Free Republic

Barack Obama took to the stage in Michigan in late October to warn the crowd of the dangers of political rhetoric. He repeated similar claims during a rally Saturday night in Philadelphia. While not identifying any person or group in particular, it was evident that he meant the Republicans. He brought up the dangers of people standing outside voting booths armed to try to intimidate voters. Yet, Obama was singing a different tune in 2008 when the New Black Panther Party did this very same thing in Philadelphia. They harassed voters, verbally threatened poll watchers trying to enter, and called...

DENVER — County clerks across Colorado say they’re bracing for a surge of highly motivated election deniers working as poll watchers or election judges in the November midterms — part of a nationwide attempt to manufacture evidence of election fraud. Local, state and federal officials, alongside political experts, have repeatedly debunked claims of election fraud but clerks in Chaffee, Eagle, El Paso, Fremont, Garfield, Summit and Weld counties told the Denver Post they’re still seeing an increasing number of bad-faith poll watchers and election judges around the state. Encouraged, even recommended, by party officials or far-right voices with national reach,...

GOLDSBORO, N.C. (AP) — The situation with the poll watcher had gotten so bad that Anne Risku, the election director in North Carolina's Wayne County, had to intervene via speakerphone. “You need to back off!” Risku recalled hollering after the woman wedged herself between a voter and the machine where the voter was trying to cast his ballot at a precinct about 60 miles southeast of Raleigh. Poll watchers have traditionally been an essential element of electoral transparency, the eyes and ears for the two major political parties who help ensure that the actual mechanics of voting are administered fairly...

Flint, Michigan’s longtime city clerk is retiring after an election integrity group sent a letter to her office demanding she balance out the number of Democrat and Republican election inspectors. On Sept. 6, Pure Integrity Michigan Elections (PIME) and attorney Erick Kaardal of the Thomas More Society sent a demand letter to Flint and City Clerk Inez Brown threatening legal action if they do not balance out the number of partisan poll watchers before the November general election. As previously reported, during Flint’s Aug. 2 primary, the city hired 422 Democrats compared to just 27 Republican election inspectors — in...

PATRIOT Poll Watchers FLOOD Virginia as McAuliffe FALLS APART!!! GOP poll watchers often outnumbering Dems 2-1. (Video begins at 1:25)

In the vital lead-up to the Georgia Senate runoff elections on January 5, a pro-Trump PAC announced a key legal victory for election integrity. Janine Eveler, elections director at the Cobb County Board of Elections and Registration, had allegedly restricted Republican poll watchers. After the local Republican Party filed a lawsuit alongside the pro-Trump PAC Committee to Defend the President, Eveler signed a consent decree guaranteeing poll watchers’ access. Ted Harvey, the PAC’s chairman, applauded Judge George Kreeger of the Cobb County Superior Court for “helping us bring accuracy, fairness, and transparency to Georgia. Because of this ruling, the county’s...

If law enforcement, government officials, legislators, and the courts are going to restrict and remove Poll Watchers, and ignore and reject their sworn testimony of election irregularities and outright election fraud, what’s the purpose of having them (as legislated by law)? Why even have them? This should be pointed out in every lawsuit filed with the courts!

The complaint filed in Pennsylvania by the Trump campaign is a superb piece of legal craftsmanship. It was filed in federal court, not state.  The gist is that some of the state's actions, and particularly the exclusion of Republican poll-watchers during the counting of hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots, violated federal constitutional requirements. The point is obvious enough once one thinks of it, but it's brilliant all the same.  It shifts the focus from state law, where a politicized Pennsylvania court has the last word, to federal law, where the U.S. Supreme Court rules. As for the obviousness of the...

By now, it’s well-established that most of the arguments put forward by President Trump’s reelection campaign in its challenge of the results of the 2020 election are baseless and highly speculative. Even Trump allies, as The Washington Post reported late Tuesday, acknowledge the apparent futility of the effort. Others have reasoned that there’s no harm in going through the motions, with one anonymous GOP official asking, “What’s the downside for humoring him” for a little while? .... The most famous scene came in Pennsylvania, where a Trump lawyer strained to avoid acknowledging that their people were, in fact, allowed to...

Nothing has changed since Friday night. You might find that strange, given the media stampede to certify the election results for their man, but it’s crucial. The calls made Saturday morning are as arbitrary as they were last Tuesday, could just as easily have waited for Monday, and fly in the face of massive evidence of voter irregularities that, at minimum, should be heard in court before anyone considers calling the election. Add pending lawsuits and official recounts in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin, and the conclusion is an attempt by the American media to pick our president...

