Wisconsin’s election managers say as long as there is a house number and a street name, absentee voting witness slips don’t need a city, the state, a zip code or anything else.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission clarified the rule for absentee ballot witnesses address information.
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Meagan Wolfe’s days as administrator of the troubled Wisconsin Elections Commission may be numbered.
The Senate Committee on Shared Revenue, Elections and Consumer Protection voted 3-1 on Monday to reject the appointment of Wolfe, the controversial election regulator protected by the left and lambasted by conservatives.
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At first glance, some Americans could mistakenly conclude that election integrity safeguards are deeply unpopular. After all, liberal politicians and the mainstream media regularly denounce commonsense measures like photo ID laws and routine voter roll cleanups.
No matter what they claim or how loudly they claim it, these voices do not speak for the majority of Americans. As recent polling conducted by Honest Elections Project Action shows beyond all doubt, an overwhelming bipartisan majority of Americans embrace commonsense voting laws that make it easy to vote and hard to cheat.
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Pennsylvania state Senator Lisa Boscola (D-Bethlehem) is drafting a bill to ensure voters have their in-person votes counted in cases when their defective mail-in ballots were tossed.
Boscola sponsored Act 77, the 2019 law that legalized no-excuse mail-in voting in Pennsylvania, and her emerging bill seeks to clarify a part of that statute. A provision in that law led the Delaware County Board of Elections to vote unanimously on May 23 to throw out six of its eligible voters’ ballots cast in the May 16 primary. Three of those voters are now suing the board in the Delaware County Court of Common Pleas to have their votes tallied and to guarantee those in similar situations have their ballots counted in the future.
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America is in a state of decline, if not chaos, following disappointing results in three straight elections and too many years of organized turmoil in our streets, schools, government institutions, and elsewhere. Reversing this requires fundamental changes in conservatives’ political and philanthropic strategies.
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Two Pennsylvania state senators told colleagues this week they are drafting a measure to count in-person ballots rather than absentee ballots in instances when someone uses both methods to vote.
Before Act 77, a 2019 law letting Pennsylvanians vote by mail without an excuse like illness or travel, those who submitted absentee ballots but became able to vote in person could do so while having their absentee ballots voided. The new law however directs election boards to let an absentee voter cast their vote in person using a provisional ballot; in cases when the mail-in ballot was received by 8 p.m. on Election Day, the earlier mail-in ballot, not the in-person one, is recorded.
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Several Democratic lawmakers this week proposed legislation allowing all imprisoned Pennsylvania citizens to vote by absentee ballot.
State Representatives Rick Krajewski (D-Philadelphia), Christopher Rabb (D-Philadelphia), Donna Bullock (D-Philadelphia), Jason Dawkins (D-Philadelphia) and Aerion Abney (D-Pittsburgh) announced they will cosponsor the bills.
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Two and a half years after Democratic Governor Tom Wolf and a Republican-controlled legislature enacted no-excuse absentee voting, many right-leaning Pennsylvanians still resist adjusting to the new system.
Arnaud Armstrong can sympathize. The Allentown native and 2018 University of Pittsburgh graduate has worked in various communication and grassroots roles for GOP campaigns and always found in-person voting ideal from a civic standpoint. But the lead organizer of Win Again PAC, a committee that formally launched last weekend at the conservative Pennsylvania Leadership Conference near Harrisburg, says it behooves his party compatriots to mount more spirited efforts to win absentee votes.
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Camp Hill, PA — Kellyanne Conway, a nationally renowned pollster and senior counselor in the Trump White House, called upon movement conservatives in Pennsylvania on Friday to adjust to mass absentee voting if they want to win tough elections.
“My theme tonight is about winning, not whining,” she told attendees of the annual Pennsylvania Leadership Conference (PLC) at the Penn Harris Hotel just across the Susquehanna River from Harrisburg.
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Pennsylvania’s top election officials this week informed lawmakers that the process of replacing the state’s voter-records system is “behind schedule” but assured them his agency is prioritizing its completion.
Responding to questions from members of the state House Appropriations Committee in preparation for drafting the Fiscal Year 2023-24 budget, Pennsylvania Acting Secretary of State Al Schmidt said 23 counties are testing the initial version of the new SUREVote system.
