Pennsylvania lawmakers plan to introduce a measure banning private organizations from funding election administration in the Keystone State.
The bill’s sponsors, state Sens. Lisa Baker (R-Dallas) and Kristin Phillips-Hill (R-Jacobus) have cited the role that the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL) played in election operations in Philadelphia and other Democratic-leaning counties in 2020. CTCL has been funded significantly by Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg.
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A Pennsylvania court this week issued an opinion allowing litigation attempting to block the use of electronic voting devices in Philadelphia, Northampton and Cumberland counties to proceed.
Commonwealth Court Judge Kevin P. Brobson (R), currently a candidate for Pennsylvania Supreme Court, ruled that two advocacy groups and several state residents have standing to challenge the use of ExpressVote XL systems.
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Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) has vowed to veto an election integrity bill that would require a voter casting an absentee ballot to prove their identity.
Senate Bills 303 and 304, approved by the Michigan House of Representatives, would “require anyone who casts an absentee ballot or votes in person on Election Day to provide identification.” A related piece of legislation, House Bill 5007 removes the current $10 fee to obtain a state ID
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A new book by The Federalist editor and Fox News contributor Mollie Hemingway details how 2020 Pennsylvania-election litigation by former President Donald Trump lost its focus on equal protection and got dismissed.
In Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, Hemingway credits Philadelphia attorney Linda Kerns with attempting to keep Trump’s lawsuit challenging Pennsylvania’s election results focused on Fourteenth-Amendment concerns. The author significantly blames Rudy Giuliani for causing the case to unravel by making superfluous arguments.
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The Michigan Senate approved three election bills on Thursday that aim to alter election law and make it easier get a state ID.
The Senate voted 20-16 to approve Senate Bill (SB) 304 as amended. Under the bill, the election inspector must notify an elector issued a provisional ballot that it will only be tabulated if the voter verifies voter registration with the clerk within six days after the election. The inspector would also have to inform the individual that some individuals are eligible for a cost-free state ID.
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The Michigan State Senate on Wednesday passed a bill that would strengthen voting laws in the state, requiring an individual to present a photo ID in order to vote.
In addition to the ID requirement, the legislation would prevent the Secretary of State from mailing absentee ballots, unless specifically requested by the voter.
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Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) on Sunday vetoed four election integrity bills the legislature passed to improve training for election clerks and increase database security.
Pandering to a “captive audience,” Whitmer rejected the bills during a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People dinner in Detroit. Democrats argue election integrity legislation discriminates against black people, though recent polling found some provisions, such as requiring an ID to vote, are popular with that voting bloc.
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The Michigan Senate passed a series of election integrity bills on Thursday, sending them to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s (D) desk for a predicted veto.
The bills, part of a 39-bill package making its way through the legislature, “would limit who can access Qualified Voter File, prohibit poll books from being connected to the internet, require specific training for poll challengers and change how municipalities decide where to hold polling locations,” Mlive reported.
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Bipartisan enthusiasm for election-reform legislation appeared solid at a Pennsylvania Senate State Government Committee hearing on Thursday, save for one part: video live-streaming of mail-in-ballot counting.
Elements of the bill, sponsored by Sen. David Argall (R-PA-Pottsville) and Sen. Sharif Street (D-PA-Philadelphia), have arisen largely from recommendations in a June 2021 report by the Senate Special Committee on Election Integrity and Reform. Argall and Street’s proposal excludes some of the ad hoc panel’s more contentious ideas, particularly enhanced voter-identification rules, which Rep. Seth Grove (R-PA-York) is spearheading in separate legislation. (While Gov. Tom Wolf [D] vetoed Grove’s bill in June, the representative has reintroduced it in light of the governor’s subsequent remarks in favor of a strengthened voter-ID requirement.)
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Former President Donald Trump sent a letter on Friday to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, asking the top election official to investigate potential threats to the state’s election integrity.
In the letter to Raffensperger, Trump cited a report from The Georgia Star News, which detailed that 43,000 absentee ballot votes counted in DeKalb County, Georgia 2020 election potentially violated chain of custody rule.
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At Wednesday’s meeting concerning the Pennsylvania’s Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee’s election investigation, which saw Republicans winning a vote to subpoena voter records, Democrats fumed.
