The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Southern Poverty Law Center sued a Georgia county on Friday, over allegations that it failed to send out approximately 3,000 absentee ballots by a requested deadline.
Read MoreTag: Ballots
Georgia Supreme Court Blocks Republican Push to Hand Count Ballots
The Georgia Supreme Court blocked a Republican effort Tuesday to require poll workers to hand-count the number of ballots cast, upholding a lower court’s decision.
A Georgia judge previously blocked a state election board rule that would have required counties to hand-count ballots on Election Day. The Republican National Committee (RNC) and Georgia GOP appealed to the state’s highest court, requesting a quick reinstatement of the rules during their ongoing legal challenge, Politico reported.
Read MoreRNC and Georgia Republicans Appeal Judge’s Ruling Tossing Out Seven Election Rules
The Republican National Committee (RNC) and the Georgia Republican Party on Thursday appealed a judge’s decision that invalidated seven election rules passed by the state’s election board.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox on Wednesday determined that the new rules are “illegal, unconstitutional and void,” because the state board did not have the authority to create such orders.
Read MoreGeorgia Judge Tosses Order to Count Ballots by Hand
After weeks of chaos surrounding the Georgia State Election Board, a judge blocked its order requiring all ballots be counted by hand.
Judge Robert McBurney of the Superior Court of Fulton County issued the stay on Tuesday, just weeks after the Election Board first approved the measure. He said the additional step of counting ballots by hand as well as electronically would lead to “administrative chaos.”
Read MoreElection Results Likely to Be Delayed Nationwide by State Rules, Litigation, and Investigations
Counting or certification of the November election results are likely to be delayed nationwide, as states are promulgating different rules on receiving mail ballots, ongoing and likely election litigation, and possible investigations over irregularities, warns an election integrity proponent.
As the 2020 election results were delayed until Joe Biden was announced the winner of the presidential race the Saturday after Election Day, there will likely also be a delay in announcing this year’s presidential contest. The delays this year could be the result of a variety of factors, especially with such a close election, according to Honest Elections Project Executive Director Jason Snead.
Read MoreCommentary: Get Ready for Another Mail-In Ballot Fiasco
Many states are now sending out mail-in ballots for the November election.
Yet at the same time that so many more voters are depending on the mail to cast their ballots, the two leading national organizations of election officials wrote the U.S. Postal Service demanding immediate action to avoid confusion and chaos with mail-in ballots.
Read MoreGeorgia Supreme Court Dismisses Catoosa County GOP Ballot Challenge
The Supreme Court of Georgia dismissed a challenge by the Catoosa County Republican Party to keep four candidates off the primary ballot, as the primary and the runoff election have already occurred.
Read MoreCommentary: Yet Another Democrat Vote Fraud Scheme Exposed
This week, former president Donald Trump noted the need for stronger border protections to stop illegal voting.
Read MoreCommentary: Gen Z Should Not Be Fooled by Kamala’s Sudden Seriousness
After yanking Joe Biden off the ticket with a giant vaudeville cane, Kamala Harris has breathed new life into the Democratic party. Kamala opened her campaign with the “politics of joy,” replete with twerking rappers, sassy X clapbacks, and quirky Doritos videos.
Read MoreMail-In Voting Begins as First State Sends Out Ballots Weeks from Election Day
Alabama began sending out the first mail-in ballots to voters on Wednesday, over 50 days out from the November election, according to CNN.
Alabama residents who requested mail-in ballots will be the first to lock in their vote for the upcoming local, state and presidential races, with Wisconsin rolling out their mail-in ballots the following week on September 19, CNN reported. North Carolina was supposed to have kickstarted mail-in voting, but the state was held up by a court order to reprint their ballots after former independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. withdrew from the race and appealed to have his name be taken off.
Read MoreElection Red Flag: Postal Service Watchdog Warns Some Mailed Ballots May Be Delayed, Not Counted
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) failed to deliver political and election mail on time between 2% and 3% of the time during the 2024 primaries and the mail service’s chief watchdog warns in a new audit that some mailed ballots might be delayed or not counted in the November election because workers aren’t following required procedures.
“We found that Postal Service personnel did not always comply with policy and procedures regarding all clear certifications, Election and Political Mail logs, and audit checklists,” the Postal Service Inspector General warned in a report made public this week. “In addition, we identified processes and policies that could pose a risk of delays in the processing and delivery of Election and Political Mail.
Read MoreCommentary: Alarming Number of Americans Open to Electoral Cheating
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.
