a period of severe cognitive decline, had voted in the 2020 presidential election. The affidavit was later passed along as a complaint to the county district attorney. Judy alleged that her mother Shirley’s mental state had deteriorated so far that she was having hallucinations and wasn’t able to recall what she had eaten during a day or even what day it was. According to Judy, her mother couldn’t see — her glasses were broken, and she couldn’t even recognize her own daughter — so even if she were of a sound mind, she wouldn’t have known whether someone assisting her with a ballot had voted according to her wishes.

Luell, who led the investigation at the request of the district attorney, found an unusual spike in voting at this care facility: 42 people had voted in the 2020 presidential election. That number is usually 10. Furthermore, in 2020, 38 people had requested absentee ballots, up from the usual 0-3 in normal years.

When Luell attempted to contact the families of these voters to check whether their loved ones had the cognitive capacity to cast a vote, seven replied no, and almost all of them hadn’t voted since 2012. One of the family members said his mother would ask him who he was, meaning she didn’t recognize her own son. She hadn’t voted since 2012 — yet MyVote Wisconsin revealed she voted twice in 2020.

This surge in voting was the result of Wisconsin Elections Commission officials breaking state law. The commission — which is made up of six commissioners, including three Democrats and three Republicans, who are appointed by legislative leaders or the governor and serve as an agency in the executive branch under the governor — authorized nursing home employees to help residents vote, which Luell noted “is a direct violation of law.” According to Luell, employees would ask residents how they voted in the past and then vote according to that party. In other words, if Judy’s mother “could only recall JFK,” staff would vote Democrat for her.

According to state law, however, nursing home staff can’t assist residents with voting. In fact, nobody can help the voter other than a relative or “special voting deputies,” which are people appointed by municipal clerks or elections boards to conduct absentee voting at care facilities. In March, however, the Wisconsin Elections Commission sent out a letter mandating that municipalities should not use the “special voting deputy process.”

“Ladies and gentleman, it’s not a process. It’s the law,” Luell said, citing state Statute 6.875.

The original letter was issued under the guise of COVID guidelines. Nevertheless, in September, after the governors’ lockdown orders had expired and the initial shock of the pandemic had passed, the Wisconsin Elections Commission sent a letter to all residential care facilities telling the workers how to help residents vote, including even marking the ballot for them, in direct violation of state law. Racine law enforcement looked at 2020 visitor logs and found that other visitors were let into the nursing home throughout the pandemic, about 900 times between the decision in March not to use special voting deputies and November 2020. Those visitors included someone to clean the fish tanks and birdcages and even DoorDash delivery people.

“Those people were allowed into the Ridgewood Care Facility, but heaven forbid we make an exception for special voting deputies,” Luell said.

Under Wisconsin state statute 12.13, breaking these laws about special voting deputies constitutes “election fraud,” which is a felony.

“We’re just one of 72 counties, Racine County,” Schmaling noted. “Ridgeland is one of 11 facilities within our county. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of these facilities throughout the entire state of Wisconsin. We would be foolish, we would be foolish to think for a moment that this integrity issue, this violation of the statute, occurred to just this small group of people at one care facility in one county in the entire state. I would submit to you that this needs the attorney general’s investigation,” the sheriff said, calling for the AG to launch an immediate probe into the Wisconsin Elections Commission.

This bombshell investigation is only the latest in the long list of malfeasant actions by the Wisconsin Elections Commission, especially regarding the 2020 election. As Wisconsin radio host and lawyer Dan O’Donnell put it, the commission “was downright derelict in its duty to fairly and impartially oversee an election.”

As O’Donnell documented, the commission unlawfully allowed clerks to “cure” ballots, illegally permitted clerks to go home on election night and return to finish counting in the morning, and illegally told clerks they could relocate polling locations in the weeks before the election.

Furthermore, the commission failed to issue relevant laws and rules for training municipal election workers, special voting deputies, and election inspections. Worse, it failed to investigate voter rolls for the hundreds of thousands there incorrectly, including more than 45,000 first-time voters whose names didn’t match Department of Transportation records, among other issues.

As The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway outlines in her new book “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections,” the Wisconsin Elections Commission also wrongly kept third-party candidates off the ballot, including Kanye West and the Green Party’s Howie Hawkins. Third parties can significantly affect elections in the Dairy State.

“Following the [Legislative Audit Bureau] report, what Sheriff Schmaling has uncovered + disclosed might only be tip of the iceberg of fraud in the 2020 election. The Legislature must be given the time, resources, and cooperation of election officials to conduct a complete investigation of allegations,” tweeted Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin following the Racine press conference. “Using elderly residents with cognitive decline to commit election fraud is reprehensible, and should concern every Wisconsinite and American.”
Johnson continued: “If Democrats will stoop this low to impact elections, one can only imagine what else they’re willing to do.”

Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

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Virginia Democrats Claim ‘Free And Fair’ Election While Rigging It Again

Reported By Stella Morabito | OCTOBER 28, 2021

**Photo OSCE Parliamentary Association / Flickr**

A lot of roadside signs for Virginia’s Democrat gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe include a special message: “Vote in Free and Fair Elections beginning September 17.” Odd. Shouldn’t “free and fair” go without saying? Why include it on a campaign sign?

This is especially odd since the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors recently asked Virginia’s current governor, Democrat Ralph Northam, to waive the legally required witness signature for absentee ballots, as well as the last four digits of the voter’s Social Security number, both statutory requirements. They asked this about a month after voting began.

For me, the gratuitous addition looks like an attempt to cover up the left’s belief that fair elections are below its paygrade. McAuliffe’s operatives can’t possibly believe it, especially as they work to change and ignore rules in the middle of the game. But they sure want you to believe the electoral changes they enacted for 2021 in Virginia—including expansions of mail-in balloting, conditions for ballot harvesting, no requirement for photo ID, etc.—somehow add up to “free and fair.”

On top of that, the huge ballot drop box in front of Fairfax County is supposed to have 24/7 surveillance, but Director of the Fairfax County Office of Elections Scott Konopasek says the camera feed will never be available to the public.

As Mollie Hemingway’s investigative work in her recent bestseller “Rigged” shows, the 2020 elections added a lot of moving parts to the machinery of election rigging. In addition to inviting fraud, there are now more ways to disguise irregularities and to render election results unverifiable. Such chaos-by-design has been in the works for many years. It reached a tipping point when the oligarchical triad of Big Tech, Big Gov, and Big Media used the Wuhan virus shutdowns to vastly expand mail-in voting while relaxing controls on it during the 2020 presidential election.

Obviously, their first order of business was to prevent President Trump from winning re-election. I imagine the second order of business is to entrench these processes for other elections so that a permanent one-party state can cross all state lines.

At the moment, there seems to be just enough pretense—such as the continued existence of in-person polling places and polling officials who request some form of identification—to create an illusion of propriety. The idea is to keep actual voters clutching their ballots with the same persistent trust as Charlie Brown holding onto Lucy’s football every time she offers him a “free and fair” chance to kick it. McAuliffe, a heavily seasoned Democratic National Committee (DNC) operative, is joined at the hip to all that machinery. Yet Democrats in Virginia are acting as though they’re “nervous” that McAuliffe might lose.

Granted, if we’re operating on a level playing field, he should be nervous. For example, his callous assertion during a debate that parents shouldn’t be involved in what their children are learning in school caused a great backlash among his presumed base. It led to lifelong Democrat voters in Virginia openly campaigning for McAuliffe’s opponent, Glenn Youngkin. So, yes, it looks like McAuliffe should be in deep doo-doo. My guess, however, is that he isn’t really worried about “winning.”

Consider that he actually doubled down on excluding parents from their children’s education. He’s just fine with the idea of the FBI investigating concerned parents as domestic terrorists. He even walked away from a televised interview because he didn’t like the questions. This is the sort of behavior I’d expect from someone who believes he has it all locked up, kind of like the Biden campaign’s extreme confidence despite the candidate’s pathetic low energy and gaffe-prone appearances, of the snoozer of the DNC convention.

So if the McAuliffe campaign feels nervous, it’s likely only over the slight possibility of not generating enough fraud. So it looks like a two-track strategy. First, make sure enough leftist operatives (like that guy in Fairfax County) are taking care of the business of generating unverifiable fraud. Second, keep propping up the illusion of “free and fair.”

Maybe that’s how you get a CYA dog-and-pony show with Stacey Abrams stumping for McAuliffe by warning against voter suppression. Maybe that’s the point of Vice President Kamala Harris’s video to 300 black churches during Sunday morning services to get out the vote for McAuliffe. The in-your-face illegality of Harris’s “Souls to the Polls” action adds to the hubris.

I’ll still mark a ballot on Election Day in Virginia (if I’m not told that I already voted.) Assuming McAuliffe ends up in Richmond again, I’ll expect to see local polling places disappear in Virginia in the future. And I’ll continue to have contempt for fake elections in 2022 and beyond.

Stella Morabito is a senior contributor to The Federalist. Follow Stella on Twitter.

