Tonight, the presidential candidates will have their first debate. But there is one critical election issue the American people are not debating at all. They agree that non-U.S. citizens should not vote in U.S. elections.
This is a convenient opinion for Americans to hold as it is also the law.
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It’s been a crazy few weeks. Joe Biden finally quit the presidential race. We heard it first through a tweet using a suspiciously unofficial letterhead, and then he disappeared for a week. It was weird.
I don’t know where they had him or what was going on, but when he appeared, his Oval Office speech was mediocre at best, full of sentimentality and short on explanations for why exactly he was quitting after saying just a few days earlier he would stay. Word is Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer threatened him with removal under the 25th Amendment, which is eminently plausible.
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An election integrity expert told The Tennessee Star that states need to start taking steps to prevent non-citizens from voting in their elections. “I think states need to make it clear in their constitutions that you have to be a citizen to vote in all elections in the state to prevent local school boards, local town councils, and others from legalizing alien voting,” said Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative.
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Based on all the accusations being hurled back and forth over the past eight years, if there’s one thing everyday Americans agree on, it’s the importance of maintaining faith in our elections.
Electoral integrity is a foundational block in our republic’s Jenga tower that, if pulled away, will topple it. Unfortunately, that may be just what a small but dangerous number of Americans are hoping for.
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The truth is out there. Aliens are registering and voting in American elections.
For anyone who cares to see it, the truth is available in public records in election offices across the nation. But unfortunately, those who expose the truth about voting by aliens—illegal immigrants or not—are subjected to ridicule and an onslaught from the Left to preserve the broken status quo.
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A memo must have gone out. Because in several prominent newspapers, the same propaganda appeared at nearly the same time.
The Washington Post said, “Top Republicans, led by Trump, refuse to commit to accept 2024 election results.” The New York Times similarly intoned, “Leading Republicans have refused to say flatly that they will accept the outcome of the presidential election if Donald Trump loses.” Rolling Stone chastised a former presidential candidate: “Tim Scott Embraces Trump’s Election Denialism, Won’t Commit to Accept Results.”
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Democrats claim that non-citizen voting doesn’t occur while Republicans and most states are trying to ensure that only U.S. citizens vote in elections.
As states are adopting constitutional amendments to prevent non-citizens from voting and Republicans are raising the alarm about the issue as more evidence has been presented, Democrats insist that it is not a concern because non-citizens are not voting in U.S. elections.
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President Joe Biden’s signature pieces of legislation are routing billions of dollars into swing states, but pundits are not convinced that the money will make much difference in November’s elections.
The bipartisan infrastructure law of 2021, the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) have cumulatively routed billions of dollars to battleground states over the course of Biden’s first term. The Biden campaign is running swing state ads to promote the funding and projects that Biden’s legislative agenda has created, but state and national pundits told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the benefits are unlikely to be a decisive factor in states like Arizona, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
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Facebook has interfered with U.S. elections almost 40 times since 2008, according to a study conducted by the Media Research Center.
Among the group’s findings are Facebook censuring 2024 presidential candidates, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and 2022 Senate and House candidates on their platform. For example, the company removed Virginia gubernatorial candidate Amanda Chase’s account. The company also “shuttered political advertising one week before the election” in 2020, according to the MRC’s analysis.
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There are multiple ongoing or just-filed election lawsuits this year that could have wide-ranging impact on the 2024 elections, as plaintiffs from both sides of the political aisle challenge election laws or applications of them.
In 2020, there were as many as 400 lawsuits brought by both Republicans and Democrats regarding election procedures and laws as election administration was quickly changed during the COVID-19 lockdowns leading up to the presidential election. This year, new election lawsuits are focusing on candidate eligibility, different changes in law, and alleged violation of election laws. All of these lawsuits may greatly impact how the 2024 presidential election will be conducted.
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There’s a strange disjunction in the discourse about the 2024 elections. On the one hand, when presented with the proposition “Trump can win,” people will nod their heads sagely and say something along the lines of: “Of course he can; only a fool would believe to the contrary.”