One angrily compared GOP colleagues to Joe McCarthy, the notoriously zealous anti-communist U.S. senator from Wisconsin who served from 1947 to 1957.
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A grassroots canvass of Maricopa County voters in the 2020 election found that over 34 percent of those canvassed said they voted even though the county didn’t have a record of their vote.
Liz Harris, the Arizona resident who organized the independent canvass talked to Steve Bannon about her Voter Integrity Project findings on the Wednesday morning edition of the “War Room.”
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In a special interview, Thursday on First Principles with Phill Kline – host Kline talked with Michael Patrick Leahy, CEO, and editor-in-chief of The Star News Network who uncovered partisan non-profit popups in swing states and the importance of election integrity as the deciding fate of America’s constitutional Republic.…
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Thursday morning on First Principles, host Phill Kline welcomed The Star News Network’s CEO, Michael Patrick Leahy to the phone lines to discuss the influence of Zuckerberg’s money on the 2020 election and altered state election laws.
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Michigan Republicans are launching a citizen initiative to implement election reforms after the 2020 vote, WWMT reported.
The legislature has been making progress on a package of 39 bills that would require photo ID to vote, and provide proof of ID when submitting an absentee ballot application, among other things. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D), whose signature would be required to enact the potential law, has vowed to veto the legislation.
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Facebook is considering creating a commission to advise the tech giant on election-related issues including misinformation, The New York Times reported.
The tech company reportedly contacted several academics and policy experts to draft plans for a commission that will advise Facebook on electoral matters and potentially decide policies related to political misinformation and advertising, several people familiar with the plans told The New York Times. Facebook plans to announce the commission in the next few months to be prepared for the 2022 midterms, the Times reported.
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The rule of law must be respected for liberty to be protected. Changing the rules to achieve a desired outcome undermines both, and when this is done in the administration of elections, democracy itself is imperiled.
Unfortunately, the left shows no compunction about wielding power for partisan advantage, especially when it comes to election administration. They’ve even gone so far as to create new rules to suit their purposes, regardless of whether they possess the authority to do so.
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In a new campaign ad for her reelection, Attorney General Dana Nessel says “democracy is on the ballot.”
“AG Dana Nessel’s Republican opponents support ‘The Big Lie’ and violent extremists. Whether it’s elections or domestic terrorism-what happens in Michigan doesn’t stay in Michigan. It impacts all of America. Let’s make sure Dana is re-elected. Our democracy depends upon it,” Nessel said in a Tweet, attaching her ad.
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A day after the November election, as Donald Trump and other Republican candidates clung to evaporating leads in Georgia, vote counters in Atlanta were confronted by a paper ballot known only by its anonymizing number 5150-232-18.
A Dominion Voting machine had rejected the ballot on election night because the voter had filled in boxes for both Trump and his Democratic opponent Joe Biden, an error known as an “overvote.” The machine determined neither candidate should get a tally, and the ballot was referred for human review.
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As part of a review of hundreds of pages of election documents from Georgia’s Fulton County, Just the News reviewed dozens of disputed ballots in which election workers known as “adjudicators” determined that a voter intended to vote for Democratic candidate Joe Biden instead of Republican incumbent Donald Trump.
Just the News’s review of the Fulton documents revealed a system rife with subjective judgment of thousands of ballots on the part of a small number of election workers, all of it governed by a confusing patchwork of state laws that simultaneously seemed to sanction and proscribe the practice of ballot adjudication.
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The Hill reports that a Colorado federal magistrate judge, N. Reid Neureiter, “sanctioned lawyers who challenged the 2020 presidential election results, calling their election claims ‘fantastical.’” “Plaintiffs’ counsel shall jointly and severally pay the moving Defendants’ reasonable attorneys [fees]”—which is very likely to be many thousands of dollars. This ruling comes while a federal district judge in Michigan, Linda Parker, considers imposing sanctions on attorneys Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, both of whom raised questions about the propriety of the 2020 presidential election.
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Ned Staebler, the university administrator who notoriously spouted a furious tirade against two Wayne County Republican election officials in a public meeting last November, is also treasurer of an entity promoted by Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) for “nonpartisan voter education.”
