As Arizona faces a lawsuit over its ballot drop boxes, states across the country have taken different approaches to using unmanned receptacles for elections.
The Arizona Secretary of State has been sued for allegedly overstepping state law by permitting unstaffed ballot drop boxes, while Wisconsin is facing a lawsuit to allow ballot drop boxes.
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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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The Wisconsin Elections Commission has lost a lawsuit challenging its use of an unlawful voter registration form, the latest legal problem for a controversial state elections regulator with a history of bending the law.
The lawsuit, filed by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) on behalf of Wisconsin taxpayer and voter Richard Braun, challenged the use of the National Mail Voter Registration Form in Wisconsin.
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A federal court in the Northern District of Georgia issued rulings on Friday upholding portions of Georgia’s Election Integrity Act while also banning countries from rejecting absentee ballots that contain improper date of births.
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The Republican National Committee and Republican Party of Wisconsin have filed a motion to intervene in Priorities USA v. Wisconsin Elections Commission, an election lawsuit filed in the Badger State by attorney Marc Elias, known as the fixer for the Democratic Party and its politicians.
The original suit, filed in Dane County Circuit Court by the Elias Law Group in July, demands Wisconsin voters be once again allowed to return absentee ballots in drop boxes.
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The liberal D.C. law firm behind a legal challenge to the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s ruling striking down the use of absentee ballot drop boxes in the Badger State was founded by Hillary Clinton’s political fixer, the man who helped bankroll the infamous — and bogus — Trump-Russia dossier.
Marc Elias and his Elias Law Group filed a lawsuit last week in the liberal Dane County Circuit Court demanding the return of the widespread use of unsecured drop boxes, just as the Wisconsin’s high court is about to be led by liberals for the first time in a long time.
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The Democratic Party machine has crushed Republicans in the contest to harvest early votes in battleground Wisconsin — inside and outside the law.
The GOP is looking to turn the tables with a new national initiative launching in the Badger State.
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State Representative Janel Brandtjen (R-Menomonee Falls) is urging the Wisconsin Elections Commission to fire Meagan Wolfe, WEC’s controversial administrator.
The commission meets at 3:30 p.m. Tuesday to take up Wolfe’s re-appointment to a four-year term. Her current term ends Friday.
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Pennsylvania’s Senate State Government Committee on Monday recommended confirming secretary of the commonwealth nominee Al Schmidt.
The panel voted 10-1 to back the Republican acting secretary and former Philadelphia city commissioner. In a subsequent, off-the-floor meeting, the committee approved a bill to facilitate removal of Pennsylvania from the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), a controversial multi-state data-sharing program supporters say helps states maintain accurate voter rolls. The bill would permit the state to use the Social Security death database and change-of-address records to identify voter-registry errors.
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At Acting Pennsylvania Secretary of State Al Schmidt’s initial confirmation hearing on Wednesday, many senators inquired about the commonwealth’s participation in a controversial voter data-sharing program.
Schmidt, a moderate Republican former Philadelphia city commissioner who subsequently was president of the left-leaning nonprofit Committee of Seventy, will sit for a second hearing covering non-electoral issues his department oversees (e.g., professional licensure). But Senate State Government Committee Chair Cris Dush (R-Bellefonte) suggested discussion of Pennsylvania’s participation in the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) will come up then as well.
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With 60 percent of likely voters in a recent Rasmussen Reports poll saying that “cheating” likely affected the 2022 midterm elections, House Administration Committee Chairman Bryan Steil (R-Wisc.) is seeking to reform Washington, D.C.’s elections to make the nation’s capital the “gold standard” for election integrity in the U.S.
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As recently as the mid-2000s, row offices were unwinnable for Democrats in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania — a GOP stronghold for over a century. By 2011, the Democrats would take over the Board of Commissioners. They now enjoy a three-to-two voter-registration advantage.
But now some Republicans sense voters are wearying of what the Democrats have overseen during their dozen-year ascendancy, including a “bail reform” measure that has unsettled local police. The commissioners also frequently increase property taxes, most recently by eight percent in 2022.
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A Pennsylvania state senator this week announced he will soon reintroduce legislation he proposed last session to end use of election drop boxes and satellite offices.
