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A To-Do List for States to Ensure Fair, Honest Elections in 2024


By: Hans von Spakovsky / @HvonSpakovsky / November 21, 2023

Read more at https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/11/21/a-to-do-list-for-states-to-ensure-fair-honest-elections-in-2024/

Ensuring fair elections should be a top priority for federal, state, and local lawmakers. Pictured: An employee at the Utah County election office puts mail-in ballots into a container to register the vote in the midterm elections on Nov. 6, 2018, in Provo, Utah. (Photo: George Frey/Getty Images)

The 2024 primary season is already in full swing, but it’s not too late for states to improve the security and integrity of their election process to the benefit of all voters, no matter their political preferences.

The American public wants and deserves an election system in which the candidates who get the most legitimate votes of eligible voters are declared the winners, and elections are not marred by errors, fraud, and other serious issues and misbehavior that make voters and candidates question the legitimacy of election outcomes.

Anyone who doubts the need for reform should take a look at The Heritage Foundation’s Election Fraud Database, which is constantly being updated with new cases of and convictions for fraud from across the country.

In an era of razor-thin elections, guarding against this type of illegal behavior, as well as errors made by election officials, is especially important. In 2024, it could prove critical.

The good news is that there is still time to implement the kind of reforms needed to help secure elections and maintain the public’s confidence in them. Although most states have part-time legislatures, most of those legislative sessions occur in the first quarter of each year, giving state legislators the ability to make final improvements—at least for the general election in November—starting in January.

States with full-time legislatures, such as California and Michigan, can pass such improvements immediately.

So, what can be done? For starters, states should ensure that election officials maintain current, accurate voter rolls. They should require photo identification to vote, both in person and absentee. For registered voters who don’t already have a photo ID, states should provide one free of charge.

States should also ban funding of state and local election offices by partisan private donors and organizations. This sort of shady funding occurred in the 2020 election and created clear and obvious conflicts of interest.

States should also prohibit ballot trafficking. Allowing third-party strangers such as candidates, campaign staffers, party activists, and political guns-for-hire, all of whom have a stake in the outcome of an election, to handle a voter’s ballot is an invitation to fraud and coercion.

Finally, transparency is fundamental for states seeking to conduct honest elections and maintain public confidence in their credibility. With that in mind, states should reject calls to restrict the access of election observers and ensure that observers have complete and unfettered access to every aspect of our elections, from the processing of voter-registration applications to the casting of votes and the counting of ballots.

The best and easiest toolkit that legislators and citizens can use to determine how to improve their elections is the Election Integrity Scorecard, which The Heritage Foundation launched in December 2021. The scorecard analyzes the election laws, regulations, and procedures of all 50 states and the District of Columbia by comparing them with a list of 47 best-practices recommendations. These recommendations outline the best ways for election officials to ensure the integrity of their state elections.

Each state is scored based on its implementation of these best practices. No state in the country has a perfect score of 100, which means everyone has some work to do. Tennessee and Georgia are at the top of the ranking, with scores of 84 and 83, respectively. Nevada and Hawaii find themselves at the bottom, with abysmally failing marks of only 28 and 26, respectively.

Heritage’s scorecard also includes a detailed analysis for each state (plus the District), informing legislators and election officials what they need to fix. The scorecard even offers model legislation on absentee ballots, accurate voter rolls, election observers, private funding of election offices, vote trafficking, and other important reforms.

Less than one year away from Election Day 2024, the time for the public, local, and state election officials and state legislators to ensure the integrity of our elections and protect the franchise for voters is now.

Originally published by The Washington Times

COMMENTARY BY

Hans von Spakovsky@HvonSpakovsky

Hans von Spakovsky is a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, a former commissioner on the Federal Election Commission, and former counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Justice. He is a member of the board of the Public Interest Legal Foundation.

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Conservative American Ally Guatemala May Fall to the Left


By: Meredith Bernal / Max Primorac / August 16, 2023

Read more at https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/08/16/conservative-american-ally-guatemala-may-fall-left/

Guatemalan candidate for president and former First Lady Sandra Torres speaks at a podium
Guatemala is one of America’s last partners in the region that still holds conservative values: free-market, anti-communism, and pro-family. Sunday’s election could threaten that should the Left find a new base in Central America. Pictured: Candidate for president of Guatemala and former first lady Sandra Torres presents her plan for government in Guatemala City on Aug. 7, 2023, in the run-up to the Aug. 20 ballot. (Photo: Fernando Aguilar, AFP/Getty Images)

Elections have consequences. They can either benefit a nation or lead to disastrous outcomes. On June 25, Guatemala held its first round of the presidential election, and the results ended disastrously for this historically conservative Central American country of 17 million people.

