Free Republic

Perhaps the most hard-fought Senate race this year will be ColoradoÂ’s showdown between Democratic senator Mark Udall and Republican congressman Cory Gardner. The RealClearPolitics average of polls in the race shows Gardner holding a lead of 1.3 percentage points. The outcome may determine control of the U.S. Senate, and the margin of victory could be less than the 11,000-vote margin by which Democratic senator Michael Bennet was reelected in Colorado in 2010. But there is a significant difference in this yearÂ’s Senate race. In 2013, a new Democratic state legislature rammed through a sweeping and highly controversial election law and...

A federal judge is ordering Texas to immediately drop its voter ID law after she found it unconstitutional. In a court filing Saturday, U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzalez Ramos of Corpus Christi issued a permanent and final injunction against the law, one of the toughest of its kind in the country. A day earlier, the state had asked for clarification about whether law would be in place for the upcoming elections in November. Gonzalez Ramos last week ruled the law was illegal, equating it to a “poll tax” that unfairly targets minority voters.

Latina Judge Strikes Down TX Voter ID, Blasts History of 'Discrimination' BY SANDRA LILLEY A Texas-born and raised Latina federal judge, Nelva Gonzalez Ramos, did not just block a Republican-sponsored state voter ID law, she equated it to laws enacted by states after slavery was abolished to ensure blacks could not vote. "The Court holds that SB 14 creates an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote, has an impermissible discriminatory effect against Hispanics and African-Americans, and was imposed with an unconstitutional discriminatory purpose," Gonzalez Ramos stated in her lengthy ruling issued Thursday. "The Court further holds that SB 14...

MADISON, Wis. — The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday may have blocked Wisconsin’s voter identification law, but an election reform expert is calling the decision purely procedural and expects the requirement to be in place at some point in the future. The high court didn’t give a reason for its decision in a brief order overruling the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, but three of the nine justices who dissented said there is a “colorable basis” for the court’s conclusion due to the proximity of the upcoming general election Nov. 4. Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas,...

AUSTIN, Texas – A federal judge likened Texas' strict voter ID requirement to a poll tax deliberately meant to suppress minority voter turnout and struck it down less than a month before Election Day — and mere hours after the U.S. Supreme Court blocked a similar measure in Wisconsin. The twin rulings released Thursday evening represent major and somewhat surprising blows to largely Republican-backed voter identification rules sweeping the nation that have generally been upheld in previous rulings. Approved in 2011, Texas' law is considered among the nation's harshest and had even been derided in court by the Justice Department...

A federal judge on Thursday blocked Texas from enforcing voter ID requirements just weeks ahead of the November elections, knocking down a law that the U.S. Justice Department condemned in court as the state’s latest means of suppressing minority turnout. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Nelva Gonzales Ramos of Corpus Christi is a defeat for Republican-backed photo ID measures that have swept across the U.S. in recent years and mostly been upheld in court. However, the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday night blocked Wisconsin from implementing a law requiring voters to present photo IDs.

The U.S. Supreme Court has blocked Wisconsin from enforcing its strict voter identification law in this year's election.. By a 6-3 vote, the justices granted an emergency appeal from civil rights lawyers who argued it was too late to put the rule into effect. Lawyers for the ACLU had noted the state had already sent out thousands of absentee ballots without mentioning the need for voters to return a copy of the photo identification. It would be "chaos," they said, for the state now to have to decide whether or not to count such ballots because the voters failed to...

AUSTIN – The Texas law requiring voters to show government-issued photo identification before casting a ballot has been struck down – at least temporarily.

MADISON, Wis. - The U.S. Supreme Court has blocked Wisconsin from implementing a law requiring voters to present photo IDs. Related Content US Supreme Court blocks Wis. voter... New bike path will connect Madison,... Court orders tribal night deer case... Dogs, bird rescued from hoarder... » View More The 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday declared the law constitutional.

Previously unpublished data from the last big election in Burlington, Vt., reveals a significant number of votes were cast by individuals whose names were not on the statewide checklist. In the 2012 presidential election, 17,383 votes were cast in Burlington, according to city-published data. According to data not published by the city, but made available to a reporter, 639 of those votes, or 3.7 percent, came from election day walk-in voters whose names were not on the voter rolls and whose registration status was unknown. As previously reported, votes by individuals whose names don’t appear on the checklist count whether...

