Free Republic

Voters heading to the polls this November in more than a dozen of the most competitive House races in the country will be confronted with aging voting machines that cannot be verified by paper ballots, according to election officials. Reuters reports that officials in 14 districts where congressional races are expected to be close are concerned about malicious actors accessing voting data and changing voter outcomes. In total, more than 140 House elections will be held in regions of the country where all or some voters do not have access to machines capable of providing a paper recount for auditors....

A new lawsuit alleges that Iowa’s new voter ID law violates the state constitution and will make it more difficult for some residents to vote. The lawsuit, filed Wednesday by the League of United Latin American Citizens of Iowa and Iowa State University student Taylor Blair, is the first major legal challenge to the law since it was passed last year, according to the Associated Press. The law requires that election officials ask voters for a form of identification starting this year, including during Iowa’s primary elections on June 5. This year, those without ID can sign an oath verifying...

WASHINGTON — The pace of new voter registrations among young people in crucial states is accelerating, a signal that school shootings this year — and the anger and political organizing in their wake — may prove to be more than ephemeral displays of activism. They could even help shape the outcome of the midterm elections. If voters in their teens and 20s vote in greater numbers than usual, as many promised during nationwide marches for gun control this spring, the groundswell could affect close races in key states like Arizona and Florida, where there will be competitive races for governor,...

New York Democratic leaders say they want more people to vote — except they won’t allow anyone but registered Democrats to vote in party primaries. The New York State Democratic Party plans on blocking a proposed resolution at its May 23-24 convention that would allow independent or “unaffiliated” voters to vote in this year’s Democratic primary for governor. New York’s restrictive voting laws became a national embarrassment in 2016 as many younger voters realized they couldn’t vote for Bernie Sanders in the presidential primary against Hillary Clinton because they missed the deadline to enroll as Democrats.

The Associated Press reports that a Texas voter ID law has been upheld by a US Court of Appeals.  From the AP:“Texas' voter ID law that was twice blocked over findings of discrimination can stay in effect for the 2018 elections, a U.S. appeals court ruled Friday.It was the second major ruling over voting rights in the U.S. this week after an Arkansas judge on Thursday blocked that state's voter ID measure as unconstitutional.But in a 2-1 decision by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans, the Texas law that critics have slammed as one of the...

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) said on Wednesday that he will sign an executive order giving all parolees in New York the right to vote. The announcement comes after he noted that the New York Legislature voted down such a measure. "I'm going to make it law by executive order," Cuomo said during a speech to the National Action Network’s annual conference. “In this state, when you're released from prison and you're on parole, you still don't have the right to vote,” Cuomo said. “Now how can that be? You did your time. You paid your debt. You're released,...

Tacoma Park, Maryland, became the first place in the U.S. to allow 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in local elections. That was in 2013. Since then, two other Maryland towns have followed suit, while in Berkeley, California, the voting age was lowered to 16, if only for school board elections. Now our nation’s capital elbows its way into the trend. Last week, Washington, D.C., City Councilman Charles Allen introduced legislation “inspired by the high-schoolers who are campaigning for gun control and filled D.C. streets last month in a massive protest that mesmerized the country,” according to a breathless Washington Post....

It’s easy to vote illegally in Nevada. All a non-citizen has to do is go the DMV and ask. The DMV uses the same form regardless of whether you’re getting a driver’s license, ID card or driver’s authorization card. The latter are for those, like illegal aliens, who can’t meet the proof of identity requirements for the other documents. At the bottom of that form is a voter registration application. The voter registration form asks if you’re a citizen and if you’re old enough to vote. What’s to stop someone from lying? Nothing and no one. You could get a...

Irked at the prospect that President Trump may send US troops to guard the border against illegal immigration, the Mexican Senate unanimously passed a resolution that would end the bilateral cooperation between US and Mexican law enforcement agencies against the violent drug cartels that have run rampant along the border. President of the Senate, Pablo Escudero Mora defended the seemingly irrational move as “totally justified given the long history of US aggression toward our country. First they seized Texas. Then they invaded Mexico and forced us to cede California, and what are now Arizona and New Mexico to them. Now,...