The results also do not bode well for America, as the current government has been pro-U.S. and a staunch American foreign policy ally, and the election of a leftist government could dramatically change all that. In an unexpected twist of events, the two candidates heading into this Sunday’s run-off elections are former first lady Sandra Torres and Bernardo Arévalo, son of former Guatemalan President Juan José Arévalo Bermejo—both leftists. The two won the first election round with only 15% and 11%, respectively, in a deeply fractured vote.

Prior to the elections, the then-frontrunner, a conservative businessman, was controversially disqualified by the attorney general while the Right has come under heavy criticism for splintering the nation’s majority conservative vote, leaving an opportunity for the Left to gain control. The results break this year’s string of conservative wins in Latin America. First, Chile’s Marxist president tried to radically change the country’s pro-free market form of government through a constitutional convention to rewrite the nation’s constitution. He was upended after conservatives won two-thirds of the convention seats.

Paraguay’s conservatives easily kept control of their government. And this past weekend saw conservatives in Argentina win nearly two-thirds of the vote in the first round of presidential elections amid a country financially ruined by the ruling socialist government.

It is Torres’ third time as a presidential candidate while it is Arévalo’s first. Torres campaigned on an agenda centered on “transforming Guatemala to be a place of equality, where women and men have the same opportunities, the youth find jobs, and everyone develops peace of mind.”  

A social democrat, observers tell us, “She is too corrupt.” Since June, Torres has pivoted her campaign message to cast herself as a defender of the country’s deeply held conservative values—pro-life, pro-family, and pro-religion. She promises to name conservative ministers to her government if she wins. Nevertheless, public distrust of her runs high.

Arévalo hails from a new political party, Semilla. Local conservatives fear “he will make common cause with global progressives on abortion, gender identity, and a pro-LGBTQ+ platform.” Last year, Semilla unsuccessfully introduced a bill in parliament “for persons who menstruate,” a reference to “transgender” men’s rights (transgender men are biological women).

In neighboring Mexico, the ruling left-wing Morena (Movement for Social Regeneration) Party has convicted conservative members of parliament and church leaders for “gender-based political violence” for speaking out against transgender ideology. An Arévalo victory could bring similar pressures on the Guatemalan people.

During the campaign, Arévalo evaded questions about social issues and has laser focused on an appealing anti-corruption agenda. While Guatemala has made substantial improvements in democratizing its national economy, it remains riven with corruption between government and businesses and scandals that have eaten into Guatemalans’ trust in their own institutions. Indeed, voter turnout exposed the country’s loss of faith in government, as only 60% of eligible voters showed up at the polls with 24% of them leaving their ballots blank. In sum, half of the country opted out of participating in the elections.

The impact of Guatemala’s election on American national security could be severe. The current conservative government has been a staunch U.S. foreign policy ally, recognizing Taiwan over Communist China, openly backing Ukraine over Russia, and being solidly pro-Israel and pro-U.S.

Other Latin American states have joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative of receiving massive loans and infrastructure investments in return for loyalty to Beijing. Recently, current Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei pledged “absolute support” for Taiwan after neighboring Honduras switched sides and recognized Beijing over Taipei.

Torres promised to maintain relations with and expand economic relations with Taiwan. Her critics warn, however, that given the executive powers of the president, once in office, “she could easily switch to China.” 

Alejandro Palmieri, the editor of La Republica Guatemala, warns that “Torres previously praised the PRC [People’s Republic of China] as an economic powerhouse, though she still wants to maintain relationships with the United States and Taiwan since they are important trade partners for us.”

As for Arévalo, he has made it clear that he wants to establish closer relations with China since he believes that it is essential for Guatemala’s economic growth.

Palmieri said that Guatemala’s conservative values are aligned with conservative American principles: “Guatemala is one of the U.S.’s last partners in the region that still holds conservative values such as support for a free-market economy, recognizing the hemispheric threat Communist China represents, and fidelity to the idea that the family structure is central to our lives.”

Sunday’s election results could threaten those shared values should international progressives find a new base in Central America. No doubt, as the White House has done with Marxist victors in Brazil and Colombia and progressives elsewhere in the hemisphere, it is likely only too keen to roll out the red carpet for Guatemala’s next left-wing president.  

COMMENTARY BY

Meredith Bernal

Meredith Bernal was a member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation.

