Free Republic

President Donald Trump said he planned to vote absentee this year, although he decries the recent push for all-mail elections. The two methods aren’t interchangeable, but are both subsets of voting by mail. Before the elections, The president reiterated his opposition to mail-in voting, tweeting: “Because of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, 2020 will be the most RIGGED Election in our nation’s history.”Because of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, 2020 will be the most RIGGED Election in our nations history – unless this stupidity is ended. We voted during World War One & World War Two with no problem, but now they are using Covid in...

Illegal electioneering and ballot harvesting by supposedly nonpartisan groups reached new heights in this election. Last week, I reported on a coordinated and completely illegal votes-for-cash scheme in tribal areas of Nevada, spearheaded by a group called the Nevada Native Vote Project, which is part of a larger effort called Native Vote funded by the National Congress of American Indians, or NCAI.Under the guise of a get-out-the-vote campaign, these nonprofit groups were bribing tribal members to vote, offering them gift cards, electronics, and other “prizes” in exchange for proof that they voted. They documented these efforts through their own social...

Yesterday several Pennsylvania Republican Party officials and individual Republican voters filed a lawsuit in state court seeking to obtain declaratory and injunctive relief based on a claim that the legislation which adopted “no excuse” eligibility for absentee voting was an illegitimate amendment of the Pennsylvania State Constitution.The Plaintiffs are Mike Kelly, a GOP member of the U.S. House of Representatives from the extreme northwest corner of Pennsylvania; Sean Parnell, a GOP politician who lost his race for the US House in a suburban Pittsburg District; Wanda Logan, a GOP politician who lost her race for Pennsylvania State House in Philadelphia...

GOP concerns about election integrity are warranted. Americans should focus on three keys to ensuring election integrity, for now and the future.President Donald Trump’s campaign is embarking on a series of legal challenges in several states, pursuing allegations of voter fraud and process violations. Any campaign or political party is certainly right to challenge legitimate, suspicious activity. Election integrity is critical, no matter the outcomes this year. The question is, what are the real problems we need to watch for?Republicans have focused much attention on Dominion Voting Systems, a leading purveyor of voting equipment across the country. Given accusations of...

The polls from the major networks and universities promised a blue wave. President Trump was down by at least 10 points nationally, and by nearly that much or more in the major swing states. The few pollsters, including Trafalgar, who got 2016 and 2018 right and called 2020 a close race, were widely ridiculed.Nate Silver, a leftwing poll analyst, was chief among the critics. Silver gave former Vice President Joe Biden a nearly 70 percent chance of winning Florida.Immediately on Election Day, turnout looked good for the GOP. Trump won Florida decisively and by 8:30 p.m. Central Time, and made...

To read reports in the mainstream press about the throngs of President Trump’s supporters who rallied in Washington, D.C., over the weekend, you’d think the crowd was made up of a bunch of conspiracy theory-addled rubes and delusional far-right extremists all of them hoodwinked into thinking the election was stolen. To read David Frum’s Twitter take, you’d think they were all Nazis. The march came on the heels of a poll last week that found a staggering 70 percent of Republicans now say they don’t believe the presidential election was free and fair. That news, like news of the self-described...

At issue was President Trump’s request for an order changing the way Pennsylvania absentee and mail-in ballots are being reviewed at the Philadelphia Convention Center. Legacy media are lying when they claim that all of President Trump’s allegations of voter fraud are baseless. I know, because I argued a case on the president’s behalf in federal court in Philadelphia. At issue was President Trump’s request for an order changing the way Pennsylvania absentee and mail-in ballots are being reviewed at the Philadelphia Convention Center. CNN and others claim he “lost.” That’s false: he won. As I made that argument on...

PITTSBURGH - Mail-in ballots continue to be the focus of the Allegheny County election officials. Bins of ballots are being reviewed by the Division Manager and Deputy Divisions Manager in front of observers, according to Allegheny County officials. The ballots are being sorted into two piles: ballots which can’t be resolved, and another for ballots that will need more research. Those ballots will be reviewed to see if a resolution is possible. Election officials are also taking a look through the ballots returned by voters who got an incorrect and corrected ballot. Those ballots are matched against the incorrect ballots....

In the face of historic and unprecedented irregularities in the counting of votes in swing states including Michigan and Pennsylvania, Republican lawyers are suing to ensure the integrity of this election. The Trump campaign and state-level Republican Party organizations have filed lawsuits in Michigan and Georgia, as well as new lawsuits in Pennsylvania, where the U.S. Supreme Court has requested Democrats respond to a motion by the Trump campaign to intervene in an earlier suit over Pennsylvania’s decision to keep accepting new mail-in ballots for days after Election Day, in violation of state law. In addition, private, non-partisan groups such...

