Free Republic

Formed in 2005, the Minnesota Voters Alliance (MVA) is the only conservative organization in Minnesota, and one of a few in the nation, dedicated solely to expanding liberty through legal action, determined to strike at the liberal forces which degrade and reduce our freedoms. A critical component of that dedication is the ability to pursue an objective for as long as it takes to win. So, while we have achieved several recent victories in other cases, our commitment to changing Minnesota’s defective Election-Day Registration (EDR) laws continues in full force. Today, I am requesting your support for our impending lawsuits...

Do you remember the Louisiana Senate runoff election of December 1996? Conservative Woody Jenkins sure does. He was the Republican Senate candidate who got mugged out of a Senate seat by Mary Landrieu. Flashback to 18 years ago — reporting in the December 23, 1996, and February 10, 1997, issues of National Review — Rich Lowry tells the story of how Mary Landrieu won ‘The Big Sleazy’ Senate runoff election of 1996. Now just 2 1/2 weeks away from the the 2014 Louisiana Senate runoff, Lowry’s investigative reports from nearly two decades ago are a sober reminder of what can...

The Hennepin County attorney’s office is investigating whether a private mailbox center in Minneapolis’ Cedar-Riverside neighborhood has been improperly used as an address for more than 140 voters. State records show that 419 Cedar Avenue S. has been used by some of the voters as far back as 2008. No one lives at the address, which is a Somali-dominated commercial building housing several small businesses and a popular mail center. Several dozen apartments upstairs use a different building number. Records also show that more than 90 of the registrants at that address have voted in previous elections, although it’s unclear...

As you know, we are committed to overturning Minnesota election law that enables ineligible individuals to vote in two ways: by not determining the eligibility of election-day registrants before counting their votes, and by accepting the statements of individuals that they are eligible even when the state has records showing they are not, such as non-citizens and felons. We have spent considerable time with our attorneys refining the arguments that connect the precise text of the Minnesota Constitution (“[Ineligible] persons shall not be entitled or permitted to vote at any election in this state.”) to the statutes that in fact...

MADISON, Wis. -- State Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen on Monday appealed a two-week-old decision striking down Wisconsin's voter ID law. Van Hollen had promised an appeal as soon as U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman in Milwaukee blocked the voter ID law for violating the U.S. Constitution and federal Voting Rights Act. Monday's filing puts the case before the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago. Van Hollen also asked Adelman to suspend his ruling while the appeal proceeds, saying his decision was too broad. In his ruling, Adelman expressed skepticism that any voter ID law could pass court muster...

Election officials across Virginia are grappling with how to follow through with a directive from the State Board of Elections to purge up to 57,000 registered voters from the state rolls — a move that has prompted a lawsuit from the Democratic Party of Virginia and outright defiance by at least one registrar. The state, working this year for the first time as part of a multistate program intended to validate voters, says it is required by law to conduct maintenance on voter lists and is not canceling voters but directing local registrars to review registrants carefully. The program provides...

Kansas and Arizona filed a lawsuit against the U.S. federal government on Wednesday seeking court approval to require proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote. The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Topeka, Kansas, by the two Republican-led states accuses an agency of President Barack Obama's Democratic administration of preventing them from enforcing state laws aimed at preventing illegal immigrants from voting.

There is a problem with Election Day registrations: the people registering are not checked for eligibility before their votes are counted. That is why the Minnesota Voters Alliance and other plaintiffs are before the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, arguing that Minnesota must confirm the eligibility of all voters before counting their ballots. That includes the more than 500,000 who register on Election Day in presidential-election years. Our lawsuit is based on the plain text of Article VII, Section 1 of the Minnesota Constitution, which says, "The following persons shall not be entitled or permitted to vote at any election...

West’s campaign, though, is calling for an emergency hearing over “concerns” raised during the recount process, including results showing that 900 votes were cast in precinct 93, where there are only seven voters registered. “As usual, Murphy’s people are full of garbage,” West campaign manager Tim Edson told the Post. “This is something the secretary of state and governor will have to sort out.”

November 18, 2012 Allen West Camp to Contest ‘Suspect Result’ on 'Behalf of all Voters in District 18’ By: JIM TURNER As St. Lucie County has reportedly missed the noon Sunday deadline to certify new numbers after a weekend recount of the first five days of early voting, the campaign manager for U.S. Rep. Allen West says more questions have arisen about how the election was conducted. “Today’s actions cast an even greater cloud of suspicion over the results of St. Lucie County than existed before,” Tim Edson, the campaign manager for the Palm Beach Gardens Republican, stated in a...