Max Primorac

Max Primorac is director of The Heritage Foundation’s Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy. He previously served as acting chief operating officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development. From 2009 to 2011, he was a senior adviser to the Afghan government.

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International Politics

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5 factors Christians should consider when casting their vote


By Jason Mattera, Op-ed contributor| Monday, August 01, 2022

Read more at https://www.christianpost.com/voices/5-factors-christians-should-consider-when-casting-their-vote.html/

Voters leave a polling station after casting their votes during the U.S. presidential election in Olmsted Falls, Ohio, November 8, 2016. | Reuters/Aaron Josefczyk

Politics can be a messy business.

From the varied special interests wielding influence behind the scenes to the undeniable fact that we’re often left with candidates who exhibit demonstrable character defects, the idea of voting our values as Christians can seem like a daunting enterprise.

This reality is one reason why the proverbial phrase “the lesser of two evils” has become a go-to expression each election cycle. It’s an acknowledgment that both political parties fall short of our biblical standards in some way — embodying worrying degrees of corruption, bad ideas, and problematic leadership.

But that phrase is also an acknowledgment that Christians shouldn’t just throw up their hands in surrender, even if our choices are less than ideal. As best we can, we should pursue the application of biblical principles to every area of life, which includes the domain of politics.

How, then, should Christians weigh upcoming elections as they assess who to support at the ballot box?

Thanks to the recent slate of excellent Supreme Court rulings, we at least have a practical blueprint to help inform us as we make our decision.

Here are five areas to sharpen our focus during election season.

Ally to the pro-life community

Protecting unborn life in the womb should be one of the primary motivating factors for any serious Christian. The ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization undid the horrors of Roe v. Wade, turning the abortion battle from the national to the state level.

Which politician, Christian or not, will be an ally to the pro-life community?

That’s the question we must ask.

The ones who are hostile to the pro-life community will make it obvious.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., for instance, demanded that the feds shut down crisis pregnancy centers by force while her colleagues in the House blocked a congressional resolution to condemn the violence and vandalism directed at faith-based organizations in the aftermath of Dobbs.

Meanwhile, abortion fanatic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, D, ghoulishly vetoed millions of dollars from the budget that was allocated by the Michigan legislature to “encourage adoption and support pro-life pregnancy facilities.”

Like I said, they make it obvious.

Religious liberty

What good is religious liberty if you can’t exercise it in a public place? Not good at all, the Supreme Court concluded in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District.

Coach Joe Kennedy, if you’ll recall, was canned by his employer, a public school district, for leading a voluntary prayer on the field after each game. The district ridiculously argued that this voluntary prayer, which players from both teams participated in, was a de facto establishment of religion by the school.

It was not.

It was an American citizen exercising his God-given right to praise his Creator free from government interference.

Which politician will rigorously protect the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious liberty and free speech?

This question is all the more important to sort out after we witnessed megalomaniac governors and local officials exploit the coronavirus pandemic to shutter churches and limit attendance capacity for almost a year, even as they allowed abortion clinics and pot shops to remain open and accessible.

Put differently, will the politician be a friend or foe to the Church?

Lest you think such a query is too abstract, remember that Beto O’Rourke, who is currently running for governor in Texas, previously told a CNN townhall audience in 2019 that, if elected president, he would rescind the tax-exemption status of any Christian nonprofit that opposed same-sex marriage.

School choice

In Carson v. Makin, the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Maine, if it is going to subsidize tuition costs for private schools, cannot freeze out faith-based schools from receiving funds as well.

“That is discrimination against religion,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote.

Three of Roberts’s colleagues objected to the decision, which means three Supreme Court justices believed that Maine was justified in explicitly barring tax dollars from going toward religious instruction even as the State made tax dollars available to other private institutions.

“Discrimination” is the right word choice.

For voting purposes, any program or law — charters, vouchers, home school protections — that aids Christians in removing their children from the public school system is a win.

Government schools are not values-neutral venues for education. They are temples of worship for humanism, where a secular worldview is at the core of what is taught. If that agenda wasn’t evident already, the relentless reporting by Christopher Rufo exposing the radical gender ideology showcased in the classroom should leave no doubts.

Separation of powers

Civil government isn’t the only form of government, biblically speaking. It’s one form among many.

God also instituted self-government (Proverbs 16:32), family government (Genesis 2:23-24), and church government (1 Timothy 3:1-15), along with civil government (Romans 13:1-6).

And throughout Scripture He places different emphases and assigns different roles to each of these jurisdictions. Under this design, tyranny is averted because power is not centralized in any one form of government; it’s decentralized, or it should be anyway.