Read MoreRanked-Choice Voting Proves to Be Lightning Rod Issue in Several States
Bills to ban ranked-choice voting are causing passionate debate over a method to cast ballots that some say is fairer and some say is confusing and could lower voter turnout.
Ranked-choice voting allows people to rank the candidates, with “one” being their favorite. The votes are tallied in rounds. After the first round, the candidate with the lowest votes is eliminated. The voter’s second preference is then added to the tally. The process continues until a winner is determined.
Read MoreVoterGA’s Garland Favorito Slams Georgia Secretary of State’s Request for Funds to Audit Ballots
VoterGA, a nonprofit election integrity organization, spoke out against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s request for more taxpayer funds from the Georgia Legislature to implement an audit of Georgia’s QR-coded Dominion Democracy Suite 5.5 voting system.
On Monday, Raffensperger called on the Georgia State Senate to “agree to funding for new technology approved by the House that would give election officials the ability to audit the text of every choice on every ballot, in every contest – without the use of QR codes.”
Read MoreCommentary: Post-Election Audits Should Be the Norm for Every State
I may be dating myself, but the old saying goes, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
We can get much more than an ounce’s worth of prevention by engaging in post-election process audits. It is much easier to fix process problems early before they blow up and become problems that require litigation and other nasty fixes. Ahead of the 2024 election, state legislatures should require full process audits to ensure transparency and build trust in our elections.
Read MoreFederal Judge Rejects Bid to Remove Trump from West Virginia Ballot
A federal judge rejected a bid Thursday to remove former President Donald Trump from the ballot in West Virginia.
Obama-appointed District Judge Irene Berger ruled that John Anthony Castro, the little-known presidential candidate who brought the lawsuit to remove Trump, lacked standing to sue. The decision comes days after Colorado’s Supreme Court found Trump was ineligible to appear on the state’s ballot under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, likely setting up Supreme Court review of the issue.
Read MoreCommentary: Mitt Romney and Joe Manchin Are Wrong About Ranked-Choice Voting
U.S. Sens. Joe Manchin and Mitt Romney recently praised Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV), lauding it respectively as “mesmerizing…we should do it” and “a superior way to proceed.” But the two lawmakers are wrong.
Their statements might ring true if they understood they are endorsing a system that encourages fringe candidates and skews election outcomes.
Read More18 States, DC Accept Ballots after Election Day, with North Dakota’s Deadline Facing Lawsuit
North Dakota is facing a lawsuit over its acceptance of mail-in ballots 13 days after Election Day and is among 18 states and Washington, D.C., that accept and tabulate ballots post-election.
The lawsuit, which was filed Wednesday against North Dakota State Election Director Erika White, alleges that the state’s law to accept ballots up to 13 days after Election Day violates federal law.
Read MoreProminent Pollster Says Time for America to Mandate All Ballots Be Counted on Election Day
With states like Arizona, Nevada and Alaska taking days to determine midterm election results, influential pollster Scott Rasmussen says there is overwhelming support for America to mandate ballots be in and counted by Election Day.
“One of the 80% issues, and there aren’t a whole lot of 80% issues in America-one of them is that all ballots should be in by Election Day,” Scott Rasmussen said Wednesday night on the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show. “We should know the results on Election Day.”
Read More‘Free, Fair and Honest’: Former Trump Spokesperson Praises States’ New Election Laws
Former Trump spokesperson Hogan Gidley praised seven states for protecting election integrity in an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Seven states are being praised by the America First Policy Institute’s (AFPI) Center For Election Integrity (CEI) in a new report for recent legislative efforts to prevent voter fraud. Hogan Gidley, director of the CEI, explained the importance of the report during an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Read MoreVoters Increasingly Returning to In-Person Ballots over Mail
In many states across the country, voters appear to be returning to in-person voting for their top preference, after vote-by-mail was greatly increased and heavily promoted during the coronavirus pandemic.
According to the Associated Press, many states, including key swing states, have seen massive drops in the number of requests for mail-in ballots. In Georgia, where nearly one million ballots were cast by mail in the primary elections in 2020, only about 85,000 voters have requested mail-in ballots for this year’s primary. Other states that saw similar declines include Ohio, West Virginia, and Indiana.
Read MoreCommentary: No More Ballots in the Wild
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.
Read MoreGeorgia Ballot Harvesting Probe Advances as State Elections Board Approves Subpoena
The Georgia Elections Board has approved a subpoena to secure evidence and testimony in an ongoing investigation into whether third-party liberal activists illegally gathered thousands of absentee ballots in the 2020 general election and a subsequent runoff that determined Democrat control of the U.S. Senate.