"My wife just sent this video of Detroit election workers cheering every time a @migop attorney is removed from the TCF Center, where absentee ballot counting is happening. She says they do this every time they eject a GOP poll watcher & that Dem watchers outnumber GOP 3:1." Aric Nesbitt Twitter Chicago Poll Workers:

A reporter for Australia's ABC met two of the men charged in an alleged plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. Journalist David Lipson suggests that the brothers Michael and William Null were more pretenders than the "real deal"..... A private security guard for a Denver TV station arrested after he shot and killed a conservative protester who sprayed him with mace following a verbal altercation..... Sweeping arrests in Portland late Sautrday night during a protest near a police precinct.... Also in Portland this weekend Patriot Prayer supporters removing a statue erected by anti-police violence protesters...... A federal appeals court...

NBA star LeBron James has reportedly recruited 10,000 volunteers to help at polls in Black electoral districts in November. The Los Angeles Lakers forward announced last month that his voting rights organization More Than A Vote would work on drafting volunteers in southern battleground states. The effort has amassed 10,000 volunteers for "We Got Next," a collaboration with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, The New York Times reported Wednesday. The collaboration will be highlighted during the NBA Finals between the Miami Heat and the Lakers. More Than a Vote told the Times the second phase of the group's push would...

One of President Donald Trump’s top re-election advisers told influential Republicans in swing state Wisconsin that the party has “traditionally” relied on voter suppression to compete in battleground states, according to an audio recording of a private event obtained by The Associated Press. The adviser said later that his remarks referred to frequent and false accusations that Republicans employ such tactics. Justin Clark, a senior political adviser and senior counsel to Trump’s re-election campaign, made the remarks on Nov. 21 as part of a wide-ranging discussion about strategies in the 2020 campaign, including more aggressive use of Election Day monitoring...

A U.S. Department of Justice press release warns individuals who may serve as poll watchers hoping to prevent voter fraud could violate voter intimidation laws. Upon first blush, what may appear to be a middling warning that voter fraud and abuse will not be tolerated by federal law enforcement also casts a shadow over various lawful election activities with broad language apparently intended to caution individuals from performing their duties.

With two weeks to go before the presidential election, the Pennsylvania Republican Party has filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming the state’s law regarding poll watchers is unconstitutional. The challenge comes as polls show a tight race between Republican nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. In recent days on the campaign trail, Trump has warned of “rigged elections” in “other communities” including cities like Philadelphia. The current state law, established in 1937, allows poll watchers to monitor locations only within the county in which they are registered to vote. The lawsuit claims that because some electoral districts...

(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch today, as part of its ongoing Election Integrity Project, announced that Judicial Watch volunteer poll observers will monitor polling sites in Virginia on Election Day. Judicial Watch poll monitors will be in Virginia in response to significant concerns about the integrity of the election process there: 1,046 aliens , or residents who are not U.S. citizens, were on the voter rolls in 8 Virginia counties. If that rate of non-citizen registration held in the rest of Virginia’s counties, that would mean that about 6,500 non-citizens are registered to vote in Virginia. A September 2016 report...

Pennsylvania has become ground zero for "election rigging" concerns over the past two election cycles. In 2012, Romney's performance in Philadelphia drew a huge amount of suspicion when he received exactly 0 votes in 59 voting divisions within the city. In fact, the vote count within those 59 divisions was an astonishing 19,605 to 0. While no one would argue that many Philadelphia neighborhoods tend to skew democratic, it certainly seems incredibly unlikely that, out of nearly 20,000 voters, not a single person preferred Mitt Romney. Of course, the city also drew heavy criticism after the Black Panthers sent "security"...

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has spent much of the last several days cementing in the minds of his supporters the idea that the presidential election on November 8 is on the verge of being stolen from him by a “rigged” system. He’s encouraged his supporters to turn out at polling sites where they suspect election fraud might take place in order to fight back against the shadowy cabal he insists stands between him and the White House. In a widely read story published by the Boston Globe on Saturday, one Trump supporter said he planned to do just that....

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich stood by...Trump's claim that the election is being "rigged,"... "Without the unending one-sided assault of the news media, Trump would be beating Hillary Clinton by 15 points," Gingrich told ABC News' Martha Raddatz on "This Week."... Gingrich emphasized that the rigging is not at the local level: "This is not about election officials at the precinct level," he said. Nevertheless, he said voters should monitor polling stations as Trump has encouraged because past elections have been "stolen."