At the same time, whenever polling emerges showing that Donald Trump is performing well in 2024 matchups, a deluge of panicked articles, tweets (or is it “X”s?), social media posts, and the like emerge, reassuring readers that polls aren’t predictive and providing a variety of reasons that things will improve for President Biden.
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House Republicans have launched an inquiry into whether foreign actors are funneling money through nonprofit groups to influence America’s elections.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith, R-MO., and Oversight Subcommittee Chairman David Schweikert, R-Ariz., released an open letter soliciting input on the matter, suggesting that some nonprofit groups may be violating the law to help political parties and candidates.
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GOP lawmakers and other conservative critics are working to expose and fight a secretive executive order by President Biden to expand voter participation in elections, which they suspect has become a powerful government-wide complement to private left-wing election financing that could tip the 2024 campaign illegally and unfairly in Democrats’ favor.
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Eight House Republicans have introduced a bill to block the use of private money to operate elections and curb the controversial process called ballot harvesting.
If enacted, the Protect American Election Administration Act would block what the bill’s sponsors call a “private takeover of government election administration.”
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Americans can’t seem to agree on much of anything anymore. We’re deeply divided on a wide range of issues: abortion, illegal immigration, gun rights, and so-called climate change, to name a few. In fact, one would be hard pressed to find a major political issue on which Republicans and Democrats overwhelmingly agree.
Political polarization is nothing new: Many countries experience it at one point or another. In America, we once could put our differences aside and settle things at the ballot box. Our electoral system, when functioning as intended, transcends partisan politics. Things are different today, though. COVID-era voting policies need to be reversed in order to restore faith in our electoral process.
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Although about half the states ban private dollars from funding local governing of elections as a response to Mark Zuckerberg’s controversial grants in 2020, a tech-aligned group will dole out individual $500,000 grants to jurisdictions for future elections.
The U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, established in April, will award individual grants of $500,000 to at least two local jurisdictions out of 10 that the organization accepted into the program.
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Americans are less likely to trust the fairness and accuracy of an election if results take “days or weeks” to be counted, according to a new poll.
When asked if results that took “days or weeks” to tabulated were more or less trustworthy, 33.9% of respondents said that it is “much less likely,” and 20.9% said that it is “somewhat less likely,” according to the Trafalgar Group/Convention of States Action poll. Across party lines, 62.7% of Republicans, 27% of independents, and 10.4% of Democrats said that they were “much less likely” to trust results that took “days or weeks” to tabulate.
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There are people who talk nonstop with their dogs and cats. When I get bored, I interrogate machines. My favorite is Google Trends because it shows a lot of things that Democrats would rather you didn’t know. For example, it demonstrates that the main concern of the American people has to do with their sports team and not with sex-change operations and things like that. This leaves Democrats deeply disappointed. A contemporary Democrat is someone who firmly believes that people get out of bed, kneel in front of a picture of the ozone layer, and beat their chests while apologizing to Pachamama for climate change.
With one eye on the elections, I asked Google a few questions, paying special attention to the search trends of American users, and the answers are interesting, to say the least. In the months leading up to the 2020 election, and using George Floyd’s death as an excuse, Democratic discourse focused on stopping the racism that Republicans supposedly encouraged, pretending that this was the country’s biggest problem. But the evolution of Google queries on “racism” reveals a fun fact: no one cared about racism in the least until the Democratic Party decided to bring it into the campaign to capitalize on Floyd’s death. And the funniest thing: that concern disappeared completely the same day Joe Biden became president of the United States, which places his government’s actions in the realm of the paranormal. To put it another way: the old zombie works miracles! As I am suffering a terrible flu (this article might turn out to be posthumous), this miracle has me now seriously thinking of catching a plane, turning up at the White House, and trying to touch the hem of Joe Biden’s robe in a desperate attempt to be healed.
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A recent poll shows that, two years after a controversial presidential election with widespread allegations of voter fraud, over half of Americans still do not have confidence in the way elections are carried out in the United States.