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

Reported by Joy Pullmann | MARCH 8, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

1. Openly Breaks the Constitution

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

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

2. Set Up Star Chambers to Intimidate Judges

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Eliminate Voter ID Election Security

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

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

5. Register Millions Of Criminally Present Foreign Citizens to Vote

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

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

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

6. Explode Opportunities for Election Cheating

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Prevent Cleaning Up Voter Rolls

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

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

8. Unleash Mobs on Political Donors

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

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

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

9. Gerrymander Districts to Favor Democrats

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

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

10. Make Vote Hacking Easier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

14. Mandates Ballot Drop Boxes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

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

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Kylee Zempel Op-ed: To Democrats, ‘Unity’ Means Doing Everything They Want And Shutting Up About It

The only thing worse than listening to a screaming toddler is seeing his smug, tear-stained but smiling face after his parent gives in to his irreverent outburst and rewards him for his tantrum. That’s all I could think about as I walked the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, Saturday night after several news outlets called the presidential race for Joe Biden.

A hopeful energy pulsed through State Street, the bustling pedestrian mall of restaurants and storefronts bookended by the university and the Capitol. I walked past business after business boarded up tight in anticipation of a fiery post-election purge, but instead, front doors were propped open on the uncharacteristically warm November night as groups of friends chattered and shopped and drank in merriment. No sirens or chanting interrupted my pleasant patio dinner date.

I breathed easier than I would have under different circumstances, I’ll admit. Had the media called the race differently, I likely wouldn’t have left the apartment and I certainly wouldn’t have neared downtown. Underneath that peaceful veneer, however, remains the gross reality that things are calm only because the snotty toddler got his way.

Unity Is a Joke

These are the infantile adults that were told “no” in 2016 by the half of the country they most despised and spent the next four years screaming that everything was unfair and that those who disagreed with them were racists, sexists, bigots, and homophobes. Instead of biting and hitting, they looted and vandalized, and the equally childish media covered for them.

They promised to “impeach the motherf-cker,” canceled dissenters, and maligned anyone who wanted to “Make America Great Again.” They smeared mask rebels and churchgoers as grandma-killers and squawked in our faces that boys are girls, silence is violence, and all women are inherently trustworthy, straight white men be damned. Only now that they think they’ve won do they have any interest in faux “unity.”

In a recent editorial, the Washington Examiner posited, “Biden has a historic opportunity to heal the country’s wounds, and if he wants an admired legacy, he will start now to fulfill the promise of his Delaware speech and bring uniter’s, not dividers, into his administration.” Conservatives who fall for this “unity” schtick are hopelessly naïve.

While things might be quiet now, all hell is sure to break loose again the moment things don’t go in the way of the tantrum-throwers. This is because the wrong side won — or at least the fact that they believe they did proves the point. The toddlers got what they wanted. Their abhorrent behavior was reinforced with their most prized reward: the end of the Trump presidency.

Now rather than watching the thugs tear down and set ablaze our livelihoods, we’re stuck looking at their smug faces instead. It was always going to be one or the other: Elect us and we’ll destroy the country, or elect Trump and we’ll destroy your property.

For this reason, the relative peace in our cities now is a bad omen. This cultural calm is a reminder that, like the short-sighted parent capitulating to her toddler, the electorate traded long-term stability for short-term quiet. We didn’t bring an end to the fearmongering and the incivility; we put the uncivil fearmongers in power, and they have sinister plans for their political opponents.

Political Religion Makes All of Life a Holy War

This all goes back to the infantilization of the left, and it’s not surprising. There’s a reason shop-owners were afraid of spurned Biden supporters but relaxed when they remembered the frustrated Trumpsters had no intention of acting out.

When Trump supporters heard the unwelcome news that Biden would ostensibly be the president-elect, they were bummed. Some were mad, others were suspicious, and others felt defeated and discouraged — but they dutifully returned to their daily grinds, clocking in for work, caring for their families, and carrying on their commitments to their churches. That’s because, for so many on the right, politics is an add-on. Family and faith, however imperfectly, inform civic values, but politics is no replacement for those superior institutions.

For many on the left, that isn’t the case. For those who have chosen to worship at the feet of progressivism as religion, this election was life or death because it was central to everything else.

For a population who has pushed off marriage, disposed of its children, abandoned church, and relinquished its independence to the nanny state and its individualism to identity politics, to lose an election is to lose it all. All battles therefore become moral, meaning victory by any means necessary — including stealing and destroying and sometimes even killing — is justified.

Don’t Let the Leftist Toddlers Get Their Way

That leaves us quite a divided America. How can we ever hope for unity when one side holds theother hostage? Give us what we want, or else. That’s no way to start a mutually beneficial negotiation.

So conservatives are left with a choice. Will we continue caving in to the boisterous toddler until it becomes an unruly and insufferable adult? Or will stand our ground and endure the tantrums until the left tuckers itself out on its own fickle rhetoric and runs its own cities into the soil? Don’t relish the present quiet; realize what it stands for.

Presidents come and go, and if Trump does finally lose re-election after all the legal battles run their course, so be it. The worst thing for our country isn’t a Biden presidency. It’s giving the leftist toddlers what they want.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

Photo Fibonacci Blue/Wikimedia Commons

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5 More Ways Joe Biden Magically Outperformed Election Norms

In all the excitement among objective journalists for Joe Biden’s declared victory, reporters are missing how extraordinary the Democrat’s performance was in the 2020 election. It’s not just that the former vice president is on track to become the oldest president in American history, it’s what he managed to accomplish at the polls this year.

Candidate Joe Biden was so effective at animating voters in 2020 that he received a record number of votes, more than 15 million more than Barack Obama received in his re-election of 2012. Amazingly, he managed to secure victory while also losing in almost every bellwether county across the country. No presidential candidate has been capable of such electoral jujitsu until now.

While Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 totals in every urban county in the United States, he outperformed her in the metropolitan areas of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Even more surprising, the former VP put up a record haul of votes, despite Democrats’ general failures in local House and state legislative seats across the nation.

He accomplished all this after receiving a record low share of the primary vote compared to his Republican opponent heading into the general election. Clearly, these are tremendous and unexpected achievements that would normally receive sophisticated analysis from the journalist class but have somehow gone mostly unmentioned during the celebrations at news studios in New York City and Washington, D.C.

The massive national political realignment now taking place may be one source of these surprising upsets. Yet still, to have pulled so many rabbits out of his hat like this, nobody can deny that Biden is a first-rate campaigner and politician, the likes of which America has never before seen. Let’s break down just how unique his political voodoo has been in 2020.

1. 80 Million Votes

Holy moly! A lot of Americans turned out for a Washington politician who’s been in office for nearly 50 years. Consider this: no incumbent president in nearly a century and a half has gained votes in a re-election campaign and still lost.

President Trump gained more than ten million votes since his 2016 victory, but Biden’s appeal was so substantial that it overcame President Trump’s record support among minority voters. Biden also shattered Barack Obama’s own popular vote totals, really calling into question whether it was not perhaps Biden who pulled Obama across the finish lines in 2008 and 2012.

Proving how sharp his political instincts are, the former VP managed to gather a record number of votes while consistently trailing President Trump in measures of voter enthusiasm. Biden was so savvy that he motivated voters unenthusiastic about his campaign to vote for him in record numbers.

2. Winning Despite Losing Most Bellwether Counties

Biden is set to become the first president in 60 years to lose the states of Ohio and Florida on his way to election. For a century, these states have consistently predicted the national outcome, and they have been considered roughly representative of the American melting pot as a whole. Despite national polling giving Biden a lead in both states, he lost Ohio by eight points and Florida by more than three.

For Biden to lose these key bellwethers by notable margins and still win the national election is newsworthy. Not since the Mafia allegedly aided John F. Kennedy in winning Illinois over Richard Nixon in 1960 has an American president pulled off this neat trick.

Even more unbelievably, Biden is on his way to winning the White House after having lost almost every historic bellwether county across the country. The Wall Street Journal and The Epoch Times independently analyzed the results of 19 counties around the United States that have nearly perfect presidential voting records over the last 40 years. President Trump won every single bellwether county, except Clallam County in Washington.

Whereas the former VP picked up Clallam by about three points, President Trump’s margin of victory in the other 18 counties averaged over 16 points. In a larger list of 58 bellwether counties that have correctly picked the president since 2000, Trump won 51 of them by an average of 15 points, while the other seven went to Biden by around four points. Bellwether counties overwhelmingly chose President Trump, but Biden found a path to victory anyway.

3. Biden Trailed Clinton Except in a Select Few Cities

Patrick Basham, a pollster with an accurate track record and the director of the Democracy Institute in D.C., highlighted two observations made by fellow colleagues, polling guru Richard Baris of Big Data Poll and Washington Post election analyst Robert Barnes. Baris noted a statistical oddity from 2020’s election returns: “Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in every major metro area around the country, save for Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia.”

Barnes added that in those “big cities in swing states run by Democrats…the vote even exceeded the number of registered voters.” In the states that mattered most, so many mail-in ballots poured in for Biden from the cities that he put up record-breaking numbers and overturned state totals that looked like comfortable leads for President Trump.

If Democrats succeed in eliminating the Electoral College, Biden’s magic formula for churning out overwhelming vote totals in a handful of cities should make the Democrats unbeatable.

4. Biden Won Despite Democrat Losses Everywhere Else

Randy DeSoto noted in The Western Journal that “Donald Trump was pretty much the only incumbent president in U.S. history to lose his re-election while his own party gained seats in the House of Representatives.” Now that’s a Biden miracle!