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Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court on Thursday dismissed a Republican Party lawsuit seeking to prevent counties from “curing” mail-in ballots that contain mistakes.
The GOP national and state committees who sued insisted state law does not outline procedures for local election boards to inform absentee voters they made mistakes filling out their vote envelopes or to let those voters fix their errors. In recent elections, various counties did so anyway, prompting Republicans to object that the rules aren’t being followed in certain jurisdictions across the commonwealth.
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A Racine County man says he committed voter fraud to prove a point about voter fraud in Wisconsin.
Harry Wait, a member of the group Honest, Open, and Transparent Government, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he ordered ballots for Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Racine Mayor Cory Mason through the state’s online voting system.
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The disagreement over Wisconsin’s law on absentee ballots could be headed for court.
Sen. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater, on Thursday directed his staff to look at any and all options after the Wisconsin Elections Commission said it will not abide by the legislature’s decision to stop telling local election clerks they can fill in missing information on absentee ballots, a practice also called “curing.”
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The way we cast our ballots matters. Some methods are not secure. Some methods are overly complicated. Some methods are not transparent. Any of these shortcomings is enough to undermine public confidence in the outcomes of our elections – and thus undermine our democracy itself.
Voting by mail suffers from every one of those shortcomings. In 2020, the avalanche of nonprofit monies used to turn urban election offices into partisan turnout centers identified and exacerbated these flaws and the impact of legal violations.
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The nonprofit, conservative law firm the Thomas More Society has filed a new formal complaint against the city clerk of Green Bay, Wisconsin, for allegedly participating in illegal ballot harvesting in a close, April 5 city council election.
The complaint was filed Thursday against city Clerk Celestine Jeffreys with the Wisconsin Elections Commission for allegedly accepting multiple absentee ballots from the hand of a single person several times, according to the Epoch Times.
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Wisconsin should soon have an answer about ballot drop boxes and just who can return absentee ballots.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments Wednesday morning in the case Richard Teigen v. Wisconsin Elections Commission.
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The Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled that cities and counties can conduct statewide elections without a strict party balance on absentee ballot boards.
Upholding a previous decision by the state’s court of appeals, Justice Barry Anderson published a 25-page ruling Wednesday dismissing the Minnesota Voters Alliance’s lawsuit against Ramsey and Olmsted counties and the city of Duluth, with the Republican Party of Minnesota listed as a co-plaintiff.
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Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s mailing of absentee ballot requests to everyone on the Georgia voter rolls for the November 3, 2020, presidential election, was a “a horrible decision that majorly impacted our election process,” Congressman Jody Hice (R-GA-10) told The Georgia Star News in a telephone interview Thursday, calling the voter registration file “grossly inaccurate.”
The November 3, 2020 presidential election results certified by Raffensperger and Governor Brian Kemp had Democratic candidate Joe Biden ahead of President Donald Trump by less than 12,000 votes out of 5 million votes cast, of which 1.3 million were fraud-prone absentee ballots.
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Since 1960, federal civil rights law has required state and local election officials to “retain and preserve” records relating to elections involving federal officeholders for 22 months after ballots are cast.
That would seem to be a good thing as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger embarks on an investigation into whether third-party liberal activists in 2020 illegally gathered and delivered absentee ballots for voters — a practice known as harvesting that is outlawed in the Peach State.
But some of Georgia’s largest counties tell Just the News that they no longer possess evidence that could be helpful to probing the harvesting allegations: video camera surveillance footage that monitored the drop boxes installed around Georgia to help voters cast ballots during the pandemic.
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A Virginia nonprofit released a report this week that shows potential errors in how Virginia has sent absentee ballots to people looking to vote by mail.
In one case, out of a sample size of 587 addresses in 22 districts across the state, 217 out of 243 live contacts – nearly 90 percent – the absentee ballot information listed did not match the person living there, the report found.
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In a case of what she says could be for no other purpose than vote stealing, a DeKalb County voter had her address changed and an absentee ballot requested for the November 3, 2020, presidential election, telling her story to The Georgia Star News exclusively in order to share the information with the public.