As reported by the Associated Press, the poll by the AP and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that 52 percent of American voters say that American democracy is not working well; by contrast, just 9 percent of voters think democracy in America is working “extremely well” or “very well.” Prior to the 2020 election, only about 40 percent of Americans were confident that their votes would be counted fairly and accurately.
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The polling industry has faced criticism for underestimating Republicans through several cycles. Pollster Nate Cohn recently wrote that the 2022 polls could do it again. These continued misjudgments can undermine public faith in how the media covers elections. Worse still, they can affect the result of close races.
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Most state residents think of their secretary of state as someone who is in charge of their department of motor vehicles. Few realize that the decisions of secretaries of state could determine who becomes president. Dozens of states will hold elections this fall that will determine the officials who will run state elections in 2024 – and these officials could play crucial roles in the next presidential vote count.
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Four House Republicans sent a letter Friday to White House Domestic Policy Director Susan Rice and Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young accusing the Biden White House of colluding with progressive voting rights groups and attempting to “usurp state power to nationalize elections and commandeer the voting process to Democrats’ political advantage.”
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Midterm elections involve high stakes, a great deal of groundless guessing, and lots of numbers – oddly similar to lotteries. Unlike lotteries, though, the many numbers associated with midterm elections are meaningful. The six meaningful midterm “lotto” numbers below should help historically ground your anticipation of what is likely or unlikely to happen in this year’s House elections, as well as set the eventual outcome in its historical perspective. You will have to use your imagination about the numbered ping-pong balls and the machine mixing them up. On to the all-important numbers.
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Burning American flags, taunting defenseless kittens, and perpetrating political terrorism: Most assume that all American politicians oppose things like this that are simply indefensible. But we all know that hasn’t always been the case. So, what must a politician do to show he opposes the indefensible today?
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The vital mission of everyone on the Republican-Right in the upcoming elections should be to demolish the Democrat Party and relegate it to the Smithsonian along with the relics of the Whig and Know Nothing parties.
This is no time for Republicans to squeak by at the polls. By heaping devastating defeats upon the Democrat Party, the GOP justifiably must treat this leftist force as a clear and present danger to the Republic. Everything the Democrat Party touches goes to hell. One would be hard-pressed to find a formerly GOP constituency where a Democrat win has made life better.
The Democrat Party of JFK, LBJ, and even Bill “Welfare Reform” Clinton is long gone. The Democrat Party of Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, AOC, and Gavin Newsom has nothing positive to offer and deserves to be voted into oblivion.
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When the French people voted for a new president in April, they did so on a single day using paper ballots filled out in the privacy of official polling stations. France, being a normal First World democracy, takes election security seriously. Electronic voting machines are virtually never used. Mail-in voting has been banned nationwide since 1975 out of security fears. Voter rolls are regularly purged of the dead and those who have moved. It is a given that every French voter must show identification before being allowed to fill out a ballot.
The United States, by contrast, is an oligarchy (a regime where the elite rules) that is only pretending to be a democracy. This is why we use a Third World banana republic election system.
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Imagine if, following the disputed 2016 presidential election, the recently sworn-in President Donald Trump had sicced his Justice Department, hand-in-hand with allies in Congress and state governments throughout the country, after his Democratic political opponents who maintained that his election was the work of Russian interference.
Although the claim that Trump was a Russian asset was laughably false, and the subsequent investigation into those spurious claims damaged the federal government’s credibility in immense and perhaps irreparable ways domestically and internationally, applying criminal penalties to the promulgation of that theory would have been wrong, anti-American, and contrary to the First Amendment. In keeping with his stalwart defense of American values, President Trump made no directive to the Justice Department to pursue criminal charges against these Democrats.
Similarly, his Republican predecessor allowed Democrats to freely “challenge an election”: Democrats had previously contested the 2000 election by claiming that George W. Bush was “selected, not elected” as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore. A smaller minority contested Bush’s reelection in 2004, alleging irregularities in Ohio and elsewhere.