In 2020, The Cook Political Report and The New York Times rated 27 House seats as toss-ups going into Election Day. Right now, Republicans appear to have won all 27. Democrats failed to flip a single state house chamber, while Republicans flipped both the House and Senate in New Hampshire and expanded their dominance of state legislatures across the country.

Christina Polizzi, a spokesperson for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, went so far as to state: “It’s clear that Trump isn’t an anchor for the Republican legislative candidates. He’s a buoy.” Amazingly, Biden beat the guy who lifted all other Republicans to victory. Now that’s historic!

5. Biden Overcame Trump’s Commanding Primary Vote

In the past, primary vote totals have been remarkably accurate in predicting general election winners. Political analyst David Chapman highlighted three historical facts before the election.

First, no incumbent who has received 75 percent of the total primary vote has lost re-election. Second, President Trump received 94 percent of the primary vote, which is the fourth highest of all time (higher than Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon, Clinton, or Obama). In fact, Trump is only one of five incumbents since 1912 to receive more than 90 percent of the primary vote.

Third, Trump set a record for most primary votes received by an incumbent when more than 18 million people turned out for him in 2020 (the previous record, held by Bill Clinton, was half that number). For Biden to prevail in the general election, despite Trump’s historic support in the primaries, turns a century’s worth of prior election data on its head.

Joe Biden achieved the impossible. It’s interesting that many more journalists aren’t pointing that out.

J.B. Shurk is a proud American from Daniel Boone country.

Photo Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia

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5 Historical Trends That Show It’s Utterly Shocking If Trump Lost In 2020

If I told you an incumbent president had 52 percent approval on Election Day and ended up winning 10 million more votes than during his first election, would you predict victory? What if 56 percent of voters felt they were better off since the president had entered office? What if you knew that the incumbent had a nearly 30 percent enthusiasm edge over his opponent, or that when asked for whom they thought their neighbors were voting, nearly 10 percent more Americans expected the president to be re-elected than to lose?

With those numbers in mind, wouldn’t you feel pretty confident that the sitting president had, indeed, been re-elected? Alternatively, wouldn’t you consider it an amazing feat if, instead, the president’s challenger was victorious? The improbability of that result should be newsworthy all on its own.

Donald Trump has majority approval. Nearly six in 10 Americans feel better off today than when Barack Obama was in office, and 15 percent more voters pulled the lever for his re-election than in his 2016 victory. These are not the numbers of a losing candidate, yet we’re told Joe Biden managed to prevail.

The media and pollsters, of course, predicted a Biden landslide, not a very narrow squeaker in which Democrats lost in almost every other avenue of government. Considering the following five facts about the election, it’s no wonder Biden failed to achieve a landslide victory.

1. 10 Million More Votes

Not since President Grover Cleveland’s re-election campaign in 1888 has a sitting president won more votes the second time around and still lost, which is one reason he successfully ran again four years later. To put this in perspective, Obama lost 5 million votes between his 2008 and 2012 elections. He is the only president to have lost voters and still won re-election.

By comparison, Trump not only added about 10 million votes to his 2016 haul but also shattered the record for most votes received by a sitting president. Trump won a greater share of minority votes than any Republican presidential candidate since 1960 and brought more Democrats over to his side than in 2016. More than nine in 10 evangelical Christians voted to re-elect the president. For Trump to expand his coalition of voters so substantially and still lose is historic.

2. 56 Percent of Americans Better Off Than in 2016

This is a huge number. According to Gallup, only 32 percent of Americans say they aren’t better off since Trump was inaugurated. No sitting president has lost re-election when more than half of the country is doing better than before the incumbent entered office.

In fact, Obama, George W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan all won re-election, even though only about 45 percent of the country felt better off than when their presidencies had begun. For Biden to have won the election, despite nearly six in 10 Americans doing well under the current president, is noteworthy. It simply has never happened before.

Part of the reason for Americans’ strong sense of being better off under Trump surely stems from the unprecedented prosperity Americans were experiencing until this past spring when the Chinese coronavirus stopped the world’s economies. Under the president, minority unemployment had reached record lows, and minority wealth savings had reached record highs. At the same time, the stock market had risen to all-time record highs. In other words, the Trump economy was benefiting Americans at all economic levels.

After the pandemic caused an election-year recession, the economy has steadily rebounded since summer. Unemployment has already dropped back below 7 percent, much faster than many economists thought possible, and the stock market is back to its pre-pandemic highs.

In the past, the performance of the S&P 500 in the three months before Americans head to the polls has predicted 87 percent of elections since 1928 and 100 percent since 1984. If the S&P is in positive territory by the end of those three months, the incumbent party almost always wins. On the last trading day in July, the S&P 500 closed at 3,271, was up nearly 7 percent by mid-October, and closed at 3,310 on the Monday before the 2020 election. The market predicted a Trump victory.

3. Nearly 30 Percent Enthusiasm Gap Favoring Trump

In June, during the middle of the pandemic, pollster Scott Rasmussen was blown away by the enthusiasm gap between Trump and Biden voters. He wrote in amazement: “Wow! 76 percent of Trump voters are enthusiastic about their candidate compared to just 49 percent of Biden voters.”

This enthusiasm gap, measured consistently as somewhere between 15 and 30 percent, was picked up by many pollsters. Richard Baris, the director of Big Data Poll, told the New York Post in mid-October that enthusiasm for Trump “is historically high,” while “Biden’s enthusiasm level is historically low.”

Anyone who saw a Trump rally would not be surprised. At one of his last campaign stops before Election Day, about 60,000 Trump supporters showed up to see the president in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump tractor parades, boat parades, and 30-mile-long highway caravans have been a common feature of the 2020 campaign.

Republican support for the president has been higher than for any president of either party since Dwight D. Eisenhower. Until Biden’s presumed victory, no incumbent president winning so handily in voter enthusiasm had lost re-election.

4. More People Thought Neighbors Were Voting for Trump

Just as in 2016, polling this election cycle proved decisively wrong. Republicans in the House, Senate, and state legislatures across the country all out-performed polling estimates. Pollsters consistently predicted a Biden blowout, but instead, the race is one of the closest in American history.

Pollsters have partially excused their efforts by pointing to a “shy Trump voter” error in the polls that failed to capture the president’s true support. To get around this problem, some pollsters asked respondents to name the candidate for whom they believed their neighbors would likely vote, hoping to elicit more candid voting intentions.

By a 7 percentage-point margin, Harvard/Harris polling found in late September that more Americans believed their neighbors would vote for Trump’s re-election than for Biden. In the week before the election, USC Dornsife published a poll asking a similar question: “Do you think your friends and neighbors are voting for Trump?” USC concluded that “it’s looking like an Electoral College loss for Biden.”

5. Trump Still Has 53 Percent Approval

Just 12 days before the election, Trump’s approval rating popped over 50 percent and has held steady since that time. As Gallup noted, “[A]ll incumbents with an approval rating of 50 percent or higher have won re-election, and presidents with approval ratings much lower than 50 percent have lost.” Rasmussen and Zogby both had Trump hitting that “holy grail” approval number tied to certain re-election.

On the day before the election, Rasmussen had Trump at 52 percent approval. At the same point in his presidency, and before his own re-election, Obama had 50 percent. As of Nov. 11, Rasmussen shows 53 percent of the country approves of Trump, compared to 46 percent who disapprove. No incumbent president has ever lost re-election with numbers such as these.

All of these numbers have historically contributed to a victory for an incumbent president. Considering them, it’s no surprise Biden didn’t win in a landslide, but that they did not produce a win for Trump in 2020 is almost unbelievable.

J.B. Shurk is a proud American from Daniel Boone country.

Photo The White House/Flickr

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Partisans Cheating By Ignoring Election Law Is A Problem As Big As Vote Fraud

Fraud represents only one aspect of concern over the results from last week’s election. Of equal import when judging the legitimacy of the next president of the United States is whether states complied with the election rules established by their legislatures. These are not questions of mere “technical errors,” but raise significant constitutional concerns.

On Wednesday, Jim Geraghty of National Review tweeted his “Morning Jolt” summary of post-election lawsuits. “The Trump campaign,” Geraghty stressed, “conceded in oral arguments they were not contending fraud or improper influence, merely technical errors,” he wrote of a recent election case. Geraghty’s article, linked in his tweet, continued: “It is one thing to fume on Twitter that there is a sinister effort to steal an election; it is another thing to assert that sweeping claim in a court of law, before a judge, under penalty of perjury and/or disbarment.”

Not to pick on Geraghty, whom I respect immensely, but he is conflating two separate issues: fraud and violations of the election code. Those are two distinct problems, yet there has been little analysis of the latter, which over the next several weeks might prove more significant.

There are multiple allegations of fraud, such as the middle-of-the-night arrival of unsecured ballots in Detroit or the dead man voting in Nevada. Then there’s the even more devastating suggestion that votes for Donald Trump were swapped to Joe Biden via vulnerable computer systems. Frankly, this idea strikes me as unbelievable, but then again, so did the idea that the FBI would obtain illegal secret court warrants to spy on the Trump campaign, and we know how that turned out.

Election Code Violations Might as Well Be ‘Fraud’

Violations of the election code, however, are a different matter, and unfortunately, sometimes the public views election officials’ bending of the rules as a harmless ignoring of technicalities. As the attorney in the Montgomery County Board of Elections case noted after “conceding” he was not alleging fraud: “The election code is technical.”