There is no doubt that Tom Tillis, Karl Rove’s candidate in the North Carolina Senate race next month, was forced on us and many Tar Heel State conservatives deeply resent both of them. This is not an argument in favor of Tillis election, but rather an examination of the political rules both Tillis and the incumbent Democrat have to operate under. A few cycles ago North Carolina became the last Southern state to flip to Republican control. The rampant corruption of the last Democrat governor and many of her cohorts in the State’s Legislature caused a blow back that brought...

PJ Media has put together a new publication about voter fraud called Crimes Against the Republic.When it comes to voter fraud, there are several myths and several truths of note — enough to leave everyone unhappy. Here are five:1. Myth: President Obama won reelection because of voter fraud. Nonsense. The margins in key swing states such as Ohio and Virginia were too vast to be driven by voter fraud. No voter fraud scheme can move tens of thousands of votes. That’s impossible and would be detected. The machinery of elections simply doesn’t allow for the possibility of organizing and...

Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin has had his political obituary penned and published so many times that Badger State civil courts are probably flooded with copyright infringement lawsuits, yet he stubbornly remains in office. 2014 may wind up being his Waterloo if liberal union enthusiasts have their way – and a delicious win it would be for them indeed – but the Left side punditry is preparing for the worst and seem to have identified where to affix the blame. Obviously, it must be those racist voter ID laws. On September 12, Wisconsin voting-rights groups began to scramble when the...

In one month, voters will go to the polls to elect the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate. Will the midterms be clean? Could some elections be stolen? Everyone ostensibly agrees that voters have a right to know that their decision is not being ignored. And a clear majority supports a simple way to make sure: voter ID. You would not know it if you read only the New York Times or watched only MSNBC, but the Left and President Obama are losing their fight to block the widespread introduction of voter ID cards. In courts...

Beware of the low flying pigs as you watch hell freeze over; a group of Black Democrats in St. Louis County has endorsed White Republican Rick Stream in his race for County Executive. The group known as the Fannie Lou Hamer Coalition (FLHC), named for the Voting Rights giant who worked to give Blacks the right to vote in Mississippi during the summer of 1965, has finally awakened to the fact that Democrats do not care about them and never have. They point to the continuing failure of the county’s schools to educate Black children and the Democrat’s shameless pandering...

Opponents of Wisconsin's photo ID requirement for voters took their case to the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday, seeking an emergency halt to the state's implementation of the law before the fast approaching Nov. 4 election. ~snip~ In their petition, voter ID opponents told the Supreme Court that there's not enough time to properly implement the law in the month remaining in the tight race between GOP Gov. Scott Walker and Democratic challenger Mary Burke. "Thousands of Wisconsin voters stand to be disenfranchised by this law going into effect so close to the election. Hundreds of absentee ballots have already...

A nonprofit watchdog group is suing an obscure Defense Department unit over its failure for three years to disclose the results of testing on the security safeguards of Internet voting systems that are increasingly being used to cast absentee ballots. {This} Pentagon unit, the Federal Voting Assistance Program, has effectively bankrolled many states’ shift to online voting, disbursing tens of millions of dollars in grants for the purchase of equipment that includes Internet balloting options... {T}he Federal Voting Assistance Program said it expects to release the results in 2015 {after the 2014 election}.

Attorney General Eric Holder, who announced his resignation on Thursday, leaves a dismal legacy at the Justice Department, but one of his legal innovations was especially pernicious: the demonizing of state attempts to ensure honest elections. As a former U.S. attorney general under President Reagan, and a former Ohio secretary of state, we would like to say something that might strike some as obvious: Those who oppose photo voter-ID laws and other election-integrity reforms are intent on making it easier to commit vote fraud. That conclusion is inescapable, given the well-established evidence that voter-ID laws don't disenfranchise minorities or reduce...

Time and again, we hear from the Democrats that voter fraud is not an important issue. Despite their ardent insistence, we continue to see people getting arrested for voter fraud, usually from their own party! Today’s news continues that trend. Democratic Connecticut State Representative Christina Ayala has been arrested on 19 counts of voter fraud.

The New Georgia Project, a group currently under investigation for “significant illegal activities” regarding voter-registration applications, began handing over subpoenaed documents on Friday, and says it’s reached an agreement to limit the scope of the documents it’s required to turn over. Georgia secretary of state Brian Kemp launched the investigation of the New Georgia Project earlier this month after receiving “numerous” complaints regarding applications submitted by the group, including forged signatures and applications. The investigation has turned up 33 fraudulent applications thus far, ahead of the thousands of pages of documents set to be turned over. The group is run...