“Please get this information out – it is very important,” Mary Williams Benefield told The Star News.
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A review of transfer forms provided to The Georgia Star News in response to an open records request reveals that the Secretary of State’s office in Georgia is missing chain of custody documents for 6,995 absentee ballots deposited in drop boxes in Fulton County during the November 2020 election.
The number of absentee ballots for which the office has no evidence of the origination of the ballots represents 9 percent of the 79,460 total that Fulton County has recorded as being deposited into drop boxes during the more than month-long early voting and election day period.
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A comparison of chain of custody documents for absentee ballots deposited into drop boxes during the November 2020 election made available separately by Georgia Public Broadcasting News (GPB News) and the Georgia Secretary of State revealed that GPB News received documentation for 4,800 more drop box absentee ballots from Fulton County than Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.
The number of absentee ballots documented in the chain of custody documents GPB News has versus those the Secretary of State has represents 6 percent of the total 79,460 Fulton County indicated were deposited into drop boxes during the November 2020 election.
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While DeKalb County officials have refused to indicate whether the extended leave of absence of Elections Director Erica Hamilton is job related, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said during a CNN interview that the leave was an outcome of an investigation related to the violation of absentee ballot chain of custody rules during the November 2020 election.
A joint statement issued by DeKalb Board of Registration and Elections Chair Dele Lowman Smith and Vice-Chair Nancy Jester announced that effective September 9, Erica Hamilton was on an extended leave of absence from her role as director of DeKalb County Registration and Elections.
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43,907 of the 61,731 absentee ballots deposited in drop boxes in the November 2020 presidential election in DeKalb County, Georgia–72 percent–were counted in official tallies certified by the county and the state, despite violating chain of custody requirements set forward in Georgia Emergency Rule 183-1-14-1.8-.14 promulgated by the Georgia State Election Board at its July 1, 2020, meeting.
That rule states absentee ballots placed in drop boxes, “shall be immediately transported to the county registrar” by the two person collection team, which is required to sign a ballot transfer form indicating the number of ballots picked up, the time the ballots were picked up, and the location of the drop box, and that, “The county registrar or a designee thereof shall sign the ballot transfer form upon receipt of the ballots from the collection team.”
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In the latest development related to the absentee ballot chain of custody documents from the November 2020 election, Fulton County elections officials have contradicted Georgia Public Broadcasting News’s claims about their source for the drop box transfer forms and that documents for 18,901 absentee ballots remain missing.
On August 3, The Georgia Star News reported that Fulton County denied the same chain of custody documents for absentee ballots deposited into drop boxes during the November 2020 general election that they purportedly gave to Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) News on or before June 17.
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Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost is leading 15 other state attorneys general in backing Georgia’s effort to dismiss a federal lawsuit challenging the state’s new voter laws.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) sued Georgia, Georgia’s secretary of state and other election officials in June, saying several provisions of the state’s recent voting reform law blocks the right to vote for Georgians based on race.
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In a stunning development Wednesday, Fulton County has denied The Georgia Star News the same chain of custody documents for absentee ballots deposited into drop boxes during the November 2020 election, that they purportedly gave to Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) News on or before June 17.
Fulton County’s Legal Assistant Shana Eatmon’s emailed response informed The Star News said that there are no documents that meet our open records request.
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Taxpayer-funded National Public Radio (NPR) spread 2020 election misinformation about absentee ballot drop box chain of custody documents in Georgia in an article written by Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) political reporter Stephen Fowler published on Friday. That article was the basis for a four-minute segment broadcast across NPR’s national network Friday afternoon.
The NPR Politics Twitter account tweeted the story, titled “How Pro-Trump Local News Sites Keep Pushing 2020 Election Misinformation,” out on Friday.
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An interview between The Georgia Star News and Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) News revealed that they had received Fulton County’s drop box absentee ballot transfer forms from the Secretary of State’s office in April. GPB News, however, did not report on their findings until after The Star News report in June.
Stephen Fowler of Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) News requested an interview with John Fredericks, which also included Laura Baigert, of The Georgia Star News, as part of his fact-check for a story and to get comments from everyone involved.