That makes technical violations constitutionally significant because Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 grants state legislatures the ultimate authority to appoint the electors who choose the president: “Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.”

In Bush v. Gore, former Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist stressed the significance of this constitutional provision in a concurrence joined by Justice Clarence Thomas and former Justice Antonin Scalia. As Rehnquist wrote, that clause “convey[s] the broadest power of determination” and “leaves it to the legislature exclusively to define the method” of appointment of electors. Furthermore, “a significant departure from the legislative scheme for appointing Presidential electors presents a federal constitutional question.”

The three concurring justices in Bush v. Gore concluded that the Florida Supreme Court’s order directing election officials to count improperly marked ballots was a “significant departure from the legislative scheme,” and “in a Presidential election the clearly expressed intent of the legislature must prevail.” Accordingly, those justices would have declared the Florida recount unconstitutional under Article 2, Section 1, Clause 2.

While the concurrence in Bush v. Gore failed to garner support by a majority of the justices, the Supreme Court’s composition has changed dramatically since then, and the reasoning of this concurrence provides a strong basis to view deviations from the technicalities of the election code as unconstitutional. As Rehnquist stressed, “[I]n a Presidential election the clearly expressed intent of the legislature must prevail.”

So, if the legislative branch mandates voter signatures, or verification of signatures, or internal secrecy sleeves, or counting only in the presences of poll-watchers from each party, it is no answer to say it is a technicality and not fraud at issue. The state legislatures, through the election code, define the validity of votes, and allowing state officials or courts to read those provisions out of the law raises serious questions under Article 2 of the Constitution.

Ignoring the Election Code Denies Equal Protection

Allowing state officials to fudge on the mandates of the election code raises a second significant constitutional issue, this one under the Equal Protection Clause, which served as the basis for the majority opinion in Bush v. Gore. The majority in Bush v. Gore held that the varying standards violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, reasoning: “The right to vote is protected in more than the initial allocation of the franchise. Equal protection applies as well to the manner of its exercise. Having once granted the right to vote on equal terms, the State may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person’s vote over that of another.”

When state officials ignore the technicalities of the election code, however, it virtually guarantees voters will be denied equal treatment. The proof is in Pennsylvania. There, for instance, even though the election code prohibited inspecting ballots before Election Day, some county officials — those in larger counties with access to mail-sorting machines that could weigh ballots — weighed the ballots to determine if the voter failed to include the required inner secrecy sleeve.

Then those officials, again contrary to the election code, provided information to representatives of the Democratic Party so they could identify the voters whose ballots would be canceled. Voters whose election officials abided by the technicalities of the election code, however, did not receive that notice nor the opportunity to “cure” their ballot.

Now thanks to the unprecedented push toward mail-in voting over the last year, we are seeing this same pattern repeat itself throughout the country. Some election officials bent (or broke) the rules the legislative branch had set, while others followed the letter of the law. As a result, voters in different counties in the same state were treated disparately and on an arbitrary basis. Unlike the situation in Bush v. Gore, however, it is not the state courts altering the plain language of the election code, but secretaries of state or local election officials.

The majority in Bush v. Gore recognized the rightful place of election officials to interpret and apply the rules established by the legislative branch. This difference provides some leeway to states, which through interpretative guidance tweak the technicalities of the election code. But as in other areas of the law, such interpretations must be reasonable and must not violate the clearly expressed intent of the legislature.

The Supreme Court will likely decide where that line will be drawn in the coming days.

Margot Cleveland is a senior contributor to The Federalist. Cleveland served nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk to a federal appellate judge and is a former full-time faculty member and adjunct instructor at the college of business at the University of Notre Dame. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

Photo Chris Phan/Wikimedia Commons

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Why President Trump Has A Strong Supreme Court Case To Contest Pennsylvania

As arguments about voter fraud have escalated across the country, it’s time to recognize that despite what an unmitigated disaster widespread expansion of absentee balloting has been, concerns about its abuse aren’t the most important argument in the ongoing fight over the legitimacy of this election. Sure, the media and Big Tech’s widespread white-washing and censoring of very real voter fraud concerns are damaging to the social fabric in existential ways, just as ignoring norms (and in some cases laws) requiring transparency destroys public trust and confidence in the outcome.

The Pennsylvania lawsuit isn’t yet proof that election-altering fraud occurred, although it does present compelling evidence that if proved shatters the media narrative on election security. A closer look at the allegations of direct fraud weighed against the likelihood of proving that enough occurred to alter the outcome — on a shortened timeline — reveals a daunting task for the president’s legal team.

President Trump’s lawyers, however, aren’t making the same argument as your uncle on Facebook; they’re playing for keeps. Some Republicans have been content to publicly call for the “process to play out” while privately predicting losses or maybe a few favorable rulings on some esoteric technicalities. But the president is not tired of winning yet.

Shortly after the filing, Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser to the Trump campaign, put it succinctly: “Pennsylvania is irredeemably compromised.”

The thrust of their legal argument doesn’t hinge on the numbers of fraudulent ballots cast, but on the inconsistent and illegal application of Pennsylvania election law, which dilutes legally cast votes — so-called disparate treatment, from which the U.S. Constitution is supposed to protect us.

The other key legal argument is that those changes in the election law, which were implemented by an unelected appointee of Pennsylvania’s executive branch, namely Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar, were an impermissible usurpation of the legislature’s prerogative even if Pennsylvania’s judicial branch approved them.

Bush v. Gore Already Wrestled with These Concerns

Underlying the president’s legal argument is the recognition that the Pennsylvania legislature implemented an imperfect regime that rationally valued security of the election as more important than avoiding disenfranchising any voters. Even amid a pandemic, the Pennsylvania legislature understood that their expansion of ballot-by-mail increased risks to election security, and thus sought to mitigate that as best they could. It was partisan state courts that unilaterally overrode those determinations in the middle of a presidential campaign in an unconstitutional way.

The discussion about what types of fraud, and how much, is important because it goes to the very heart of election integrity, and our system cannot stand without trust in the outcome. That argument, however, won’t decide the Pennsylvania case from a legal standpoint. It will come down to whether a ministerial appointee of Pennsylvania’s executive branch can work with Pennsylvania’s judicial branch to subvert the expressed will of the legislature, and hastily put in place an election process wherein citizens who chose to vote differently had their votes disparately treated.

Recall that in 2000, the legal argument that eventually carried the day was equal-protection grounds; by implementing different methods for recounts and different scrutiny for different counties, voters were receiving unequal treatment. The Supreme Court held 7-2 that “Upon due consideration of the difficulties identified to this point, it is obvious that the recount cannot be conducted in compliance with the requirements of equal protection and due process without substantial additional work.”

In most cases, comity and respect for federalism compel us to defer to the decisions of state courts on issues of state law. That practice reflects our understanding that the decisions of state courts are definitive pronouncements of the will of the States as sovereigns. Of course, in ordinary cases, the distribution of powers among the branches of a State’s government raises no questions of federal constitutional law, subject to the requirement that the government be republican in character. But there are a few exceptional cases in which the Constitution imposes a duty or confers a power on a particular branch of a State’s government. This is one of them. … Thus, the text of the election law itself, and not just its interpretation by the courts of the States, takes on independent significance.

A significant departure from the legislative scheme for appointing Presidential electors presents a federal constitutional question.

If we are to respect the legislature’s Article II powers, therefore, we must ensure that postelection state-court actions do not frustrate the legislative desire to attain the ‘safe harbor’ provided by §5. (Rehnquist concurring, but writing separately; Citations and dicta omitted)

Admittedly, this “Article II view” was a more expansive view on why the ongoing Florida recount was suspect than the Supreme Court ultimately held, but clearly, at least three justices believed that the courts — even state courts, which usually receive great deference to interpreting state law — don’t have a right to tweak the express will of the state legislature about presidential electors.

To be sure, the equal-protection claims also present differently, so they aren’t a slam-dunk here, and the Rehnquist concurrence isn’t controlling precedent (two of the three justices who signed on to the opinion are no longer on the court), so it might not carry the day.

Three of the young lawyers on the Bush team advocating this view of the law in 2000 have received pretty notable promotions since that time, however, and three other guys likely to have a say have signaled their belief in exactly this interpretation, stating recently, “The provisions of the Federal Constitution conferring on state legislatures, not state courts, the authority to make rules governing federal elections would be meaningless if a state court could override the rules adopted by the legislature simply by claiming that a state constitutional provision gave the courts the authority to make whatever rules it thought appropriate for the conduct of a fair election.”

It’s anyone’s guess how the Supreme Court would rule if it gets to that point, but when three current justices (Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch) have signaled they’re sympathetic to the basic legal argument, and three other justices (John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett) were part of the team that advanced very similar legal arguments in Bush v. Gore, the president and his team must like their chances.

The Changes Disproportionately Helped Biden

Pundits and some Trump supporters have engaged in navel-gazing and resigned themselves to the line of reasoning that “maybe Trump shouldn’t have down-talked absentee voting.” We know in addition to increased risk of fraud, however, voters who cast absentee ballots have historically had a significantly greater likelihood of being disenfranchised than in-person voters.