On November 17, 2020, Staebler, vice president for economic development at Wayne State University and head of the business-development organization TechTown Detroit, blasted county Board of Canvassers’ members Monica Palmer and William Hartmann for initially voting to block the certification of votes in Wayne County.
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The U.S. Department of Justice’s recent guidance on the process of state election audits indicates that the federal agency is apparently deeply unsettled by the string of election audits and election reform efforts carried out by state Republicans since last November’s presidential election.
The guidance, distributed last week and directed in part toward state legislatures, instructs investigators on “how states must comply with federal law” when conducting election audits. It also addresses efforts by some state legislatures to repeal emergency COVID-19 voting rules that other states have in some cases sought to make permanent.
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Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) said Friday he plans to hire more investigators and anticipates allowing more time for a probe into the 2020 presidential contest for Wisconsin’s 10 Electoral-College votes, the Associated Press has reported.
The official vote count in Wisconsin last November put Joe Biden ahead of Donald Trump by 20,682 votes. The margin was just over 0.6 percent of the nearly 3.3 million votes cast statewide.
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Twitter permanently suspended several accounts dedicated to documenting the Arizona audit. The social media giant also permanently suspended other similar or affiliated accounts covering the audit or calls for an audit in Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.
The suspended accounts were: @arizonaaudit, @AuditWarRoom, @AuditMichigan, @AuditWisconsin, @AuditNevada, @AuditGeorgia, @Audit_Arizona and @Audit_PA. The latter 7 accounts are associated with an Instagram account, @auditwarroom, that hasn’t been suspended from the Facebook-owned platform. That account notified the public that it joined GETTR, a social media platform created by former President Donald Trump’s aide Jason Miller.
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PHOENIX, Arizona – The energy of the thousands of attendees of former President Donald Trump’s rally, hosted by Turning Point Action at the Phoenix Federal Theater, carried over to the constant stream of Republican politicians who appeared over the more than three hours of the event prior to their president taking the stage.
Trump took advantage of the “Protect Our Elections” theme to detail many of the November 2020 election irregularities in Arizona and other states, as well as to thank the “brave and unyielding warriors in the Arizona State Senate,” who initiated the forensic audit in Maricopa County.
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The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee has prompted extensive commentary about the implications for future challenges to election laws under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Litigants arguing that some laws, such as Georgia’s newly enacted SB 202, disproportionately affect racial minorities may have a greater challenge meeting the standard set forth by the court than the standard that some lower courts had been using in recent years.
But while the justices split on a 6-3 vote on whether a pair of Arizona statutes ran afoul of the Act, it voted 6-0 (with three justices not addressing the question) in concluding that Arizona did not act with discriminatory intent. This holding sets the stage for the Justice Department’s recent lawsuit against Georgia, and it offers hints at how district courts and reviewing courts should behave. In short, the Justice Department has an uphill battle.
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The ubiquitous term “paradigm” and the concept of “paradigm shifts,” were popularized by the historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn. He used them to characterize, roughly, a scientific theory’s fundamental elements and the changes in fundamental elements that occur with scientific revolutions and changes in theory.
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The number of coronavirus infections among Democratic lawmakers who fled to Texas to stall a voting reform bill increased over the weekend.
At least five members of the Democratic delegation have tested positive for the virus, a person familiar told the Associated Press. The Texas House Democratic Caucus announced three of the lawmakers had tested positive as of Friday, but said the entire group had been fully vaccinated.
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Five Michigan House GOP members sent Attorney General Dana Nessel a letter threatening to file articles of impeachment against her if she prosecutes anyone profiting from spreading lies about the 2020 presidential election.
The irony is that a Senate GOP report “found no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud in Michigan’s prosecution of the 2020 election” and even asked Nessel to investigate Michiganders making “misleading and false information about Antrim County to raise money or publicity for their own ends.”
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Sixty-seven Texas House Democrats fled Austin Monday for Washington, D.C. on private planes in a political maneuver that Gov. Greg Abbott said only hurts Texans.
Shortly after 2 p.m., House Democrats confirmed in a statement they were not returning to the state Capitol to complete an ongoing special session, which began July 8 and lasts for 30 days.