A Hialeah boletera at the center of a weeklong absentee-ballot investigation that muddied the Miami-Dade mayor’s race was arrested Thursday after police say she fraudulently obtained an absentee ballot from a terminally ill woman in a nursing home. Deisy Penton de Cabrera, 56, was charged with absentee-ballot fraud, a third-degree felony, and two misdemeanor counts of violating a county ordinance that makes it illegal for anyone to possess more than two ballots belonging to other voters. Investigators say Cabrera illegally collected at least 31 absentee ballots for the Aug. 14 primary election. Hours after her office made the arrest, Miami-Dade...

People seemingly voting after they’ve been dead for years. Drug kingpins buying votes from poor people to sway elections. Non-citizens being bussed to the polls and coached on how to vote. Stories of voting fraud are shocking, and states have been taking action to make sure that elections are secure. But the Justice Department, led by Attorney General Eric Holder, has blocked states at almost every turn. This is the same Justice Department that stopped a non-partisan election reform by arguing that if party affiliation were removed from a ballot, African-American voters wouldn’t be able to identify and vote for...

MINNEAPOLIS (KMSP) - One day after the FOX 9 Investigators reported that as many as 24,000 Minnesota drivers licenses may be frauds, a state employee working in Secretary of State Mark Ritchie's department appeared in court to face charges that she fraudulently obtained a drivers license and housing assistance. A federal indictment was unsealed on Monday, revealing that a 53-year-old Woodbury woman who works as an administrative assistant in the Secretary of State's Office has been accused of using an alternate identity to receive more than $18,000 in low-income housing help from the United States Department of Housing and Urban...

In their petition challenging the Voter ID ballot question, the petitioners make three main arguments, which are all easily overcome. First, they argue that “[t]he ballot question is unconstitutionally misleading because it states the amendment would require photo identification from ‘all voters,’ when the amendment actually states photo identification is required from those who vote ‘in person.’”[11] There is nothing misleading about “all voters.” Based on the text of the amendment, “all voters voting in person” will need to present photographic identification and those not voting in person will, at the very least, “be subject to a substantially equivalent identity”...

County elections supervisors raised red flags, and then federal authorities weighed in Thursday to demand the state of Florida halt its ongoing push to remove thousands of voters from the rolls. The U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter contending Florida's efforts to identify people who are not U.S. citizens violates federal voting laws.

The Obama administration on Tuesday will wade into the increasingly divisive national debate over new voting laws in several states that could depress turnout among minorities and others who helped elect the president in 2008. Â… With the presidential campaign heating up,Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. will deliver a speech Tuesday expressing concerns about the voter-identification laws, along with a Texas redistricting plan before the Supreme Court that fails to take into account the stateÂ’s burgeoning Hispanic population, he said in an interview Monday. Holder will speak at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Libary and Museum in Austin, Tex.,...

Six people have recently been charged in St. Louis County with a felony crime that is rarely seen on a Northeastern Minnesota court docket: "Voting while ineligible." It's a felony punishable by a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine, but a conviction most likely will result in a probationary sentence. Under Minnesota law, a person is ineligible to vote if their civil rights had not been restored after being convicted of treason, or any felony, or while under a guardianship in which a court order revoked the ward's right to vote, or if found by...

"......It was one of the most difficult things I've watched in a long while: Last night, the Assembly debated AB7, the Voter ID bill, for almost six hours before a final vote saw the measure pass, 60-35. Protestors watching the proceedings from the gallery erupted into angry shouts at the passage, and as one gentleman was escorted from the room, he summed up the feelings of many well – "Welcome to Wisconsin, Jim Crow!" This bill is, at its core, a rollback of the right to vote that impacts the most vulnerable and already disenfranchised populations in the state. It...

Recount unnecessary EditorialApril 20, 2011JoAnne Kloppenburg certainly had the right to ask for a statewide recount on Wednesday. But we had hoped that she wouldn't - and the state would be better off if she hadn't. We understand the motivation. The final county-by-county canvassing of the state Supreme Court election revealed that Justice David Prosser won a narrow victory, a reflection of how polarizing the new governor and his policies have become. The heat generated by the controversy over those policies most likely spurred the significant turnout for a spring nonpartisan election and a 7,316-vote win for Prosser - less...

As if the situation in Wisconsin wasn't tense enough, it appears that one county in particular is going to a new extreme. This comes after word that there may have been voter fraud in the nonpartisan State Supreme Court election yesterday between incumbent David Prosser and JoAnne Kloppenburg. For some reason one of the counties in the state is destroying ballots that 'were not counted' yesterday. Apparently this is a very bizarre and egregious move. There is now a call for an injunction to preserve the 'discarded' ballots: I have filed a Wisconsin Open records request with the City of...