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On Monday, FBI Director Christopher Wray declared that the greatest foreign threat to the United States is the country of China, adding that the nation’s recent escalation of tensions regarding the country of Taiwan are “more brazen” and “more damaging” than anything seen in recent history.
The New York Post reports that Wray made his remarks at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California. Just days before the start of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing, Wray said that China poses a threat “to our economic security and to our freedoms: Our freedom of speech, of conscience, our freedom to elect and be served by our representatives without foreign meddling, our freedom to prosper when we toil and invent.”
“I’ve spoken a lot about this threat since I became FBI director,” Wray continued. “But I want to focus on it here tonight because in many ways it’s reached a new level — more brazen, more damaging than ever before, and it’s vital, vital, that all of us focus on that threat together.”
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One-party rule and the destruction of an effective opposition might seem like a counterintuitive goal for “democracy journalists” pushing the “voting rights” legislation. But democracy journalists have been refreshingly candid in their goal to destroy competitive opposition in order to “save democracy.” Don’t believe me? Read below how these self-appointed heroes of democracy explain that nullifying their political opponents will preserve democracy from election results that contradict their political views.
This campaign has gone on for a long time in one form or another. But the New Republic offered this opinion piece early in the 2020 election season, “End the GOP—In order to save our democracy, we must not merely defeat the Republican Party.” Osita Nwanevu wrote:
“We cannot afford to wait the GOP out; its power is not a problem to be worked around. The only way to take on the problems posed by the Republican Party is to take on the Republican Party itself. The forces of demographic change and structural reforms must be joined with direct action. . . . We must wrest that choice back and set the country forward. We must end the GOP.”
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Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger says he supports a national law that bans ballot harvesting, the third-party gathering and delivering of absentee ballots for voters.
“One thing that I do think we need is to make sure that nationwide there should be a law that bans ballot harvesting,” the Republican politician said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “I don’t think that ballot harvesting is good. The only person that should touch your ballot is you and the election official. So I think that’s one solid election reform measure.”
Ballot harvesting is legal in some states but not in Georgia.
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Firebrand Tucker Carlson is the poster boy for the radical Right. His fans are far outside the mainstream. They’re the “deplorables”: the alt-right, white nationalists, and so on. Pragmatic politicians should pick positions halfway between Tucker Carlson’s and those of his counterpoise on the Left—say, Rachel Maddow. These middling positions—flowers across the land of the moderates; reeds across the still waters of the independents—will win elections.
That’s what many believe, anyway. But why? The mere existence of polar opposites does not, in fact, imply a virtuous mean. Some people murder a lot of people. Some people murder no people. Murdering some people is not, however, the good or pragmatic thing to do.
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Newly-released IRS filings show that a foundation funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg injected $7.1 million into local Minnesota electoral systems in 2020.
The Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) is funded by Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. The CTCL is a left-wing organization that spent a total of $350 million during the last presidential election on “grants to various jurisdictions throughout the United States to help them hire more staff, buy mail-in ballot processing machinery, and other measures they deemed necessary to properly handle the election amid the COVID-19 pandemic,” per Influence Watch.
The efforts of the CTCL have been honored by Time Magazine in its infamous article on how activists “fortified” the 2020 election and drawn the ire of Republican legislators who are calling for more transparency about the group’s activities and intentions.
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Politics is getting in the way of government transparency, preventing the sort of accountability on which our governing institutions depend for maintaining public trust and legitimacy.
In Wisconsin and elsewhere around the country, public officials are steadfastly refusing to answer basic questions about their official conduct from the people’s elected representatives. These are not salacious questions about their personal conduct, or fishing expeditions designed to stir up political scandal. Legislators are merely seeking to better understand how appointed bureaucrats and elected officials administered the 2020 elections amidst a pandemic and an unprecedented, and in many cases unlawful, infusion of private monies into public election offices.
