Free Republic

Elon Musk and the Trump administration are pitching cuts in one of the most politically dangerous arenas in America — the Social Security Administration. Musk has cast the idea as one that’s primarily about immigration, falsely claiming that undocumented immigrants are fraudulently accessing hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of entitlements, including Social Security, Medicaid and disability programs, as part of a Democratic scheme for votes. “By using entitlements fraud, the Democrats have been able to attract and retain vast numbers of illegal immigrants,” Musk, the billionaire tech CEO behind the Department of Government Efficiency, said Monday on Sen. Ted...

Elon Musk’s cost-cutting and fraud-finding apparatus, the Department of Government Efficiency, came out swinging in recent days. The result? Two stunning strikeouts. A series of announcements by DOGE as well as claims by Musk and President Donald Trump about the agency’s efforts have crumbled under scrutiny even as they’re broadly repeated by conservative pundits, sympathetic media and the White House. Two of the most notable claims — around Social Security fraud and $8 billion savings found in a Department of Homeland Security contract — have been debunked. Meanwhile, Trump’s agenda is set to add to the federal government’s deficit well...

With Pennsylvania expected to be a close and crucial state in the 2024 race for the presidency, it's unusual election laws are again under the microscope. First, there's the counting. The state doesn’t have early voting — instead offering the time-consuming and paperwork heavy option of on-demand mail balloting. It also doesn’t process its mail ballots ahead of Election Day. So, in the hours after polls close on Election Day, when many battleground states will be reporting their early, mail and Election Day totals, Pennsylvania will be counting ballots around the clock in a mad dash to catch up. Then...

A shocking scene reportedly unfolded at a satellite election office in South Park Ice Rink in Bethel Park, PA, where early voters, who had been waiting for hours, witnessed ‘vanloads’ of ‘non-English-speaking citizens’ allegedly escorted to the front by “translators” to cast their ballots. According to X user Emma Cawwod, at least “three buses” arrived, with individuals being guided in by representatives from “Vote Today PA,” a vote mobilization group funded by the progressive organization Working Families Power, which advocates for causes like “economic fairness, racial justice, gender equity, climate sustainability.” Some of these individuals were seen wearing hooded sweatshirts...

2024 Election The 2020 election took days to call. Could it happen again this year? While many states have made it easier to count mail ballots faster in recent years, several critical swing states may still keep America waiting well beyond Election Day. Milwaukee Absentee Ballot Election workers count absentee ballots into the early morning Nov. 4, 2020, in Milwaukee.Stephen Groves / AP file Create your free profile or log in to save this article Feb. 27, 2024, 5:00 AM CST By Jane C. Timm and Adam Edelman After the 2020 presidential election took days to call, many states reworked...

Ken Paxton hit the campaign trail with a smile last week. Beaming in photos he posted of events in Collin County, Denton County, Grayson County and Tarrant County, the Texas Republican attorney general campaigned and promoted more than a dozen candidates on the ballot in this week’s primary election. Most are new faces to the Republican Party, because Paxton, the legally embattled but popular statewide official, isn’t seeking to shore up his party’s incumbents: Paxton is out for revenge. “It’s time for a whole new slate in Collin County,” he wrote in one post with a photo of him and...

A grand jury voted to indict two local officials who delayed the certification of midterm election results in 2022 in Cochise County, Arizona, state Attorney General Kris Mayes said Wednesday. Cochise County Supervisors Peggy Judd, 61, and Tom Crosby, 64, voted against certifying the county’s election results by the statutory deadline in 2022, after months of casting baseless doubt on the integrity of the election. The county only certified its election results after a court ordered them to do so. The indictment alleges that Judd and Crosby committed two felonies by conspiring to delay the certification of election results and...

After years of claiming that American elections are rife with fraud, conservative election activists are preparing a new tool to take matters into their own hands. Activists are currently testing a computer program called EagleAI NETwork, a database loaded with voter rolls and other records that promises to quickly churn through the data and find registrations that may be suspect based on other sources. The activists then personally evaluate the flagged voter registrations one by one — looking up home addresses on Google Maps, searching for obituaries online — and prepare lists of questionable registrations to report to local officials....

Florida Democrats say they’re spending and organizing to chase down people who vote by mail after election officials across the state canceled all standing mail ballot requests this year. The mass cancellations were to comply with a 2021 election law that added new restrictions to mail-in voting. The legislation — which was celebrated by Gov. Ron DeSantis and slammed by voting rights advocates as discriminatory — cut the duration of mail-in ballot requests in half from four years to two. It also required that existing requests for mail ballots be canceled at the end of 2022, forcing election workers to...

BUCKINGHAM, Virginia — Lindsey Taylor loved running elections here. The previous registrar had spent nearly three decades in the job, and Taylor, 37, hoped to do the same when she was first hired in 2019. She loved her staff and the volunteer poll workers, and she took pride in the detail-oriented work. She implemented dozens of new laws in 2020, ran elections through the pandemic and impressed many in the rural, conservative, tight-knit community of Buckingham County. But then the voter fraud claims started. In January, the GOP assumed control of the Buckingham County Electoral Board that oversees her office,...

Officials in Otero County, New Mexico, voted to certify primary election results on Friday in compliance with a state Supreme Court order after refusing to do so, citing concerns about voting machines. In a 2-1 vote, the Republican-led commission certified the county's results from its June 7 primary. One of the commissioners, Vickie Marquardt, said she voted to certify over fears of criminal charges and possible jail time. “The New Mexico Supreme Court, the Democrat-controlled state legislature and the Democrat-controlled Secretary of State and the Attorney General will not allow us to withhold approval pending investigation. Instead, they are railroading...

President Donald Trump has suggested multiple times that a coronavirus vaccine could come within months, an accelerated timeline that prominent health experts and veteran vaccine developers say is unlikely absent a miracle. "We're looking to get it by the end of the year if we can, maybe before," Trump said Friday during in a Rose Garden event centered on his administration's efforts to fast-track a vaccine. “Vaccine work is looking VERY promising, before end of year,” Trump tweeted on Thursday. “I think it’s possible you could see a vaccine in people’s arms next year — by the middle or end...

“There’s a lot of things that could go wrong,” one expert said. President Donald Trump has suggested multiple times that a coronavirus vaccine could come within months, an accelerated timeline that prominent health experts and veteran vaccine developers say is unlikely absent a miracle. "We're looking to get it by the end of the year if we can, maybe before," Trump said Friday during in a Rose Garden event centered on his administration's efforts to fast-track a vaccine. “Vaccine work is looking VERY promising, before end of year,” Trump tweeted on Thursday. “I think we’re going to have a vaccine...

"I'm going to put it very simply: the president of the United States has the authority to do what the president has the authority to do, which is very powerful. The president of the United States calls the shots," Trump said Monday evening, pressed on his claim during a news briefing at the White House. He continued: "When somebody’s the president of the U.S., the authority is total, and that’s the way it’s gotta be." But experts — and the Constitution — say Trump is wrong. The authority to require businesses to close in a public health crisis is what...