By leaving Texas, House Democrats avoided being arrested by a “Call of the House,” which Speaker of the House Dade Phelan could have initiated had the members left Tuesday, when the chamber is scheduled to be back in session. Because the legislature was out of session on Monday, Democrats had time to leave after having met over the weekend.
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Katie Hobbs, the Arizona Secretary of State who recently launched a bid for governor, sent a letter to Attorney General Mark Brnovich and requested that he open an investigation into former President Donald Trump and his allies over allegations of “election interference.”
“I urge you to take action not only to seek justice in this instance, but to prevent future attempts to interfere with the integrity of our elections. If your ethical duties prevent you from investigating this matter, I ask that you refer it to another enforcement agency,” Hobbs said in her letter to Brnovich.
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An order handed down by a Georgia judge today named several individual members of a county elections board as respondents in an election-related lawsuit, clearing the way for an intensive audit of 2020 absentee ballots in Georgia’s largest county.
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“They were doing things eagerly but incorrectly.”
That was a judgment rendered in a Georgia election monitor’s report last year detailing what the investigator said were a series of problems brought on by improperly trained temporary staffers handling the absentee ballot scanning operation in Fulton County.
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Regardless of one’s political affiliation, it’s not difficult to find voters in Georgia who were discouraged by the messiness of the 2020 election process.
It’s one thing to be disappointed by the outcome. It’s entirely another to feel disenfranchised and frustrated by questions and uncertainties surrounding absentee ballot handling, unsecured drop boxes, and questionable third-party funding of local elections.
In evaluating federal, state, and local voting safeguards, these and other serious complications — glitches, missing votes, even water pipe breakages at polling locations or ballot drop boxes — raised legitimate concerns and weakened voter confidence in Georgia’s election integrity.
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Documents that Georgia’s largest county submitted to state officials as part of a post-election audit highlight significant irregularities in the Atlanta area during last November’s voting, ranging from identical vote tallies repeated multiple times to large batches of absentee ballots that appear to be missing from the official ballot-scanning records.
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An apparent break-in occurred at the ballot-holding warehouse where the ballots for the pending Fulton County, Georgia audit were housed. According to reports, security guards hired by Fulton County left the facility. About 20 minutes later, the facility’s alarm was set off. A security detail hired by the plaintiffs’ attorney, Bob Cheeley, relayed to reporters that the facility door was wide open.
The audit concerns over 145,000 ballots from the presidential election. President Joe Biden won Georgia with just over 12,600 votes.
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In 1999, Tim Meisburger helped Indonesia run its first open election in almost half a century.
“The people were very distrustful of the process because in the past the party in power rigged elections to get the outcome they wanted,” Meisburger, former Director of Democracy and Governance at the U.S. Agency for International Development, explained. The United States helped fund more than 500,000 election observers across the country to prevent voter fraud and ballot tampering.
“Because of that scrutiny, the elections were fair and honest,” Meisburger added.
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Abill that was set to strengthen election integrity in Arizona by cracking down on voter fraud failed in the Republican-led State Senate, after a Republican member went against the party and voted it down, as reported by ABC News.
The bill, SB 1485, would have made it easier to remove inactive names from the state’s early voting list by removing the word “permanent” from the state’s definition of said list. Following this change, anyone on the list who did not vote in the state’s elections after a certain period of time could have their names removed completely. Inactive names remaining on a state’s voting rolls, such as in Arizona, can lead to a greater chance of voter fraud when those names are used to sway an election in a crucial swing state.
But a single Republican state senator, Kelly Townsend (R-Ariz.), voted with the Democrats against the bill. Her reasoning, ostensibly, was to wait for the results of a GOP-led audit of all 2.1 million ballots in Maricopa County from the 2020 election.
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The Conservative Clergy of Color — a group of black pastors, priests and ministers — is running a full-page ad in the Atlanta Constitution Journal newspaper saying it’s “correcting the lies” President Biden and Georgia Democratic politician Stacey Abrams have told about the state’s new voting law.
“There’s nothing ‘racist’ about the Election Integrity Act, and it’s certainly not ‘Jim Crow 2.0.’ Your lies are now devastating minority small businesses in Atlanta following the MLB’s decision to move its All-Star Game to Denver, resulting in the loss of $100 million in business,” reads the ad. “Enough is enough.”
