Republicans have filed five election integrity lawsuits recently in Arizona, attracting the ire of election fraud denier and progressive attorney Marc Elias.
Elias issued a video last week analyzing some of the lawsuits, which he described as “anti-voting lawsuits” that seek to make it “harder to vote and easier to cheat,” part of a “plan Republicans have to undermine elections and suppress voters.”
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Tennessee has added new restrictions to allowing residents with out-of-state felony convictions to regain voting privileges.
Coordinator of Elections Mark Goins wrote a person convicted of a felony must receive a pardon from a governor of the United States president or have their full rights of citizenship restored and then must have paid all owed restitution and assessed court costs along with being current on child support obligations.
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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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Republicans in the Ohio Legislature are working to pass a law codifying the election-integrity office whose creation Secretary of State Frank LaRose (R) announced last year.
LaRose declared last October he would set up the Public Integrity Division in his office to improve the security, accuracy and accessibility of elections in the Buckeye State. The new department consolidates heretofore separate divisions dealing with campaign-finance administration, voter registration, election investigations and cybersecurity.
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Pennsylvania Republican congressional candidate Jim Bognet sued the Luzerne County Board of Elections in the county’s Court of Common Pleas this week over problems with administration of the 2022 election.
This year, Bognet challenged incumbent Democrat Matt Cartwright to represent the Eighth Congressional District which includes Scranton, Wilks-Barre, Hazleton, Mount Pocono and neighboring communities extending northeastward to the New York and New Jersey borders. While many observers considered Cartwright’s reelection effort vulnerable, he ultimately received 51.3 percent of the 283,580 votes cast for Congress in the district while Bognet got 48.7 percent.
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Pennsylvania’s Republican Party and its national counterpart filed a lawsuit this week to prevent the state’s Democrat-run executive branch from requiring counties to count undated absentee ballots.
A lawsuit that originated in 2021 to settle a dispute about whether such ballots should be tallied resulted in the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals answering in the affirmative this June. That ruling decided a race for Lehigh County Court of Common Pleas in favor of Democrat Zachary Cohen over Republican David Ritter.
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The U.S. Supreme Court invalidated a lower federal court’s decision Tuesday allowing Pennsylvania counties to count undated mail-in ballots.
The case originated in 2021 after Republican David Ritter and Democrat Zachary Cohen vied for a judgeship on the Lehigh County Court of Common Pleas and their race came to a near tie. Cohen eventually netted a five-vote lead when the Philadelphia-based Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals resolved a dispute between the candidates about whether to count 257 absentee ballots. Those sheets were returned in envelopes on which the voter failed to write a date.
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