The vote was a major win for Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who announced the investigation into alleged ballot harvesting in January and was seeking the subpoena authority to assist the probe.
The subpoena power will allow Raffensperger’s team to secure evidence about a whistleblower who alleged to an election integrity group that he participated in a large operation to gather ballots in which activists were paid $10 for each ballot they delivered.
Read MoreTexas Election Commissioner Resigns After 10,000 Uncounted Ballots Found in Last Week’s Primary
The elections commissioner in Texas’ largest county has resigned after revelations that 10,000 ballots were not counted in the Houston area in last week’s primary election.
Read MoreArizona Senate Study Estimates 200K Ballots Counted in 2020 with Mismatched Signatures
Astudy of Maricopa County’s mail ballots in Arizona’s 2020 presidential election estimates that more than 200,000 ballots with mismatched signatures were counted without being reviewed, or “cured” — more than eight times the 25,000 signature mismatches requiring curing acknowledged by the county.
Commissioned by the Arizona State Senate, the signature verification pilot study was conducted by Shiva Ayyadurai’s Election Systems Integrity Institute, which released its final report to the public on Tuesday. Ayyadurai is an engineer and entrpreneur with four degrees from MIT who bills himself as the inventor of email, a claim which critics have alleged is exaggerated.
Of the 1,911,918 early voting mail ballots that Maricopa County received and counted in the 2020 presidential election, the county reported that 25,000, or 1.3%, had signature mismatches that required curing, but only 587 (2.3%) of those were confirmed mismatched signatures.
Read MoreElection Watchdog: ‘Not Ready for 2024’ Elections, ‘Still Have Many of the Same Problems’ from 2020
Election integrity issues from the 2020 presidential election have yet to be resolved, “so we are not ready for 2024,” Phill Kline, Director of the Amistad Project, warned on Monday.
Kline was asked by “Just the News, Not Noise” TV show cohosts John Solomon and Amanda Head if election integrity issues had been solved after the 2020 election. “No, we still have many of the same problems,” he replied, explaining that this is “because the legislatures have not taken the time to understand the problem.”
Read MoreRepublicans Move to Ban Federal Funds to States, Cities That Allow Non-Citizens to Vote
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is leading a coalition of Republicans in Congress to sponsor legislation that would ban federal funding to states or localities that allow foreigners to vote in U.S. elections.
The new legislation, dubbed the Protecting Our Democracy by Preventing Foreign Citizens from Voting Act, was introduced after many liberal municipalities from San Francisco to New York have moved in 2021 to allow non-citizens to cast ballots in local elections
“It’s ridiculous that states are allowing foreign citizens to vote,” Rubio said. “However, if states and localities do let those who are not U.S. citizens to vote in elections, they shouldn’t get U.S. citizen taxpayer money.”
Read MoreMore Votes Counted Than Cast in Georgia 2020 General Election, Analysis of State Voter Data Shows
An analysis of 2020 election results and individual Georgia Department of Elections data shows a 3,742-vote difference between those marked as having participated in the election and the number of ballots certified as being cast.
That’s according to the non-partisan Voter Reference Foundation (VRF), which released an audit of the 2020 race. It compares the state of Georgia’s official certified vote totals to its official individual voter history files, which report who voted– and who didn’t vote– last November.
Read MoreFederal Indictment Alleging Iranian Hack Further Erodes Narrative of Perfect 2020 Election
During the dizzying days after the November 2020 election, the Homeland Security cyber-security chief was fired by a frustrated President Donald Trump, then went on national TV to insist the election was fully secure.
“There was no indication or evidence that there was any sort of hacking or compromise of election systems on, before or after November 3,” ex-Cyber-Security and Infrastructure Agency Chief Chris Krebs declared on “60 Minutes.”
On Thursday, nearly a year later, federal prosecutors in New York unsealed a dramatic indictment that conflicts with that clean bill of health.
Read MoreMore Than 70 Georgia Counties Can’t Produce Original 2020 Election Ballot Images, Says Election Integrity Group
Exactly 74 Georgia counties are unable to produce all the original ballot images from the November 2020 election.
VoterGA co-founder Garland Favorito said this at a press conference Tuesday in Roswell. The group, according to its website, is a nonprofit whose members said it wants to restore election integrity to the Peach State.