Pennsylvania’s Attorney General, for instance, has sued to block a legislative subpoena seeking voter information as part of an investigation of the state’s voter registration system, known as SURE. Even though there is ample precedent for disclosing this type of information, the AG’s lawsuit argues that it would violate citizens’ right to privacy, as though allowing lawmakers to access government records would automatically compromise the security of that information.
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Before the Donald Trump-inspired challenges of the 2020 presidential election, Democrats and liberals alleged fraud and formally contested the results of the 2000, 2004, and 2016 Republican-won presidential elections. Those earlier challenges spurred the creation of a network of election litigators on the left — what J. Christian Adams, a conservative ex-Justice Department attorney pitted against them, calls a “linear build-out” of “some 30 groups” responsible for a lot of sudden changes in election law last year amid the pandemic.
For the closely fought 2020 presidential election, 29 largely Democrat-controlled states and the District of Columbia loosened voting laws, most expanding access to mail voting, according to the liberal Brennan Center for Justice. In response, after former President Trump’s efforts to contest his narrow loss, 19 largely conservative states tightened their voting laws, the Brennan Center reports. The latest changes have provoked a wave of litigation, overwhelmingly from the left.
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Why are progressive regions of the country—especially in the old major liberal cities (e.g., Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle)—institutionalizing de facto racial quotas through “proportional representation” based on “disparate impact”? Why are they promoting ethnic and racial chauvinism, such as allowing college students to select the race of their own roommates, calibrating graduation ceremonies by skin color and tribe, segregating campus “safe spaces” by race, and banning literature that does not meet commissariat diktats?
Why are they turning into one-party political fiefdoms separating the rich and poor, increasingly resembling feudal societies as members of the middle class flee or disappear? What does it mean that they are becoming more and more intolerant in their cancel culture, and quasi-religious intolerance of dissent, on issues from climate change and abortion-on-demand to critical race theory and wokeness?
Isn’t it strange that there are entire states and regions wholly reliant on the money and power of “one-crop” Big Tech monopolies? And why, in the 21st century no less, are Democratic-controlled counties, cities, and entire states nullifying federal law?
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State Rep. Regina Young (D-PA-Philadelphia) voted with all Republican House State Government Committee members this week in favor of a bill to require post-election audits.
The legislation to verify the accuracy of election outcomes will thus go before the full Pennsylvania House with at least a modicum of bipartisanship, making it more difficult for Democrats to call the bill merely “a reactionary thing being done because of the last election,” as Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta (D-Philadelphia) did at the committee meeting.
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Former President Trump said in an interview on Saturday that Virginia GOP gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin will win if his base turns out to vote.
“I think he’s gonna do very well,” Trump said of Youngkin on Fox News’ “Justice with Judge Jeanine”.
Trump compared former Democratic Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s comment in a debate with Youngkin, saying parents shouldn’t tell schools what to teach their children, to Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” comment of Trump supporters during the 2016 presidential race.
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Legislation currently in the works in the Pennsylvania General Assembly would spell out two rules for redistricting in the Keystone State: Elections cannot legally take place in outdated districts and courts can’t create new districts themselves.
In Feb. 2018, the Democrat-controlled Pennsylvania Supreme Court not only struck down Pennsylvania’s congressional maps as unconstitutionally gerrymandered, it reimposed new maps created with no input from the legislature, something state law does not grant the court the right to do. The new maps strongly favored the Democrats’ electoral prospects.
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I was the speaker at a large Republican event recently and, inevitably, the grievance was aired in the Q&A portion: “Where’s the Republican Party? They are worthless. They won’t do anything.”
This is one of the most common refrains on talk radio. Glenn Beck does it almost daily. Steve Deace and his team never stop. Rush used to do it regularly. And therefore, a lot of conservatives and traditionalist Americans think it is true. But is it?
Exhibit number one in this case is always the failure to repeal Obamacare. That’s where the line of accusation really kicked in.
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On Monday, California Governor Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) signed a bill into law that permanently enacts “vote-by-mail” procedures in every state election, including automatically mailing out ballots to every single registered voter in the state, the Daily Caller reports.