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Over just a few hours Thursday, Georgia’s Legislature and Gov. Brian Kemp drew the first battle line in the high-stakes struggle to decide how American voters will cast ballots in the future after the pandemic-ridden election of 2020.
The Republican-controlled state put itself firmly in the camp of voter ID requirements, limited drop boxes and expanded weekend voting. And depending on the eye of the beholder, it was either a win for election integrity or a return to the era of Jim Crow voter suppression.
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Much ink has been spilled warning of the ramifications should Democrats pass their election “reform” package, HR1 — and for good reason, given how the bill would upend our nation’s electoral system. Democrats claim HR1 is aimed at maximizing voter participation and ending corruption in our election systems, but the truth is that the legislation would do neither. Instead, it will only serve to open up our states’ elections to fraud and public mistrust at a time when we need to bolster voter confidence. Let’s look at just a few of the many areas where HR1 would nationalize elections and cancel out state integrity and confidence-building measures.
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Significant legislative attempts are underway in multiple U.S. states, including key battleground states, to roll back major changes in voting rules and regulations to various pre-2020 status quo antes. The efforts come after an historically chaotic election process that has left millions of Americans doubtful of election fairness, security, transparency and accountability.
Changes to election rules — some of them enacted prior to 2020 and others put in place in response to the COVID-19 pandemic last year — have included expansive mail-in voting, expanded early voting, relaxation of verification rules, and extensions to ballot receipt deadlines.
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The right to vote is one of the most sacred rights that we as citizens can exercise. We select the individuals who will lead us and the policies we will live under in our daily lives. Yet the system is broken.
Growing up as a Black teen during the 1960s, I knew of the tremendous sacrifices and the dangers that my friends and relatives endured to secure the right to vote for Black people. So before I go any further, let me be clear: I have zero interest in disenfranchising or suppressing the vote of any portion of the population. I am keenly aware of our country’s history of doing just that – from poll taxes to literacy tests and other obstacles that were constructed in the South to prevent Blacks from voting.
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In response to a call for election integrity by U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), Ohio House Minority Leader Emilia Sykes (D-OH-Akron) tweeted, “No thank you.”
Sykes’ statement came after Paul tweeted, “That’s why I’ll spend the next two years going to every state legislature trying to fix the laws, protect our vote and stop election fraud.”
Read More Georgia voter Richard Hendrix reported that the Dominion Voting Systems (Dominion) scanners ran out of battery power at his Fulton County voting location at Heards Ferry Elementary School on Tuesday morning.
Hendrix stated that he filed a complaint with the Secretary of State’s office, and sent copies to Senator Burt Jones, Republican Party of Georgia Chairman David Ralston, and Governor Brian Kemp.
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A Spalding County voter told The Georgia Star News early Tuesday that voting machines broke at a Griffin-area polling place, and instead of receiving paper ballots, workers sent the voters waiting in line away.
In an interview with The Star News, the voter stated that she’d arrived at her polling place at Union Baptist church early because she works several jobs and wanted to ensure she could cast her vote.
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A private call between President Donald Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was leaked by The Washington Post on Sunday afternoon. The call reportedly took place almost exactly a day prior to the time that the audio was leaked.
Others on the call included White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Trump’s attorneys Cleta Mitchell and Kurt Hilbert, Georgia’s Secretary of State General Counsel Ryan Germany, and Georgia’s Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs.
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In a statement Saturday, Vice President Mike Pence issued a statement through his Chief of Staff Marc Short that he welcomes the actions of some members of the House and Senate, who say they will object to the final certification of the Electoral College vote on Wednesday. “Vice President…
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Following the Nashville bombing, a viral post alleged a connection between SunGard, a nearby data facility, and SolarWinds’ parent company, Silver Lake. However, Silver Lake only owned SunGard from 2005 until 2015. After that, Fidelity National Information Services (FIS) assumed control once SunGard filed for bankruptcy. Since 2017, Silver Lake hasn’t held any shares in FIS.
“Please help dig on Solar[W]inds, SunGard data center, and 211 Commerce Street in Nashville,” wrote Ron Watkins, former 8Kun administrator. “Interested in finding correlations between these subjects.”
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