That’s the road to freedom. But that’s not how Washington, D.C., has functioned lately.

Americans have lost a great deal of their freedoms to unelected bureaucrats who populate the administrative state. No-name pencil pushers are imposing vast regulations on American society by decree, making a mockery of our Constitution’s commitment to “checks and balances.”

A seismic correction, however, could be in the works, thanks to the ruling in West Virginia v. EPA. Here the Supreme Court blocked the Environmental Protection Agency, and, by extension, other government agencies, from snatching power that was never delegated to them by Congress in the first place. As Neil Gorsuch underscored in a concurring opinion, any federal agency endeavoring to regulate “‘a significant portion of the American economy’” must be given an overt mandate by the legislative body. The same determination applies if an agency is trying to “require ‘billions of dollars in spending’ by private persons or entities,” the justice added.

It’ll now be more difficult for some Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez fanboy you’ve never heard of to micromanage your life from the windowless office of his D.C. cubicle.

While defanging the administrative state may not be as flashy as the other Supreme Court opinions handed down this term, West Virginia v. EPA is nonetheless a crucial part in upholding the biblical precept of separation of powers. Christians should be suspicious of any politician who doesn’t respect these constitutional boundaries.

One last thing…

This next topic wasn’t addressed in the Supreme Court’s most recent docket, but it remains an indispensable part of how Christians should assess who to back for political office. And that topic surrounds this question: What kind of people will the candidate staff his administration with?

That question is critical because who an elected leader hires to implement his policies reflects that administration’s beliefs and priorities. It’s not a one-man operation, after all.

Which brings us to President Joe Biden.

He appointed a man pretending to be a woman to a key healthcare role at the White House. Admiral “Rachel” Levine, formerly known as Richard Levine, is the assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services. During an MSNBC interview not too long ago, Mr. Levine said he remains dedicated to empowering “trans youth” to get “gender-affirmation treatment in their state,” which is the euphemistic way of saying he supports pumping adolescents full of puberty blockers and recommending “sex” reassignment surgery if these “youth” convey discontentment about their gender.

Any politician or party who defends mutilating children over feelings they’ll eventually grow out of has tilted the “evil” in “the lesser of two evils” balancing act unequivocally to one side of the electoral scale … which means that balancing act no longer exists.

The Biden administration has similarly made news by hiring a guy at the Department of Energy’s nuclear waste division who shows up to work in stilettos, a dress, lipstick, and goes by the pronoun “they.” The same dude reportedly brags about his bizarre sexual fetish that involves animal role-playing. It’s called “pup-play,” if you’re interested.

What this means in the context of voting is that we may not like the candidate at the top of the ticket and may even find his personality obnoxious, but that should not automatically be a dealbreaker.

If the candidate is going to hire personnel who champion the unborn, who respect religious liberty and Christian education, who seek to scale back the size and scope of civil government, and who aren’t trying to subvert the biological differences between men and women and castrate kids in the process, then these are all strong factors to consider before casting a ballot.

In other words: Personnel is policy.

Remember that when Election Day rolls around.

Originally published at Standing for Freedom Center. 

Jason Mattera is a New York Times bestselling author and Emmy-nominated journalist. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

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Immigrants turn Orange County blue in 4 decades


Reported by Michael F. Haverluck (OneNewsNow.com) | Thursday, January 3, 2019

CA immigration marchIn just 40 years, an immigration explosion has turned California’s Orange County – formerly a predominantly red Los Angeles urban sprawl area – into a new blue stronghold for Democratic candidates.

“The Democratic capture of four Republican-held congressional seats in Orange County in November – more than half the seven congressional seats Democrats won from Republicans in California – toppled what had long been a fortress of conservative Republicanism,” The New York Times reported in an article titled, “In Orange County, a Republican Fortress Turns Democratic.”  “The sweep stunned party leaders – among them Paul D. Ryan, the outgoing House speaker. Even Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor-elect of California, won the county where Richard M. Nixon was born.”

Foreign makeover

The longtime conservative suburban haven no longer resembles what it looked like in decades past.

“To appreciate the vast cultural and political upheaval across Orange County over the last 40 years, look no further than Bolsa Avenue,” The New York Times’ Adam Nagourney and Robert Gebeloff explained. “The auto body shop, the tax preparer, a church, a food market, countless restaurants – all are marked by signs written in Vietnamese … or head seven miles west to Santa Ana, where Vietnamese makes way for Spanish along Calle Cuatro – a bustling enclave of stores and sidewalk stands serving an overwhelming Latino clientele.”