For Trump to push his supporters to vote in ways that were more likely to count isn’t irrational. It instead raises the question of why former Vice President Joe Biden wasn’t concerned with his voters being disenfranchised if they voted absentee, given the historical risks.

Both the potential for fraud and increased probability of disenfranchising voters sound intuitively like things we should fix, but the Pennsylvania legislature didn’t. They saw fit to keep the bar high to offset the risk of fraud and associated effects to public confidence in the election that unrestricted mail balloting would cause.

There’s a rational basis for that, and the entire saga has played out nationally. With the non-legislative changes, absentee voters were significantly less likely to be disenfranchised than before — indeed, Boockvar’s unilateral changes in Pennsylvania removed nearly every barrier the duly elected state legislature had put in place.

This created an environment where the constitutional guarantee of one person, one vote was tilted significantly in the direction of a voting modality (mail balloting versus in-person balloting). Not only was this ripe for greater abuse, but that tilting of the playing field disproportionately benefited the voters of one presidential candidate. Making this even more obvious are new revelations that show how the larger Democratic strongholds were equipped to quickly pre-sort potentially invalid ballots, and Democratic operatives were gearing up to capitalize on the eventual changes to the statutory pre-canvass period before Boockvar’s office even announced them.

What if the Supreme Court Invalidates a State’s Election

For conservatives, an intellectual challenge now presents itself: If you were OK with the Supreme Court stopping the Florida recount in 2000, you need to prepare yourself to be comfortable with the same court invalidating the Pennsylvania electors. Indeed, you should want them to, whether or not there was underlying direct fraud sufficient enough to affect the outcome. Alternatively, you should start working on your tortuous rationale for why, on constitutional grounds, what was legitimate in 2000 is not legitimate in 2020.

Whether you’re persuaded by the equal protection reasoning in the Bush v. Gore holding or in the minority’s separate concurrence emphasizing the plenary powers of the Pennsylvania legislature under Article II, Section 1, Clause 2, if the case makes it to the Supreme Court it won’t hinge on some threshold level of fraud that tipped the scales against Trump, nor will it be about the raw power of a conservative court to hand the election to Trump (which will certainly be the media narrative if it gets to that point). It will be, and always has been, about the rule of law.

Where the actual fraud becomes important — an actual measure of it, and whether it delivered an illegitimate win to Biden — is in how the Pennsylvania legislature, and potentially Congress, should react to the Court prohibiting the certification of the November election with respect to presidential electors. There is nothing wrong or abhorrent to our constitutional system if the elected representatives of the citizens of Pennsylvania are required to weigh in and clean this up on behalf of their voters. They need to be prepared to make their case to their voters if the predominant media narrative remains that the fraud wasn’t significant enough to affect the election outcome in Pennsylvania.

Regardless of how the Pennsylvania case gets resolved, it won’t change the overall outcome on its own. The 20 electoral votes wouldn’t be enough to swing the election to Trump if existing media projections for Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan stay in Biden’s column. If any of those changes, whether through ongoing canvassing efforts or other simultaneous legal challenges — such as the president’s filing Wednesday in Michigan making similar constitutional claims — well, Katy, bar the door.

Our way of government is strong enough to endure this. The only way through is through.

For nearly twenty years, Matt Beebe served as a countermeasures engineer in the Air Force and a contractor in the intelligence community before launching an IT and computer security firm in San Antonio, Texas. He is active in Texas politics and can be found on Twitter @theMattBeebe.

Photo Mark Thomas/Pixabay

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To Democrats, ‘Unity’ Means Doing Everything They Want And Shutting Up About It

The only thing worse than listening to a screaming toddler is seeing his smug, tear-stained but smiling face after his parent gives in to his irreverent outburst and rewards him for his tantrum. That’s all I could think about as I walked the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, Saturday night after several news outlets called the presidential race for Joe Biden.

Unity Is a Joke

These are the infantile adults that were told “no” in 2016 by the half of the country they most despised and spent the next four years screaming that everything was unfair and that those who disagreed with them were racists, sexists, bigots, and homophobes. Instead of biting and hitting, they looted and vandalized, and the equally childish media covered for them.

They promised to “impeach the motherf-cker,” canceled dissenters, and maligned anyone who wanted to “Make America Great Again.” They smeared mask rebels and churchgoers as grandma-killers and squawked in our faces that boys are girls, silence is violence, and all women are inherently trustworthy, straight white men be damned. Only now that they think they’ve won do they have any interest in faux “unity.”

In a recent editorial, the Washington Examiner posited, “Biden has a historic opportunity to heal the country’s wounds, and if he wants an admired legacy, he will start now to fulfill the promise of his Delaware speech and bring uniters, not dividers, into his administration.” Conservatives who fall for this “unity” schtick are hopelessly naive.

Now rather than watching the thugs tear down and set ablaze our livelihoods, we’re stuck looking at their smug faces instead. It was always going to be one or the other: Elect us and we’ll destroy the country, or elect Trump and we’ll destroy your property.

Political Religion Makes All of Life a Holy War

When Trump supporters heard the unwelcome news that Biden would ostensibly be the president-elect, they were bummed. Some were mad, others were suspicious, and others felt defeated and discouraged — but they dutifully returned to their daily grinds, clocking in for work, caring for their families, and carrying on their commitments to their churches.

That’s because, for so many on the right, politics is an add-on. Family and faith, however imperfectly, inform civic values, but politics is no replacement for those superior institutions.

For many on the left, that isn’t the case. For those who have chosen to worship at the feet of progressivism as religion, this election was life or death because it was central to everything else.

For a population who has pushed off marriage, disposed of its children, abandoned church, and relinquished its independence to the nanny state and its individualism to identity politics, to lose an election is to lose it all. All battles therefore become moral, meaning victory by any means necessary — including stealing and destroying and sometimes even killing — is justified.

Don’t Let the Leftist Toddlers Get Their Way

That leaves us quite a divided America. How can we ever hope for unity when one side holds the other hostage? Give us what we want, or else. That’s no way to start a mutually beneficial negotiation.

Presidents come and go, and if Trump does finally lose re-election after all the legal battles run their course, so be it. The worst thing for our country isn’t a Biden presidency. It’s giving the leftist toddlers what they want.

Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

Photo Fibonacci Blue/Wikimedia Commons

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Ann Coulter Op-ed: The Democrats’ Guide to Losing Gracefully

Commentary by Ann Coulter | Posted: Nov 11, 2020 2:15 PM

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

The Democrats' Guide to Losing Gracefully

Source: AP Photo/Richard Drew

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Here are the times Democrats have conceded a presidential election with grace and dignity:

OK, now on to my column.

I hope someone is recording the media’s demands that Trump supporters ACCEPT THE RESULTS OF THE ELECTION! inasmuch as the Democrats refuse to accept the results of any presidential election they lose, unless it’s a landslide, and sometimes even then.

After George W. Bush won the 2000 election — despite the media depressing Bush turnout in Florida by calling the state for Gore when polls were still open in the conservative panhandle — Gore contested the election until Dec. 13, the day after the Supreme Court called off the endless recounts (in only certain Florida counties) demanded by Gore.

The night of the court’s ruling, Laurence Tribe, the Harvard law professor who’d argued one of Gore’s cases before the court, and Ed Rendell, general chairman of the Democratic National Committee, went on TV and said it was time for Gore to concede.

Both were immediately attacked by their fellow Democrats and forced to retract their statements. Gore’s deputy campaign manager, Mark Fabiani, for example, told The New York Times that Rendell “seems to be more interested in getting his mug on TV than in loyalty.”

The next day, Gore conceded, telling his supporters he had “congratulated him on becoming the 43rd president of the United States,” adding, “while I strongly disagree with the court’s decision, I accept it.”

But that still wasn’t the end of it! Weeks later, the Congressional Black Caucus tried to prevent congressional certification of the Electoral College for Bush, raising objection after objection on the House floor.

Over the course of the next year, the Florida ballots were painstakingly recounted by an independent investigative firm at a cost of nearly a million dollars, paid for by the same media outlets currently telling you to shut up and accept the results — including The New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post and the Associated Press, along with several others.

The year-long, million-dollar recount led to this shocking conclusion: Bush still won. As the Times put it, contrary to the claims of Gore partisans, “the United States Supreme Court did not award an election to Mr. Bush that otherwise would have been won by Mr. Gore.”

And yet, to this day, Democrats claim Bush was “selected, not elected,” as so wittily put by Hillary Clinton.

Hillary was still harping on Bush’s stolen election when she ran for president in the 2008 cycle. At a 2007 primary presidential debate, she delighted the Democratic audience by remarking, “Well, I think it is a problem that Bush was elected in 2000. (APPLAUSE) I actually thought somebody else was elected in that election, but … (APPLAUSE).”

At a subsequent primary debate in 2008, Hillary said that she and President Clinton had been making great progress “until, unfortunately, the Supreme Court handed the presidency to George Bush.”

In 2006, Michael Kinsley claimed in The New York Times that the 2000 election was “actually stolen.”

And so on.

When Bush was reelected in 2004, Democrats again refused to accept the results of the election, and again attempted to block Congress’ counting of electoral votes, this time with the connivance of Sen. Barbara Boxer.