Several of these states will ultimately end up quite close, perhaps even with recounts. Will the Election Night leaders end up losers? As expected (or feared) the presidential election is too close to call. A little after midnight, Joe Biden made a short and surreal speech at a drive‐​in amphitheater to declare “We’re gonna win this.” Then Donald Trump spoke to a packed East Room in the White House at about 2:30am and asserted, “We did win this election,” claiming several states that had yet to be called and making allegations of fraud and disenfranchisement. I’m neither a pollster nor...

A sickening feeling is spreading among some of the smarter Democrats that they have royally screwed up their election strategy. The plan that seemed so smart, once they realized that COVID was a golden opportunity to distract from President Trump's massive foreign policy and economic triumphs, is backfiring. The plan, in short, was to terrorize Americans with fear porn over the purported dangers of COVID (despite it being 99%+ survivable for all but those over 70, and despite huge progress in therapeutics driving the survival rate even higher), while emphasizing mail-in voting for their base. Republicans, they thought, could be...

Before the China virus, Democrats were hitting a wall with the upcoming 2020 election. President Trump looked invincible with his booming economy and "promises made, promises kept" routine. And they're stuck with their only "moderate" candidate, Joe Biden. How will anyone vote for Joe Biden, and how will half the electorate choose Joe? He's not an attractive, articulate candidate; he's a doddering old man who sadly mumbles through his faux rallies. But then Biden was a gaffe machine even before he drifted into senility. He has no big wins in his record and no vision for a Biden administration. And...

The U.S. Postal Service has faced scrutiny for making major operational changes in an election year when many more Americans are mailing their ballots because of the coronavirus pandemic. But new statistics show the USPS is doing a worse job of delivering the mail on time, raising concerns that some ballots may be delayed. The Postal Service said Friday that its on-time delivery rate for first-class mail slipped to 85.6% for the week ended October 16. That’s down from nearly 91% over a three-month period ending in June, noted Paul Steidler, senior fellow with the Lexington Institute, a public policy...

The Democrats’ ploys to draw out the ballot-counting process have largely failed across the country, so now, election and postal experts are saying it’s already too late to mail your ballot. If you want your vote to count, you need to vote in person. It appears that about 10 percent of all first-class mail is being delayed because of the massive volume of election mail. Despite extraordinary measures by the USPS to get every ballot where it needs to go to be counted, it won’t be enough to ensure that every single ballot mailed before Election Day arrives in time...

DeShawn Bojgere, 30, who no longer works for the USPS, was charged with delay or destruction of mail in connection with the ballot dump earlier this month in Louisville, US Attorney Russell Coleman’s office said. More than 100 general election absentee ballots being sent out to voters were discarded in a construction dumpster, prosecutors said.

MISSION, S.D. - The small, brick post office in Mission, South Dakota, sees steady business most days as people wait outside to allow one family at a time to check for mail at one of just four such depots scattered across the Rosebud Indian Reservation. With limited polling places on a reservation that’s roughly 2,000 square miles and officials pushing people to vote by mail amid the coronavirus pandemic, cramped post offices such as this one are a lifeline to preserving Native American’s right to vote. But voting right advocates fear it’s not enough. The slow-moving nature of mail on...

HARRISBURG — Negotiations between the Republican-led legislature and Gov. Tom Wolf to let counties begin opening mail ballots in Pennsylvania before Election Day appeared to collapse Wednesday, setting up a potential nightmare scenario that some fear could leaving the state counting millions of ballots for days after Nov. 3. The Democratic governor and legislative leaders had been negotiating behind closed doors as recently as Tuesday to change the election code after months of inaction. But the General Assembly adjourned Wednesday and is not scheduled to reconvene until Nov. 10, a week after the election. In adjourning, Republicans turned away pleas...

Most people supporting President Trump in this election are confident that he will get more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016, but they fear that fraudulent mail-in ballots will steal or delay the election results. After analyzing state voting laws -- and the 2016 electoral map -- I feel confident in saying that neither is a likely outcome. First, only ten states mail ballots to every voter on their registration rolls. Those states have faced justified criticism for risking their results' integrity because voter rolls are outdated and make verifying identity difficult. But under the Electoral College system,...

Perhaps the most notable observation from the latest Bank of America Fund Manager Survey is the finding that 74% of respondents believe that a contested election is the biggest reason for volatility in 4Q, and that 61% of Wall Street professionals believe the election will be contested. Consistent with this, 44% of respondents in a parallel survey targeting FX and Rates investors found that 44% of respondents expected uncertainty to linger for up to a month if not longer—still a considerable share. Yet even as the market is setting up for the possibility of greater volatility, it now appears...

Nearly 90% of rejected applications were duplicate requests. Pennsylvania has rejected hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballot applications this election year, with the vast majority of those rejections occurring because of duplicate ballot requests from voters in the state. The state "has rejected 372,000 requests for mail-in ballots," with "more than 90% of those applications, or about 336,000," occurring due to duplicate requests, ProPublica reported this week. According to ProPublica, the significant number of duplicate applications came about largely due to voters having requested a general election ballot during the state's primary election as well as closer to the general...