Free Republic

In June 2013, North Carolina passed the most sweeping voting restrictions in the country, requiring strict voter ID, cutting early voting and eliminating same-day registration, pre-registration for 16 and 17-year-olds, and out-of-precinct voting, among other political reforms. The state defended its cutbacks in court last summer by invoking, of all places, New York. “The state of New York has no early voting as opposed to North Carolina that has ten days of early voting,” lawyer Thomas Farr said. “The state of New York has no same-day registration. The state of New York has no out-of-precinct voting. The state of New...

Donald Trump has extended his support in the 2016 presidential race among Republican primary voters to a record 40 percent as the field has narrowed, but he is still locked in a tight battle with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz for dominance, a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows. Trump gets the support of 40 percent of Republican primary voters, while Texas Sen. Ted Cruz gets 35 percent. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, in third place, has the support of 24 percent of GOP primary voters. The margin of error for Republican primary voters in the poll is +/- 5.6 percent....

At a campaign rally on the eve of the New York primary, Donald Trump read aloud an emotional testimonial on what he considers "New York values" and mistakenly said 7-Eleven instead of 9/11. "I wrote this out, and it's very close to my heart--because I was down there, and I watched our police and our firemen down on 7-Eleven, down at the World Trade Center, right after it came down, and I saw the greatest people I've ever seen in action," Trump said at a rally near the Buffalo waterfront on Monday evening, without stopping to correct himself. "I saw...

A longtime Republican consultant who has been harshly criticized by Donald J. Trump filed a multimillion-dollar lawsuit on Monday accusing him and his campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, of making false statements that harmed her professionally and personally. The consultant, Cheri Jacobus, accused Mr. Trump and Mr. Lewandowski of libeling her by depicting her as a disappointed job-seeker who turned on Mr. Trump after he declined to hire her. When Ms. Jacobus criticized Mr. Trump on CNN in late January and early February, Mr. Trump branded her on Twitter as “a real dummy” who had “begged my people for a job.”...

7/11, 9/11, it’s all the same to Donald Trump. The billionaire — who never visited the Sept. 11 Memorial & Museum in lower Manhattan until months after his campaign kicked off —seemed to have briefly forgotten the date the terrorist attack happened. “I wrote this out, and it’s very close to my heart,” he said at the First Niagara Center on Monday night during the rally. “Because I was down there and I watched our police and our firemen down at 7/11, down at the World Trade Center right after it came down. And I saw the greatest people I’ve...

A former senior advisor to Donald Trump thinks the Republican presidential front-runner should ask his delegates to promise to support him on every ballot at a contested convention by having them sign a loyalty pledge. "We're going to produce a voluntary loyalty pledge that will say, if you're a Trump delegate, that you'll stick with Trump through all the ballots to reflect the will of the voters," veteran GOP strategist Roger Stone told Rolling Stone in an interview published Monday. "We'll ask them to sign. It's voluntary, but we'll see who does it, and who the cockroaches are," he added....