Their smoking gun? The election results in Ohio didn’t match the exit polls! If that’s not enough proof for you, and I can’t imagine why it wouldn’t be, the voting machines were manufactured by Diebold, and Diebold’s CEO was a Bush supporter. Yes, apparently, the voting machines in Ohio were rigged to flip votes from Kerry to Bush.

This crackpot theory was pushed assiduously by Vanity Fair (Michael Shnayerson in the April 2004 issue, and Christopher Hitchens in the March 2005 issue), Rolling Stone magazine (Robert F. Kennedy Jr., June 15, 2006), and in books: John Conyers’ “What Went Wrong in Ohio” — introduction by Gore Vidal — and “Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?” by Steven F. Freeman and Joel Bleifuss. (You’ll have to read it to find out!)

I haven’t even mentioned the craziest of the Democrat media complex’s attacks on the results of an election: Reagan’s 489-49 electoral landslide against Jimmy Carter in 1980. (Stay tuned!)

Election results, according to Democrats:

— 1960: Kennedy wins a razor-thin victory after a surprisingly high turnout of dead voters in Texas and Illinois — FAIR ELECTION, CLEAN AS A WHISTLE!!

— 1964: Landslide election for Lyndon Johnson — FAIR ELECTION, CLEAN AS A WHISTLE!!

— 1968: Nixon won with his racist (and mythical) “Southern strategy.”

— 1972: Nixon landslide — no provable cheating.

— 1976: Carter won — FAIR ELECTION, CLEAN AS A WHISTLE!!

— 1980: Reagan won by traitorously colluding with Iran to prevent the release of American hostages before the election!

— 1984: Reagan landslide — no provable cheating.

— 1988: Bush 41 won in a landslide because of his racist Willie Horton ads.

— 1992: Clinton won with 43% of the vote — FAIR ELECTION, CLEAN AS A WHISTLE!!

— 1996: Clinton won with 49% of the vote — FAIR ELECTION, CLEAN AS A WHISTLE!!

— 2000: Bush 43 was “selected, not elected” after the Supreme Court stole it for him.

— 2004: Bush won because of Diebold hacking the voting machines in Ohio.

— 2008: Obama won — FAIR ELECTION, CLEAN AS A WHISTLE!!

— 2012: Obama won — FAIR ELECTION, CLEAN AS A WHISTLE!!

— 2016: Trump won after colluding with Russia to persuade them to purchase $200,000 in Facebook ads.

If that’s how we’re supposed to “accept the results of the election,” then WOW — game on!

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From Hanging Chads To Ballot Creep, Democrats Are Perfecting Post-Election Heists

If we thought “hanging chads” were damaging to electoral confidence back in 2000, then buckle your seat belt. The year 2020 that’s already brought us a pandemic and riots has suddenly lurched toward a dangerous curve that poses an unprecedented risk to the American electoral process and our faith in it.

Twenty years ago we were glued to our televisions as vote-counting unfolded in the crucial state of Florida. A huge magnifying glass held by one vote counter became an iconic symbol of the effort to rightly interpret votes. As agonizingly difficult as it was to watch, it paled in comparison to what we’re seeing in the 2020 election.

Transparency has been replaced with boards over windows. Election observers have been barred in key Democratic strongholds where vote counting continues, days after other states wrapped up. When they are allowed in they’re forced to remain behind barricades far away. In Detroit, it was reported that vote counters cheered as GOP observers were kicked out.

For all of the tough elections in years past, despite all of the bitter division along partisan lines, at the end of the day we’ve always benefited from an election system that, while not perfect, has been widely viewed as free and fair by the majority of Americans. Such things matter. Constitutional governance is the hallmark of a healthy democracy. It is what most others around the globe crave but will never experience.

But now, in the span of just a few days, we’ve seen the traditional presidential election process devolve into a chaotic scene suggesting those of banana republics. When blue-state political machines call an end to vote counting on election night just as the scale is about to tip to a Republican victory, something has gone terribly amiss.

Confidence in the system eroded further as massive numbers of mail-in ballots for one candidate suddenly appeared in the middle of the night. While it was explained as a “clerical error” in one state, and defended as such by Democrats’ willing social media agents, Twitter and Facebook, no explanation is given for how it happened in multiple states, a statistically improbable occurrence.

Each day we have watched the vote tallies in a half-dozen key states drift inexorably toward blue, many of which were heading solidly red on election night. Is it possible to elect the leader of the free world in this way, in a closed-door system that reeks of possible corruption?

The legality of ballots must be determined first. The count comes second. As significant as the “hanging chads” were in 2000, ballot creep has emerged as the determining issue in 2020. It’s a skill that Democrats perfected in past elections.

Back in 2008, incumbent Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman seemed on his way to re-election against comedian Al Franken. After the ballots were counted, Coleman had a 725-vote lead. But then the post-Election Day vote-gathering kicked into high gear. By the time it was over, an exhausting eight months later, Coleman was cleaning out his Capitol Hill office and Franken was moving in. His margin of victory: 312 votes.

The process by which it all happened is instructive as to how Democrats operate. The initial canvass in Minnesota had resulted in a 206-vote lead for Coleman. Democrats were just getting started, though, as a phalanx of attorneys descended on the blue state. Caches of ballots began to appear, starting with 200 that had not been counted on election night.

An envelope with ten absentee ballots was found in a Democratic stronghold. And 953 previously rejected absentee ballots were included in the second recount, yielding a net pickup of 176 votes for Franken. Nineteen precincts in Democrat-friendly Minneapolis ended up reporting more votes than voters. By January, the State Canvassing Board certified Franken as the winner.

Just a few years prior in Washington state, Republican Dino Rossi lost by 129 votes in the closest gubernatorial election in the history of the United States. He had led Democrat Christine Gregoire in both the initial count (261 votes) and the machine recount (42 votes). Consideration of 573 previously rejected ballots had only added to his lead, then up to 74 votes.

But then a tray of 162 “misplaced” absentee votes was suddenly discovered in a warehouse in Democrat-heavy King County, and by the end of December Gregoire was ahead by 130 votes. Litigation followed but was never successful in unseating her.

Before, there was Lyndon Johnson’s election to the Senate in 1948 via a batch of 202 ballots found six days after polls closed in a small town in south Texas, and John Kennedy’s election to the presidency in 1960 via fake voter registrations (names found on cemetery tombstones and an empty house with 56 votes tied to it).

The lesson is clear: Democrats believe in finding votes, until they’re ahead. Then it’s game over. It’s a sport Democrats know well, but Republicans seem to instinctively fail to understand. As Coleman commented, “I’ve watched this drama before. The other side is very good at this. … if you have an accounting process that simply allows unlimited ballots to kind of come in without being checked, without being verified, without having timestamps, who knows what you get in the end?”

Democrats will argue that Al Gore was cheated out of victory in 2000, but the simple truth is that, for once, they were stopped from perpetual recounting in accordance with the law. There had already been an initial count (1,784 Bush margin), and then a state-mandated machine recount which again yielded a Bush win (327 votes).

It should’ve ended there, but Gore’s team then sought a manual recount in four selected counties, and eventually the Florida Supreme Court ordered a state-wide manual recount that threatened to go on forever. Four days later, on December 12, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court stopped it on the grounds that different counting methods were being used, a violation of the Equal Protection Clause, and the fact that the state’s electoral deadline was at hand.

The decision ended Democrats’ attempts to continue counting “hanging chads” ad infinitum. Writing in support of the ruling, Justice Antonin Scalia warned of “irreparable harm” by “the counting of votes that are of questionable legality.” With words that could be called upon today, he noted that, “Count first, and rule upon legality afterwards, is not a recipe for producing election results that have the public acceptance democratic stability requires.”

The Supreme Court must soon hear these arguments in another presidential race. More important than whether the person who takes the oath of office in January is Republican or Democrat is the confidence of the American people in the validity and fairness of the process. We may be witnessing the end of election integrity—and nations do not long stand when the foundation of democracy is shattered.

Bob Anderson is a partner and CFO of a hotel development company and a former aerospace engineer who worked on the International Space Station and interned in Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) at the Pentagon. He is also a licensed commercial pilot.

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Leftist Scream/Cry/Shout/Bemoan Foreign Interference In Our Elections

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Warren And Biden Support Taxpayer-Funded Transgender Surgery

Reported by Mary Margaret Olohan | Social Issues Reporter | September 24, 2019 11:05 AM ET

URL of the original posting site: https://dailycaller.com/2019/09/24/warren-biden-transgender-surgery/

Democratic presidential candidates Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren want American taxpayers to pay for transgender surgeries. The 2020 candidates spoke at a LGBTQ forum GLAAD, the Advocate and the Cedar Rapids Gazette hosted in Iowa on Sept. 20, according to Vox. Both Biden and Warren touched on taxpayer-funded sex reassignment surgeries.

Biden promised to make transgender surgery legal under Obamacare. “It does cover the surgery. It does cover transgender people,” he said. “It does cover across the board. … Every LGBTQ person as well as anyone else should be able to have full health care without any limitations.”

“No doctor can deny you. No hospital can tell you can’t get the service,” the former vice president added. “It is simply against the law when I’m president.” (RELATED: Every Democratic 2020 Frontrunner Supports Bill Forcing Male Athletes Into Girls’ Sports)

WATCH:

Warren also weighed in on whether she supports taxpayer-funded transgender surgery. The Gazette’s Lyz Lenz reminded Warren that the presidential candidate formerly did not support gender affirming surgery for transgender inmates. Warren said in 2012, “I have to say, I don’t think it’s a good use of taxpayer dollars.”