The drastic mail-in voting measures, which are highly susceptible to fraud and manipulation, were originally enacted as an emergency response to the coronavirus pandemic, and ostensibly aimed to make it safer to carry out elections. However, State Assembly Bill 37 sought to permanently extend this procedure for all California elections, after the original coronavirus-based procedures were set to expire on June 1st, 2022.
In addition to automatically mailing out ballots to all voters in every election from now on, the new law extends the post-election day window in which late ballots can still be received. Prior to the pandemic, voters had up to three days after election day to submit their ballots and still have their votes counted; now, voters have up to seven days to do so.
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Pennsylvania Senate Democrats filed a legal challenge in Commonwealth Court against what they call an “overreaching” subpoena of election records containing personal information for nearly 7 million voters.
The lawsuit filed late Friday alleges Republican members of the Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee – including Chairman Cris Dush, R-Wellsboro and President Pro Tempore Jake Corman, R-Bellefonte – broke the law when they issued a subpoena against the Department of State seeking the name, address, date of birth, driver’s license number and partial social security number of each and every resident that voted by mail or in person during the last two elections.
In a joint statement, the Democratic members of the committee – including Minority Leader Jay Costa, D-Pittsburgh; Minority Chairman Tony Williams, D-Philadelphia; Sen. Vince Hughes, D-Philadelphia; and Sen. Steve Santarsiero, D-Lower Makefield – said the consequences of the subpoena “are dire” and leave the personal information of residents in the hands of an “undisclosed third party vendor with no prescribed limits or protection.”
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As Pennsylvania Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee Majority Chair Cris Dush (R-Wellsboro) investigates recent elections, Democratic lawmakers against tightening election security must contend with a withering 2019 audit of Pennsylvania’s voter registry.
At his investigation’s initial hearing last Thursday, Dush announced his intention to hold the Department of State (DOS) accountable for the mismanagement identified in the audit by calling the department to testify at the committee’s next hearing to be scheduled soon.
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Gov. Greg Abbott Tuesday signed Texas’ election reform bill into law, ending a months-long political fight over the controversial legislation.
Abbott, a Republican, traveled to Tyler, Texas to sign the Senate Bill 1, which repeals many of the voting measures that large cities in the state implemented amid the pandemic and overhauls the state’s mail-in voting and polling place systems.
Senate Bill 1 also bars election officials from sending voters unsolicited mail-in ballot applications to voters, threatening jail time if they do so.
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Things stopped working in this country about 50 years ago. But it wasn’t really noticeable until a few decades later. I like to date the beginning of the decay to the summer of 1969, though it’s impossible to put a precise date on it. Still, the summer of 1969 was an inflection point much more important than 1967’s “Summer of Love.”
Consider: On July 20, 1969, Apollo XI landed on the moon and 39 minutes later, on July 21, Neil Armstrong became the first man to stand on its surface. A few weeks later, on the night of August 8, the Manson family broke into Roman Polanski’s Hollywood Hills home and murdered his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, their unborn baby, and three friends who were at the house. The following Friday, August 15, the Woodstock music festival began in upstate New York. A good argument could be made that Woodstock was the culmination of the ’60s, but in reality, the ’60s had ended a week earlier. Woodstock wasn’t the final flowering, it was an aftershock.
This isn’t the time for a full exploration of the summer of ’69 (look out for that in the future), but it’s worth noting that a lot changed after that. Things had already peaked. For example, the two fastest ever commercial aircraft had both flown for the first time earlier in 1969; the 747 in February and the Concorde in March. In fact, the average speed of commercial air travel has been declining ever since. (Though that may be changing for the better.) Then, in the early 1970s, the median real wages of American workers entered a period of extended stagnation characterized by exceptionally low growth which made it impossible for the average person (who, by the way, is not an entrepreneur) to get ahead. It’s still true today, which is why so many families require two incomes if they want to remain in the middle class.