With California becoming a “sanctuary state” a year ago – not long after San Francisco became a “sanctuary city,” the embrace of Democratic pro-immigration policies by leftist politicians has made California into a safe haven for immigrants, who have taken over many communities in the previously conservative Southern California region.

“But the results [of November’s midterms] reflected what has been a nearly 40-year rise in the number of immigrants, nonwhite residents and college graduates that has transformed this iconic American suburb into a Democratic outpost, highlighted in a Times analysis of demographic data going back to 1980 – the year Ronald Reagan was elected president,” Nagourney and Gebeloff continued. “The ideological shift signaled by the most recent election results – on the heels of Hillary Clinton beating Donald J. Trump here in 2016 – is viewed by leaders in both parties as a warning sign for national Republicans, as suburban communities like this one loom as central battle grounds in the 2020 elections and beyond.”

Blue avalanche

The sharp demographic shift that has taken place in the county that is the home to Disneyland is the result of an immigration explosion that drastically changed the area – especially in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

“There was a steady decrease in white voters in the seven congressional districts that are in and around Orange County between 1980 and 2017, according to census data,” Breitbart News divulged. “In 1980, whites made up 75 percent of the population in the district … by 2017, that number dropped to 30 percent.”

And the number of immigrants in Orange County is expected to continue to grow with immigrants’ far-greater birth rates in the region.

“The county’s immigrant population grew five times as fast as the general population between 1980 and 2000, and while the pace of immigration has slowed, the Latino and Asian populations continues to increase – driven by the children of immigrant families born in the United States,” Breitbart’s John Binder noted.

It was pointed out by Marcia Godwin – a public administration professor at the University of La Verne in Los Angeles – that the registration advantage in Orange County once claimed by Republicans has considerably narrowed over the past few decades.

“You went from a solid Republican county to one in which Republicans were just barely the majority, and it fell pretty quickly in the past two years,” Godwin asserted. “You have had continued demographic changes. This is a county that went from majority-white to having a majority that are Latino and Asian-American. So, that has gone hand-in-hand – particularly with the rising Asian-American population – to voting more Democratic.”

Numbers at the polls are accurate indicators that Orange County is no longer the place it used to be, due to immigration.

“By every measure, this is a far different place than it was in the 1980s,” Nagourney and Gebeloff asserted. “The population of Orange County has grown from 1.9 million in 1980 to nearly 3.2 million in 2017; it is the third largest county in the nation’s most populous state.”

The flood of population increases for two ethnic groups has literally turned the political landscape in Orange County upside-down – as witnessed at the polls.

“In the 48th Congressional District – which voted out Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a fixture of Orange County Republican politics for nearly 30 years – the Latino population jumped to 145,585 in 2017 from 38,803 in 1980, or 8 percent, accounting for 21 percent of the district’s population,” the Times recounted. “In another corner of Orange County – where Representative Mimi Walters, a Republican, was upset by Katie Porter, her Democratic challenger – the Asian-American population jumped from 14,528 in 1980, or 4.4 percent, to 175,540 in 2017, making up just under a quarter of the total population.”

With the immigrant takeover in many Orange County communities, Democrats – such as Gil Cisneros, who stole a House seat formerly held by Ed Royce (R-Calif.) – are now winning handily at the polls.

“Because it’s becoming more diverse, it’s becoming more Democratic, because the Democratic Party is more inclusive,” Cisneros claimed, according to the Times. “This is no fluke at all. It’s been this way for a long time, and it’s going to continue to trend this way for a long time.”

America’s political landscape changing?

This trend is not only evidenced in Orange County, as it has been contended that there are now “two Americas.”

“Republican districts have far fewer immigrants,” Axios.com informed last year.

It is contended that immigration policy is mostly responsible for ethnic communities voting Democrat.

“House seats held by Republicans generally have significantly lower foreign-born populations than those held by Democrats – a likely indication of why the two parties are so far apart on immigration – especially in the lower chamber,” Axios’ Caitlin Owens and Chris Canipe explained at the time.

With Dreamers, amnesty and deportation being hotly debated last year, a large proportion of America’s ethnic minorities have put their trust in the Democratic Party’s open borders pro-immigration stance.

“The clock [was] ticking [last year] on protections for immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, and Congress [was pressed to come up with] a solution,” Owens and Canipe stressed. “It’s obviously members’ job to reflect the interests of their constituents. [so] when the majority of a district’s voters don’t have any skin in the game, meeting in the middle can be tough.”

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