Lenz also said Warren changed her opinion on this issue in January. “You just said we have to get everyone on board. How do we even do that?” the moderator asked.

WATCH:

“The way I think about this in America — equal means equal and that is true everywhere,” Warren said. “It’s true in the workplace, it’s true in marriage and it’s true in health care. And we have to be willing to get out there and fight for it. It’s true for people who are straight. It’s true for people who are gay, bi, trans, intersex. It’s true for everyone.”

“Medicare for all is not something that goes through the states. This is a direct commitment from the federal government to every single person in this country that you will have the full range of health care services that you need,” the Massachusetts senator continued.

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California Lawmakers Are Trying To Allow Non-US-Citizens To Run For State Office

Reported by Steven Ahle May 2, 2018

URL of the original posting site: https://steadfastandloyal.com/unreal/california-lawmakers-are-trying-to-allow-non-us-citizens-to-run-for-state-office/

What could possibly go wrong with this? Who would they support the most? California or illegal immigrants? Also, how could you limit them to voting for statewide offices only? If they vote for a House member, Senate or presidential, it’s a felony. Not that the Democrats would mind, the have wet dreams about it on a daily basis. The bill, SB 174, would amend an old provision in the state code that was originally drawn up in 1872 in order to prevent Chinese and other immigrants from running for state offices.

But the new law wouldn’t be limited to legal residents. Illegal aliens would be permitted to run for state offices. But it would also make them highly visible deportation targets. The bill is the brainchild of California State Sen. Ricardo Lara.

It is not necessarily a bill to shore up illegal aliens as much as it is a way of shaking up Lara’s failing campaign for California Insurance Commissioner. Polls show that Lara is far behind former California Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, who instead of running as a Republican again is running as an independent.

There has been no word on how other legislators feel about the proposal but my guess is they really don’t want the competition.

From Breitbart News

California has already allowed at least two illegal aliens to serve in state office. Most recently, State Sen. Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) appointed Lizbeth Mateo to the California Student Opportunity and Access Program Project Grant Advisory Committee.

Mateo is an illegal alien who was brought to the U.S. as a minor by her parents but is not eligible for deferred deportation under DACA because she returned to Mexico and attempted to re-enter the U.S. in 2013 as part of a protest. She was detained at the border and requested asylum — after spending several weeks in Mexico with family.

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House GOP demands new special counsel to investigate Obama admin

Posted July 28, 2017 01:35 PM by Chris Pandolfo

URL of the original posting site: https://www.conservativereview.com/articles/house-gop-demands-new-special-counsel-to-investigate-obama-admin

Clinton & Obama | Marc Nozell | Flickr

House Republicans want a new special counsel to investigate members of the Obama administration.

The House Judiciary Committee on Thursday sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein calling for the appointment of a second special counsel to investigate former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, former FBI Director James Comey, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Heavy reports.

“We are writing to you to request assistance in restoring public confidence in our nation’s justice system and its investigators, specifically the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),” the letter says. “We need to enable these agencies to perform their necessary and important law enforcement and intelligence functions fully unhindered by politics.”

Republicans expressed that they are not confident that Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating the full scope of matters related to the 2016 election, especially those pertaining to interference in the election conducted by members of the Obama administration.

“The unbalanced, uncertain, and seemingly unlimited focus of the special counsel’s investigation has led many of our constituents to see a dual standard of justice that benefits only the powerful and politically well-connected,” the letter states.

Among the evidence of untoward behavior by the Obama administration Republicans cited was Mr. Comey’s sworn testimony before Congress that Loretta Lynch instructed him to refer to the FBI’s criminal probe into Hillary Clinton as a “matter” rather than an “investigation.” Additional reports of Comey’s closed-door testimony before Congress go further than the public record, suggesting that Lynch told Comey to get out of her office after he confronted her privately with evidence that suggested she had agreed “to put the kibosh on any prosecution of Clinton.”

Comey’s own decision to close the investigation into Secretary Clinton shortly after that meeting has also caused suspicion of misconduct.

Conservative Review Editor-in-Chief Mark Levin has previously called for former FBI Director Comey to be investigated. Earlier this month, The Hill reported that over half of Comey’s private memos on conversations he had with President Trump contained classified information. If that report is true, Comey had the same disregard for classified information as Hillary Clinton, whom he was criminally investigating for before declaring that he would not indict Clinton.

“It’s absolutely contemptible,” Levin said of Comey’s behavior, declaring that Comey “must be subjected to an investigation.”

Further, Levin has noted how there is ample evidence of how the Obama administration colluded to cover up its knowledge of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

This letter by House Republicans is just the first step in what must be a comprehensive investigation of the Obama administration’s actions during the 2016 election.

Here is the letter in full:

House Judiciary Letter by Chris on Scribd

https://www.scribd.com/embeds/354905846/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll&access_key=key-YsJ3EedNhoXiqaAcY6IN&show_recommendations=true

Chris Pandolfo is a staff writer and type-shouter for Conservative Review. He holds a B.A. in politics and economics from Hillsdale College. His interests are conservative political philosophy, the American founding, and progressive rock. Follow him on Twitter for doom-saying and great album recommendations @ChrisCPandolfo.

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Voters are backing POTUS’ travel moratorium, big league

Posted July 05, 2017 10:50 AM by Nate Madden

URL of the original posting site: https://www.conservativereview.com/articles/voters-are-backing-potus-travel-moratorium-big-league

president thumbs up outside on south lawn of white house

President Donald Trump gives a ‘thumbs up’ as he walks across the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Wednesday, June 7, 2017. Pablo Martinez Monsivais | AP Images

After months of wrangling against the mainstream media and liberal federal judges, President Trump’s moratorium on immigration from six Middle Eastern countries has not only won at the Supreme Court, but is winning in the court of public opinion, according to a new Politico/Morning Consult poll.

Per the story at Politico Wednesday, when asked about the administration’s “new guidelines which say visa applicants from six predominantly Muslim countries must prove a close family relationship with a U.S. resident in order to ender the country,” 60 percent of those surveyed supported the measure, while a mere 28 percent were against it.

The survey of almost 2,000 registered voters also found that the policy was a big hit with independents in addition to Republicans. While 84 percent of GOP voters support the revised measure, 56 percent of independent voters got behind it as well, with just 30 percent opposed.

Finally, registered Democrats signaled more of a split on the policy than a decided opposition to it, showing only a five-point discrepancy with no majority either way. A mere 46 percent of Democrat voters opposed the moratorium, with 41 percent in favor.

The moratorium popularity boost comes at a moment when both the president and his primary policy focus – health care reform – are facing rough numbers themselves.

And with the GOP’s efforts to repeal/address/bail out Obamacare stuck in political limbo and tax reform far away on the horizon, it would appear that the kind of tough anti-terror and immigration policy that got him elected might just be the clearest winner in the president’s political arsenal.

When news of the unanimous Supreme Court decision holding up the substantive portions of the moratorium came out, Conservative Review’s Daniel Horowitz pointed out that the win provided the administration an opportunity to seize and expand upon. The new polling numbers this week appear to have proven him correct, on some level.

“With Obamacare repeal going down in flames and Republicans accomplishing nothing else, Trump needs to notch up some transformational victories on immigration,” Horowitz wrote. “Ensuring that America doesn’t self-immolate as a civilization, as Europe is doing before our very eyes, should be at the top of that list.”

He goes on to suggest that Trump should continue charging forward on his national security agenda by imposing a full-year moratorium on refugee resettlement until the full impact of the program can be evaluated, especially since the highest court in the land has issued the no-brainer ruling that he has the authority to do so.

“There is something seriously wrong when, even according to former FBI Director James Comey, 300 of the roughly 2,000 terrorism investigations relate to refugees, well beyond their composition of the population,” Horowitz concluded.

He goes on to argue that the current Obama-designated cap of 50,000 resettlements per year is too high and that lowering it would “send a clear message that security is paramount and that such a move is well within his authority.”

As of the time of this writing, the current number of refugee resettlements for this fiscal year is at 49,255.

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Justice for Brian Terry: Cartel member suspected of murdering border agent with Fast & Furious gun finally arrested

Reported By: Nate Madden | April 13, 2017

URL of the original posting site: https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2017/04/justice-for-brian-terry-cartel-member-suspected-of-murdering-border-agent-with-fast-furious

U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agent Brian Terry

U.S. Customs and Border Protections

Nearly seven years after the untimely and tragic death of fallen Border Patrol agent Brian Terry, his suspected murderer — a member of a Mexican cartel — has finally been apprehended in Mexico, bringing a bit more closure to the deadly result of Obama’s “Fast and Furious Scandal.”

Terry lost his life in a shootout along the Mexico border with cartel thugs just 10 days before Christmas in 2010. The guns used be the thugs in the firefight, it was later revealed, had been obtained via an undercover United States government operation.

Here’s the story as reported by Fox News:

The suspect, Heraclio Osorio-Arellanes, was apprehended by a joint U.S.-Mexico law enforcement task force that included the Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Marshals and the Border Patrol Tactical Unit (BORTAC).