Read MoreCommentary: The Wall Street Journal’s Shabby Rebuttal of Trump Settles Nothing
President Trump’s October 28 letter to the Wall Street Journal detailing some of his complaints about the 2020 election and the Journal’s editorial comment on it the following day clearly reveal the shortcomings of both sides of this argument. But the important thing to note is that there are two sides to the argument over the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election result.
The prolonged and intensive effort in which the Wall Street Journal has eagerly participated, to suppress and throttle the merest suggestion of illegitimacy surrounding the 2020 election result, has failed. It has always been understandable why there would be a great body of opinion that would wish to suppress any consideration of the question. It is a sobering and demoralizing thing to imagine that the vastly important process of choosing the president of the United States could possibly be an erroneous or even a fraudulent process.
Read MorePush to Reverse Arizona Election Reform Laws Fails to Make Ballot
An effort to reverse three recently enacted election integrity laws has failed.
Petitioners couldn’t collect the required signatures to put three questions on the 2022 general election ballot regarding whether to reverse three laws passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature and signed by Gov. Doug Ducey over the summer.
“We did not collect enough signatures to submit to the Secretary of State to stop SB1485, HB 2569 and SB 1819 by the deadline today, so the fight to protect voting rights will go on,” Arizona Deserves Better, who spearheaded the drive, said Tuesday.
Read MoreCommentary: Fundamentally Transforming America
“We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”
That was the “composite character” David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, on the campaign back in 2008. By “we,” the composite character meant himself and running mate, Senator Joe Biden. In 2021, with the Delaware Democrat in the White House, an update on the transformation process is in order.
In 2008 the United States was already a democratic republic, in which the people had selected presidents as different as Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. After FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society, the United States was already a top-heavy welfare state. Any fundamental transformation, therefore, would have to come through different channels.
Read MoreReport: Wisconsin Lost Track of 82,000 Ballots in State Biden Won by 20,000
Wisconsin lost track of more than 82,000 mail-in ballots cast in the state in the November 2020 elections—more than four times the margin of difference separating the two presidential candidates in the state, according to a report by the nonprofit Public Interest Legal Foundation.
The legal foundation, an election integrity watchdog group, released a research brief Friday looking at one of the most closely contested states in the 2020 presidential election.
However, the Wisconsin Elections Commission disputes those findings, as the commission spokesman said the report “mischaracterizes election systems and cherry-picks data,” adding, it is “unreliable and frankly, it’s sloppy work.”
Read MoreCommentary: Reject Federal Takeover of Elections – Again
Yogi Berra once said, “It’s déjà vu all over again.”
That is exactly how Americans must feel as they learn that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is trying to ram through another bill orchestrating a federal takeover of elections, despite the previous failed attempt in the Senate.
The bill, H.R. 4, is expected to come up in the House of Representatives this week, and it is stunning in its breadth. In short, Pelosi would give broad, sweeping powers to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division to rewrite every state and local election law in the country.
Read MorePennsylvania State Sen. Doug Mastriano Initiates Forensic Investigation of 2020 Election
The Pennsylvania state senator who led a hearing on election fraud in Gettysburg, PA, last November, has initiated a “full forensic investigation” into 2020 election results in several counties.
Republican State Sen. Doug Mastriano said in a statement that as chair of the Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee, that he has issued letters to several counties representing “different geographical regions of Pennsylvania and differing political makeups,” requesting “information and materials needed to conduct a forensic investigation of the 2020 General Election and the 2021 Primary.”
Read MoreCommentary: What Americans Lost When We Abandoned the Secret Ballot
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.
Read More‘Horrendous’: Georgia Audit Lawyer Demands Full Investigation into Fulton County’s Ballot Irregularities
Alawyer spearheading a major ballot audit inside Georgia’s largest county is warning the irregularities apparent in that county’s election management are “horrendous” and cut against “the basic principle of our democracy.”
Atlanta-based attorney Bob Cheeley made those claims while talking to Just the News editor-in-chief John Solomon on Tuesday night’s “Securing our Elections: Protecting Your Vote” special on Real America’s Voice.
Cheeley is among the investigators approved by a Georgia court to audit the 2020 absentee ballots of Fulton County, Ga., a county critical to Joe Biden’s historic 2020 win of Georgia that helped propel him to the White House.
Read MoreCommentary: Georgia Conducting Secret 2020 Ballot Review –– Keeping Plaintiffs in the Dark
After several Fulton County, Ga., poll monitors testified last year that boxes of mail-in ballots for Joe Biden looked liked they’d been run through a photocopy machine, state investigators quietly broke the seal on one suspicious box and inspected the hundreds of votes it contained for signs of fraud, RealClearInvestigations has learned exclusively.
