Free Republic

An incumbent Democrat narrowly won re-election to the state’s highest court. But the Republican-controlled court is considering an unusual protest from her challenger that could flip the result.Heath Clay, a city councilman in Summerfield, N.C., left the voting booth last fall feeling that this was the most secure election he had ever voted in, partly because of a North Carolina law that requires both in-person and mail-in voters to show proof of identity. Mr. Clay, a registered Republican, had done just that. But then someone told him troubling news: Jefferson Griffin, a Republican candidate for the State Supreme Court, was...

After more than a decade of court battles and legislative jousting over voting rules, North Carolina this month held its first general election under its new voter ID law.And unlike the pitched battles of the past, it felt like a fight that had largely been fought to a draw, with a more muted ID requirement, and very few ballots that were disqualified.In 2013, when North Carolina’s Republican-run State Legislature first required voters to pull out a photo ID card before casting a ballot, it stirred a hornet’s nest of protest that the real goal was to keep nonwhite, mostly Democratic,...

A sweeping 2021 law drew a legal complaint from the Justice Department. Legislators in the state are considering several new measures focused on ballot access and fraud investigations. ATLANTA — Butch Miller, a Republican leader of the Georgia State Senate, is running for lieutenant governor and faces a tough fight this spring against a primary opponent backed by former President Donald J. Trump. So perhaps it is no surprise that Mr. Miller, a co-sponsor of a sweeping and restrictive state voting law last year, has once again jumped into the fray, promoting a new measure to prohibit the use of...

In Georgia, Arizona and other states won by President Biden, some leading Republicans stood up in November to make what, in any other year, would be an unremarkable statement: The race is over. And we lost, fair and square. But that was then. Now, in statehouses nationwide, Republicans who echoed former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless claims of rampant fraud are proposing to make it harder to vote next time — ostensibly to convince the very voters who believed them that elections can be trusted again. And even some colleagues who defended the legitimacy of the November vote are joining...

Thomas B. Hofeller achieved near-mythic status in the Republican Party as the Michelangelo of gerrymandering, the architect of partisan political maps that cemented the party’s dominance across the country. But after he died last summer, his estranged daughter discovered hard drives in her father’s home that revealed something else: Mr. Hofeller had played a crucial role in the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. Files on those drives showed that he wrote a study in 2015 concluding that adding a citizenship question to the census would allow Republicans to draft even more extreme gerrymandered...