On April 12, 1861, the Confederacy opened fire on Fort Sumter, igniting a civil war that before its end killed more than 800,000 Americans. Mark the date April 1, 2018, April Fool's Day, as the day Civil War 2.0 began. On that day, the State of California began to automatically register illegal aliens who have driver licenses to vote. This new law immunizes illegals against any state criminal penalty for registering and voting. Leftist scholars say our states control their voting criteria and can legally register non-citizens to vote in state, county, and local elections. States, including California, however, may...

The election high point this century for Democrats was 2008. They took the White House and Congress. They then hoped to addict Americans to government-provided medicine, causing people to vote Democratic forever. But the plan failed. Since then Republicans have won most elections. Not just nationally, for president and Congress, but also for governor, state legislatures, and other state and local offices. However, Democrats thought 2016 was the election they could not lose. But lose it they did. The presidency along with Congress and a record number of state governments. Which has made them desperate. Obviously, Democrats are out of...

West Virginia is test launching a mobile voting system powered by blockchain technology in its upcoming primary election on May 8th. The system will initially be available only for active-duty military registered voters and their “eligible dependents” in Harrison and Monongalia county. The state is the first in the country to be testing a blockchain-backed voting system for a federal election, according to a recently released statement.

A judge sentenced a Rendon woman to five years in prison Wednesday for voting illegally in the 2016 presidential election while she was on supervised release from a 2011 fraud conviction. Crystal Mason, 43, waived her right to a jury trial and chose to have state District Judge Ruben Gonzalez assess her sentence. J. Warren St. John, her defense attorney, said after the verdict was rendered that an appeal had already been filed and he is hopeful his client will soon be released on bond. "I find it amazing that the government feels she made this up," St. John told...

Documentary filmmaker and left-wing activist Michael Moore took to Twitter on Monday and shared the “one thing” he says we’ve “learned” since last month’s horrific mass shooting. “If there’s one thing we’ve learned since Parkland, it’s that the voting age should be lowered to 16. Other countries do it, we should too.” Moore was among the throng of celebrities who took to social media to shower praise on the thousands of students and activists who hit the streets in Washington, DC, and in other cities across the country and marched in support of gun control. “I’d say at least one...

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) on Monday signed a package of measures aimed at increasing voter participation that would create potentially hundreds of thousands of new voters — in a state that already has one of the highest turnout rates in the country. Perhaps the most consequential measure is one that would require the state Department of Licensing to automatically register citizens obtaining a state driver’s license or identification card to vote. Among the other measures Inslee signed Monday: A bill to allow voters to register on election day and another bill to allow 16- and 17-year-olds to preregister to...

A pollster hired by Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach testified Monday that a survey of 500 adults he conducted found just one person who couldn't produce a document proving U.S. citizenship. The Topeka Capital-Journal reported his testimony came on the seventh day of a federal bench trial challenging Kansas' proof-of-citizenship requirement. Pollster Pat McFerron also acknowledged possible bias in his survey under questioning by an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union.

While in India promoting her election memoir "What Happened," former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton laid a big share of the blame for her loss to Trump on "white women who were too weak to stand up to bullying by their husbands demanding that they vote for Trump." Clinton's former 2008 presidential campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle called Hillary's contention "wrong" and "unhelpful. To try to portray women as the pawns of men will clash with every woman's personal perception that she is the master of her own self. It won't ring true to women or to men. Rather than blaming...

The ACLU’s top voting rights lawyer faced down one of President Donald Trump’s voter fraud commissioners in court on Friday, getting him to concede that he had shaky evidence of significant voter fraud in Kansas. The exchange came on the fourth day of a trial over a Kansas law that requires residents to prove they are U.S. citizens when they register to vote. Several residents who were not allowed to vote in the 2016 election are being represented by the American Civil Liberties Union in the suit against Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R). Dale Ho, director of the...

A former employee of YouTube (a subsidiary of Alphabet, parent of Google) alleged in a recently filed lawsuit that YouTube is discriminating against white and Asian men. “YouTube last year stopped hiring white and Asian males for technical positions because they didn’t help the world’s largest video site achieve its goals for improving diversity,” the suit alleges. Liberal discrimination against white men is nothing new, but many people are caught by surprise to see such explicit discrimination against Asian males in the name of diversity from one of the most progressive companies in one of the most liberal zip codes....

Former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi has been surprised by a topless activist while casting his vote in the Italian elections today. The woman, who had the words 'Berlusconi, you've expired' written in black marker on her chest, jumped onto the table at the Milan polling station as Berlusconi was voting.