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In a story this week, The Washington Post referred to Fulton County’s record-keeping of the chain of custody documentation of the absentee ballots deposited into drop boxes during the November 3, 2020, election “shoddy” and “sloppy.”
While the apparent goal of the story was to deliver “Four Pinocchios” to former President Donald Trump for what The Post called “baseless claims about ballot drop boxes in Fulton County, Ga,” it made arguments supporting claims of election irregularities.
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Seven months after the November 3, 2020 presidential election, state and county officials in Georgia have failed to produce chain of custody records for more than 317,000 absentee vote by mail ballots deposited in drop boxes located around the state for that election.
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A tweet by Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) News writer Stephen Fowler on Saturday revealed more chain of custody document discrepancies in Fulton County’s absentee ballot drop box transfer forms.
The tweet included a partial image – the very top only — of two transfer forms Fowler claims were part of an open records response GPB News received on Wednesday from Fulton County election officials.
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Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced Monday that a thorough investigation will be conducted of Fulton County’s inability to produce the critical chain of custody documents for absentee ballots deposited in drop boxes during the November 3, 2020 election.
Raffensperger made his announcement via Twitter, following the lead story Monday in The Georgia Star News that a Fulton County election official admitted that chain of custody documents are missing for absentee ballots deposited in drop boxes in the 2020 election.
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Tennessee’s absentee ballots will have a watermark, starting in elections in 2022.
Gov. Bill Lee signed Senate Bill 1315, the Tennessee Election Integrity Act, which was passed by the Tennessee Legislature last month and will put an approved watermark on all absentee ballots with the goal of providing more security to the election process.
The watermark does not apply to military electronic absentee ballots, which are not printed onto paper. Local election authorities will be required to dispose of previously purchased ballot paper at the end of 2021.
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Fulton County election officials provided two different versions of 34 completed critical chain of custody documents for absentee ballot drop boxes from the November 2020 election.
The documents were provided in response to open records requests made by The Georgia Star News, which remain incomplete even six months after the election, The Star reported.
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Six months after the November 3, 2020 election, Fulton County has failed to produce complete chain of custody documents for 18,901 vote-by-mail absentee ballots deposited by voters into drop boxes.
The Fulton County missing documentation is a little more than five percent of the estimated 333,000 vote-by-mail absentee ballots cast in the November 3, 2020 general election for which chain of custody documentation is still missing.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has refused to collect, count, and verify the chain of custody documentation associated with an estimated 600,000 absentee vote by mail ballots deposited in drop boxes in the 2020 general election. Instead, Raffensperger has said it is a county responsibility. The Georgia Star News has filed Open Records Requests with all 159 counties in the state to obtain this documentation and report on it to the public.
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Six months after the November 3, 2020 presidential election, officials at the state and county level in Georgia have failed to produce chain of custody records for more than 333,000 absentee vote by mail ballots deposited in drop boxes located around the state for that election. Joe Biden was certified as the victor of Georgia and its 16 Electoral College votes by a margin of 11,599 votes, or less than 0.25 percent of the 5 million votes cast in the November 3, 2020 presidential election in Georgia. According to the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, 1.3 million of those votes were cast as absentee vote by mail ballots. Based on polling conducted by John McLaughlin & Associates, 700,000 of those absentee vote by mail ballots were sent via regular mail and 600,000 were deposited in the estimated 300 drop boxes located around the state and were manually picked up and transported by election workers to the local county registrar for subsequent counting. As of May 17, only 59 of Georgia’s 159 counties have provided ballot transfer form data to The Georgia Star News. The number of absentee by mail ballots delivered to registrars in those 159 counties total only 266,492,…
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Five months after the November 3, 2020 presidential election, officials at the state and county level in Georgia have failed to produce chain of custody records for more than 355,000 absentee vote by mail ballots deposited in drop boxes located around the state for that election.