A $250,000 reward had been sought for information leading to the arrest of Osorio-Arellanes, who was captured at a ranch on the border of the Mexican states of Sinaloa and Chihuahua. U.S. authorities have said they will seek his extradition.

Four other cartel members present at the 2010 gunfight have already been sentenced to jail in the United States, with one pleading guilty to first-degree murder in 2014. However, Jesus Rosario Favela-Astorga — the last remaining member of the crew — is still believed to be at large.

living nextdoor to you Terry’s death ended up setting off a chain of events that would expose the Obama administration’s now-infamous Operation Fast and Furious. The scandal started in 2009, when the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms hatched a plan to release firearms into the hands of international criminals, and let them walk across the border with the intent of tracking them once they went to Mexico.

But once the guns got to Mexico, it was like they had vanished into the wind. Reports would later reveal the ATF made no real effort to trace the guns once they were out of the United States.

Why

Documents uncovered by investigators showed the operation was a Machiavellian effort by Obama officials to make the case for stricter gun control. A CBS report from 2012 demonstrated that part of the plan was to let guns fall into the hands of people who would use them to commit crimes, and then ride the political blowback to increase regulations on firearms sales here in the United States.

Two of “walked” guns were found at the scene of Brian Terry’s murder.

While Terry is the only known American to have died as a result of the ATF operation, it may never be known just how many innocent Mexican lives have been taken by cartel violence with weapons supplied by Obama’s first presidential scandal.

Following a media firestorm and congressional investigation, the operation was shuttered. But none the shame Obama and then-Attorney General Eric Holder endured during the fallout brought Agent Terry back, nor did it bring back the hundreds of firearms still in the hands of Mexican gang members.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Nate Madden is a Staff Writer for Conservative Review, focusing on religious freedom, immigration, and the judiciary. He previously served as the Director of Policy Relations for the 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative. A Publius Fellow, John Jay Fellow, Citadel Parliamentary Fellow and National Journalism Center alumnus, Nate’s writing has previously appeared in several religious and news publications. Follow him @NateMaddenCR and on Facebook.

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11 times Dems were conveniently FOR the nuclear option before they were against it

Reported By: Nate Madden | April 04, 2017

URL of the original posting site: https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2017/04/11-times-dems-were-conveniently-for-the-nuclear-option-before-they-were-against-it

Senators Dick Durbin and Chuck Schumer / George Miller | Flickr

The next escalation in the great judicial war is upon us. As Senate Democrats gird themselves to filibuster President Trump’s Supreme Court pick, Republicans may just take a page from Democrats’ 2013 playbook and invoke what’s known as the nuclear option — a change to Senate rules that would effectively block a filibuster of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, Neil Gorsuch included.

Current Senate rules require Supreme Court nominees to meet a 60-vote threshold in order to be confirmed, which gives the minority party an incredible amount of power in blocking the nominee’s confirmation — exactly as the Founding Fathers intended. Invoking the nuclear option, as Senate Democrats did in 2013 with lower court nominations, would make the confirmation a simple majority vote. In order words, Gorsuch and every future Supreme Court nominee would only need 51 votes to be confirmed — dramatically weakening the minority party’s ability to block a nominee.

For decades, with the increasing politicization of the bench has come an even greater politicization of the Supreme Court nomination process. What began with Robert Bork will now culminate in a nuclear vote for Neil Gorsuch and all the rest of Donald Trump’s nominees, with the losing party naturally up in arms.

Delaware Democrat Chris Coons — who became the necessary 41^st filibuster pledge to force the GOP’s hand on Gorscuh’s nomination — called the prospect of lowering the vote threshold “tragic” just last week.

But, “in war,” the Greek writer Aeshcylus reminds us, “truth is the first casualty.” The shoe was one the other foot for several of these same Democrats just three and a half years ago. Back then a Democrat Senate majority led by former Senator Harry Reid ended the filibuster for circuit court level nominees.

Here are some of their greatest hits from ‘Nuclear 2013.’

1. “[Democrats would] much prefer the risk of up-or-down votes in majority rule than the risk of continued total obstruction. That’s the bottom line, no matter who’s in power.” – Sen. Chuck Schumer, D, N.Y.

2. “It’s never, ever, ever been like this. You reach a point where your frustrations just overwhelm and things have to change.” – Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., justifying the nuclear option to The Daily Beast.

3. “Every senator takes an oath of office promising to support and defend the Constitution. No senator takes an oath to protect the filibuster.” – Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) in The Boston Globe

4. “This is a terrific vote for the U.S. Senate.” – Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore.

5. “We all have heard the story of President Washington saying the Senate is a cooling saucer, but never was the Senate intended to be a deep freeze … [y]et that is what it has become.” – Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore.

6. “I’m just so encouraged now that we’re going to be able to — without filibusters — put people on the courts in an orderly way.” – Tom Udall, D-N.M.

7. “If there are differences in the Senate, then debate should be had, people should vote their conscience, they should vote on behalf of their constituents, but they should vote. That’s what they’re there to do. And ultimately, if you got a majority of folks who believe in something, then it should be able to pass.” – President Barack Obama

8. “Americans sent us here to get things done, but in recent years, the minority has filibustered again and again — not to slow action out of substantive concerns, but for political gain. Any president — Democrat or Republican — should be able to make their necessary appointments.” – Tom Udall

9. “The Senate has spoken. It has said we have tried to restore, through mutual understanding, the norms and traditions of the Senate time and time again, and each time the minority has failed to uphold its position.” – Jeff Merkley

10. “Ending the abusive filibuster on nominations is a big step toward restoring the functionality of the Senate, and that matters for all of us. I hope we continue to look at ways to make this legislative body work better. We face big challenges as a nation, and we need a Congress that can take on those challenges.” – Jeff Merkley

Perhaps one of the most prescient and telling quotes for the situation was uttered by then-Majority Leader Harry Reid as he walked out of the chamber following the 2013 vote:

11. “When the Republicans are in power, these changes will apply to them as well. That’s simple fairness.”

As Guy Benson points out in greater detail at TownHall, the GOP’s decision — while unfortunate — has been precipitated by years of Democrat-driven obfuscation and obstruction on judicial nominations. Democrats have made their beds, now they’ll have to get nuked in them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Nate Madden is a Staff Writer for Conservative Review, focusing on religious freedom, immigration, and the judiciary. He previously served as the Director of Policy Relations for the 21st Century Wilberforce Initiative. A Publius Fellow, John Jay Fellow, Citadel Parliamentary Fellow and National Journalism Center alumnus, Nate’s writing has previously appeared in several religious and news publications. Follow him @NateMaddenCR and on Facebook.

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Posts tagged ‘Elections’

BY: J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS | MARCH 17, 2023

J. Christian Adams is the President of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a former Justice Department attorney, and current commissioner on the United States Commission for Civil Rights.

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BY: JOSEPH ARLINGHAUS AND WILLIAM DOYLE, PH.D. | MARCH 16, 2023

Raw Institutional Power

Democrats’ ‘Election-Industrial Complex’

“ELECTION-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX“

Conservatives Must Rebuild Classic Electoral Norms

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BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | MARCH 15, 2023

Alaska

Georgia

Ohio

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Texas

Virginia

South Carolina

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BY: SHAWN FLEETWOOD | MARCH 01, 2023

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BY: VICTORIA MARSHALL | FEBRUARY 14, 2023

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

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BY: VICTORIA MARSHALL | FEBRUARY 09, 2023

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

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BY: JOY PULLMANN | JANUARY 30, 2023

Notice there’s no probe into Schiff’s blatant and repeated misuse of the classified information he was privileged to receive on the House Intelligence Committee. But there could be if he stopped being such a useful Democrat.

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BY: VICTORIA MARSHALL | JANUARY 18, 2023

What This Means

“On November 9th, the reported count is 25,000 ballots less, which is beyond the margin here, than on November 10th,” Olsen said. “So the day after the election, they put out what the count is and then magically 25,000 ballots appear on November 10th, and well, hey, that’s the race.”

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

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BY: VICTORIA MARSHALL | JANUARY 11, 2023

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

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BY: VICTORIA MARSHALL | DECEMBER 28, 2022

What’s To Be Done

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

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BY: MOLLIE HEMINGWAY | DECEMBER 21, 2022

About that $1.7 Trillion Spending Package

Republicans Need a Leader Who Shares Their Goals

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BY: JOY PULLMANN | DECEMBER 14, 2022

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Scrutinizing Arizona’s Election Administration Does Not Make Kari Lake An ‘Election Denier’

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BY: AUGUSTE MEYRAT | NOVEMBER 16, 2022

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BY: KYLEE GRISWOLD | NOVEMBER 08, 2022

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By JACK MCEVOY, ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT REPORTER | November 08, 2022

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Michigan Is Hiding A Children’s Constitutional Right To Genital Amputation In Its Abortion Amendment

It’s Right in the Text

Prop 3 Applies to Men and Women AND Boys and Girls

The rights of parents do not matter; Mom and Dad have no rights. And even the health of the girl does not matter because, under the plain language of the amendment, the state’s interest cannot “infringe” on the “individual’s autonomous decision-making.”

Planned Parenthood Targets Kids One Way or Another

With less than one month to go before Michiganders cast their final ballots, little time remains to give proof to the left’s lie that Prop 3 is about codifying Roe. It is not. It is about sacrificing the children of the state — both born and unborn.

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