At the same time, a key whistleblower told RCI that state investigators pressured her to recant her story about what she and other poll monitors had observed — what they called unusually “pristine” mail-in ballots while sorting through them during last November’s hand recount.
“I felt I was under investigation,” said Suzi Voyles, a longtime Fulton County poll manager whose sworn affidavits have been used by election watchdogs to sue the county for access to the ballots in question.
Read MoreArizona Senate on the Verge of Beginning Major Audit of Maricopa County Ballots
The Arizona Senate is poised to begin a major audit of over two million ballots cast in the 2020 election in the state’s largest county, a process the state Senate president claims has been stymied by county officials and which the county claims rests on legally uncertain ground.
Senate subpoenas to the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors for information and equipment needed to perform the audit have been pending since Dec. 15, 2020 and were upheld by a judge on Feb. 25. In mid-March, the state Senate announced that Republicans in that chamber would be conducting a “broad and detailed” review of Maricopa’s ballots, one that would involve “testing the machines, scanning the ballots, performing a full hand count and checking for any IT breaches,” among other approaches.
Read MoreInvestigation Finds Georgia Officials Decline to Prosecute or Correct the Double Voters They Catch
More than 1,700 Georgians were singled out for illegally casting two ballots in 2020 elections – including last month’s hotly contested presidential race – but their fraudulent votes weren’t canceled out, according to state election officials. And so far, none of the cheaters has been prosecuted, raising concerns about continued fraud as Georgia prepares to vote again in twin U.S. Senate runoff elections next month.
Read MoreCobb County BOE Denies Ballot Shredding-After Videos Produce Evidence of Ballot Shredding
The Cobb County Board of Elections and Registration is defending itself after being accused of shredding election documents during Georgia’s controversial recount.
President Donald Trump’s attorney Lin Wood tweeted videos shot by a witness who identified herself as Susan Knox and said she was outside the Jim R. Miller Event Center, where ballots were stored, on Friday. She documented a mobile shredder company destroying documents, which she called ballots.
Read MoreIn Sworn Statement, Prominent Mathematician Flags up to 100,000 Pennsylvania Ballots
In a sworn declaration, a respected mathematician says his analysis of election data and phone interviews with Pennsylvania voters raises questions about as many as 100,000 absentee ballots requested in the key battleground state where President Trump and Joe Biden are separated by just about 82,000 votes.
Read MoreGeorgia Whistleblower: Officials Used Ballot Machines Missing Security Seals in Gwinnett County
A GOP poll watcher reported that officials allowed workers to use ballot machines that were missing security seals in Gwinnett County, Georgia. Beth Sexton first called into The Tennessee Star tipline to report the incident on Monday.
According to the report Sexton gave the tipline, a group of concerned-looking poll workers were gathered around a ballot machine. When Sexton approached them, she overheard them discussing missing security seals.
Read MoreGlitch-Prone Dominion Voting Software Used in Georgia Counties
A glitch-prone voting software called Dominion Voting Systems (Dominion) was used in all 159 of Georgia counties. Dominion classified their presence in Georgia as a “statewide voting system rollout.”
This past week, Dominion has caused delayed voting and reporting results in Gwinnett County, Morgan County, and Spalding County. Gwinnett County is the same location a whistleblower claimed had ballot machines used that were missing security seals.
Read MoreDemocrats Invite Voters to Exploit Georgia’s Weak Residency Rules to Stuff Ballot Boxes in Runoff Elections
Democrats are advocating for blue voters to become Georgia residents for the upcoming runoff elections. Georgia doesn’t have a minimum residency requirement, which poses a legal loophole for both parties. Democrats could drum up enough voters to match general election turnouts and flip the state, and Republicans could ensure their hold on two Senate seats.
Additionally, the state’s voter I.D. laws allow individuals to use an out-of-state driver’s license to vote. However, the law defines residency as “without any present intuition of removing therefrom [the fixed habitation].”
Read MoreCounty in Georgia Re-Scans Ballots After Coming Up Short, Cites ‘System Error’
On Saturday, Fulton County officials discovered that the number of scanned ballots didn’t reflect the totals received. Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced the news of a rescan that afternoon.
Raffensperger dispatched a monitor, investigators, and Deputy Secretary of State Jordan Fuchs to moderate the process at State Farm Arena.
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