Joe Biden was certified as the victor of Georgia and its 16 Electoral College votes by a margin of 11,599 votes, or less than 0.25 percent of the 5 million votes cast in the November 3, 2020 presidential election in Georgia. According to the Georgia Secretary of State’s office, 1.3 million of those votes were cast as absentee vote by mail ballots. Based on polling conducted by John McLaughlin & Associates, 700,000 of those absentee vote by mail ballots were sent via regular mail and 600,000 were deposited in the estimated 300 drop boxes located around the state and were manually picked up and transported by election workers to the local county registrar for subsequent counting.
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The Virginia state Senate on Monday passed legislation that would repeal the witness signature requirement when people in the Commonwealth use absentee ballots to vote in elections.
Introduced by Sen. Barbara Favola (D-Arlington), Senate Bill 1097 passed the body by a 21-18 straight party-line vote, with all Republican members opposing the legislation.
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Tuesday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Hans von Spakovsky who the Manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative at The Heritage Foundation to the newsmakers line to discuss the importance of election integrity.
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Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger called on lawmakers Wednesday to propose legislation to revamp the state’s absentee ballot voting process.
During an election investigation hearing Wednesday, Raffensperger asked the House Governmental Affairs Committee to eliminate signature matching and no-excuse absentee voting.
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A federal judge dismissed a Georgia lawsuit Thursday challenging the legality of drop boxes and absentee signature verification. The suit, filed by the 12th Congressional District Republican Committee, sought to eliminate the use of absentee ballot drop boxes and invalidate signature matching protocol added earlier this year and for the runoff election.
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Georgia State Representative Greg Dolezal (R-Cumming) received an absentee ballot after submitting an application using a different signature than on his photo ID. The representative submitted his application on November 28 to vote in the runoff election. He received a ballot without any issues on December 15.
Dolezal tweeted a comparison picture between the non-matching signatures on his photo ID and his absentee ballot application.
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An analysis of ballot transfer forms from Cobb County reveals that 78 percent of the more than 89,000 absentee ballots from drop box locations, required to be “immediately transported” to the county registrar according to Emergency Rule of the State Election Board for Absentee Voting, took more than one hour to be transferred to election officials.
State Election Board Emergency Rule 183-1-14 relative to securing absentee ballot drop boxes was adopted by the State Election Board at the July 1, 2020, meeting.
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A review of drop box ballot transfer forms reveals that Cobb County violated the Rules of the State Election Board for Absentee Voting that requires absentee ballots from drop box locations be “immediately transported” to the county registrar.
Specifically, the Rules of the State Election Board of the Georgia Election Code Chapter 183-1 for Absentee Voting states, “The ballots from the drop box shall be immediately transported to the county registrar and processed and stored in the same manner as absentee ballots returned by mail are processed and stored.”
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The election was a sham, and there is “overwhelming proof of fraud,” Rudy Giuliani said Thursday in the second of two hearings at the Georgia Senate, and his team showed a damning video of suitcases stuffed with ballots processed once counting was supposedly finished.
The Senate Government Oversight Committee held the first hearing of the day to “evaluate the election process to ensure the integrity of Georgia’s voting process,” 11 Alive reported.
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Dr. Michael A. Youssef, a prominent Arab-American pastor in Atlanta, posted on social media that three mail-in ballots were sent to his house for his adult son — who has lived overseas for decades.
Youssef is founder/pastor of The Church of the Apostles megachurch in the Buckhead neighborhood. He also runs Leading the Way, an international television and radio ministry that shares the gospel in 26 languages in six continents.
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Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger stated that President Donald Trump should give up and “leave quietly” from the White House. The secretary of state made these comments in an interview with Atlanta Journal-Constitution published Saturday.
“When you lose an election, you should leave quietly. It’s the will of the people that has been expressed,” stated Raffensperger.
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The Amistad Project of the Thomas More Society said it filed a lawsuit on Thanksgiving asking the Michigan Supreme Court to physically secure all evidence of irregularities in the 2020 election and declare the results invalid on the basis of alleged unlawful conduct by state and local officials.
“In numerous instances, state and local officials brazenly violated election laws in order to advance a partisan political agenda,” said Phill Kline, Director of The Amistad Project. “The pattern of lawlessness was so pervasive and widespread that it deprived the people of Michigan of a free and fair election, throwing the integrity of the entire process into question.”
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