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In 1880, Americans did something momentous: They all elected their congressional delegations in the same year. Prior to that, elections had been a hodgepodge affair. For example, the first elections for the 28th Congress, which ostensibly met from 1843 to 1845, were held in Missouri on Aug. 1, 1842. But only five other states held elections that year; almost all other states held them over the course of the odd numbered year of 1843. Maryland finally got around to holding its elections on Feb. 14, 1844, a half-year before the presidential election and less than a year before the next Congress convened.
Even after 1880, a truly uniform Election Day did not arrive until 1960, when Maine gave up its stubborn insistence on holding its congressional elections in September. But for all intents and purposes, 1882 marks the birth of the phenomenon we know today as the midterm election year.
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Fulton County, Pennsylvania election officials are defending their decision to conduct an audit of the 2020 election in their jurisdiction and their right to continue use of their voting machines.
Attorneys from Dillon, McCandless, King, Coulter & Graham LLP who are affiliated with an election-integrity nonprofit known as the Amistad Project, will be handling the case for the small county of about 14,500 residents, situated about 90 miles southwest of Harrisburg.
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Toyota announced Thursday that it will stop donating to Republicans who objected to certifying President Joe Biden’s victory in January.
The company said in a statement, first reported by The Detroit News, that its previous donations to Republican election objectors “troubled some stakeholders.”
The statement comes two weeks after an Axios report revealed that the Japanese automaker’s corporate PAC donated more to Republicans who contested Biden’s victory than any other company, doing so by a significant amount. It donated $55,000 to 37 objectors, over $25,000 more than any other corporation.
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My father likes to say that the secret ballot means that he doesn’t have to listen when I tell him how I voted. This joke conceals a serious point: Ballot secrecy is not just a right of the individual but also a guarantee to all that my vote was not wrung from me by bribery or intimidation.
Out of a desire to make voting “easier” and perhaps exaggerated fears of public gatherings during the pandemic, most U.S. jurisdictions permitted unrestricted mail-in balloting in 2020. What did Americans lose when ballot secrecy was attenuated or vanished altogether?
Make no mistake, ballot secrecy is incompatible with secure mail-in balloting. At the polls, we each go into a little booth and make our choices in private. By contrast, no one knows where a mail-in ballot was filled out, or if a party or union activist hovered over the voter or even filled in the circles. Nobody knows what inducements, whether cash or threats, were offered to ensure that the person voted “correctly.” And if the ballot was “harvested” – turned in to the vote-counters by activists instead of by voters themselves – our suspicions deepen.
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Kettering University announced a new “Math for Social Justice” elective will address climate change, human trafficking, elections and racial justice causes through math modeling.
The course aims to teach students how to use statistics and data to address various social justice-related topics.
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In the Wall Street Journal of June 10, Peggy Noonan captured the kernel of the crisis of national division that afflicts America: Donald Trump and opposed perceptions of last year’s presidential election. Equitable person though Noonan is, she qualifies as a Trump-hater, whose invective against Trump has only escalated over time.
Noonan’s premise today is that any question about the 2020 presidential election is unfounded conspiracism, but that suspicion is growing, spread by “the Trump underworld—the operatives, grifters, and media figures around him . . . This lessens our faith in our systems . . . it leaves the GOP with an untreated cancer.” She holds that “QAnon is important” in propagating this fraud. She thinks that anyone who wasn’t appalled by the storming of the Capitol on January 6 has given up on democracy. Lingering concern about the fairness of the result is in itself an assault upon democracy. “The breaching of the Capitol happened because of a conspiracy theory: that the election was actually won by Mr. Trump but stolen from him by bad people.”
She makes no allowance for exactly the opposite view: that there is ample evidence that Trump was sandbagged in rigged voting and vote-counting in only six states, stonewalled by the courts, and defamed by a unanimous national political media: the courts couldn’t face overturning the election, and the media can’t accept the idea that it was a tainted election. I agree with her that “the only thing that can stop” (the cancer that supposedly afflicts the GOP, even if it is in fact benign righteousness) “is true facts independently developed and presented with respect and receipts.”
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