In a memorandum asking colleagues to cosponsor his bill, Senator Cris Dush (R-Bellefonte) characterized drop boxes where voters can deposit absentee ballots as fraught with security problems. Lawmakers never enacted a law authorizing counties to set up the receptacles, but the commonwealth’s Democrat-controlled executive branch issued guidance to counties in 2020 permitting drop boxes’ usage.
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Democrats are moving to implement new voting laws at the state level following their midterm wins, according to The New York Times.
Democratic governors and state legislators have expressed plans to push automatic voter registration, voter pre-registration for minors, an expansion of early and absentee voting and criminalization of election misinformation, according to the NYT. The party retained most of its governors in the 2024 election and maintained its hold over several key state legislatures, creating a clear path to instating many of its favored voting policies.
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A judge granted a temporary restraining order on Tuesday against an election watchdog group, setting back efforts to enforce election integrity in a crucial swing state.
According to Politico, U.S. District Court Judge Michael Liburdi has forbidden the group Clean Elections USA from getting too close to ballot drop-boxes. Liburdi had previously refused to implement restrictions on ballot-watchers, but allowed the group Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans to make another case as to why such poll-watchers should have certain limitations placed on them.
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The Voter Reference Foundation (VRF) has said that ballot drop boxes in Arizona’s Maricopa County should be manned with staff from the two major parties, based on the discovery that one of two drop boxes lacked proper surveillance during the primary.
Maricopa County Republican Chairman Mickie Niland said the county’s drop box camera was not recording during the primary and reported the surveillance error, the Foundation said.
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Election managers in Kenosha are promising not to use ballot drop boxes any longer.
Attorneys for the Thomas More Society on Wednesday said Kenosha agreed to stop using the drop boxes as part of a deal to end a lawsuit against the city.
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The Wisconsin Supreme Court, in a 4-3 decision, ruled that absentee ballot drop boxes, largely used in the 2020 election, are unlawful.
According to the majority opinion, only the state legislature has the authority to authorize the use of drop boxes. However, during the coronavirus pandemic, the Wisconsin Election Commission (WEC) allowed their use.
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The U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) recognized Pierce County, Washington for its practices related to the chain of custody that helps track pick-up and chain of custody of vote-by-mail election ballots deposited in drop boxes.
Pierce County was an EAC “Clearie” Award winner in 2021 for outstanding innovations in elections for large jurisdictions. Having over 550,000 registered voters, Pierce County is Washington state’s second largest jurisdiction.
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Pennsylvania State Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-Gettysburg) announced on Thursday he intends to draft legislation creating an Office of Election Crimes and Security.
The new division within the Pennsylvania Department of State would be charged with probing all alleged violations of voting laws. The proposed bill also targets “ballot harvesting,” the illegal practice of hand-delivering absentee ballots — usually by depositing them in election drop boxes — on behalf of voters other than oneself. Currently, state law treats ballot harvesting as a misdemeanor; Mastriano’s measure would make it a third-degree felony.
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Pennsylvania Senate President Pro Tempore and gubernatorial candidate Jake Corman (R-Bellefonte) appeared on Steve Bannon’s War Room Thursday to discuss his proposed reforms to make elections more secure in his state.
Corman promised to call for a special legislative session on election-related legislation the day he takes office. Items he said he intends to address foremost are requiring identification of all voters, rescinding a state policy allowing people to vote by mail without submitting an excuse, banning absentee-ballot drop boxes and banning the use of private grants for election administration.
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Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R) released a report this week on elections in his state—focusing especially on Maricopa County—advocating similar election reforms to those Pennsylvania Republican lawmakers currently seek.
While the report did not make criminal allegations regarding recent elections, it did declare that Arizona’s election system suffers from major procedural vulnerabilities including insufficient time to confirm signatures on ballots submitted during early voting and problems with the chain of custody for ballots placed in drop boxes. Altogether, the attorney general estimates that between 100,000 and 200,000 early ballots were transported without proper protocol being followed.
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The reason that President Trump lost in the state of Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is now claiming 16 months after the November 2020 general election, is that 28,000 Georgians skipped the race.
“The brutal truth is that 28,000 Georgians skipped the presidential race. And that’s why President Trump came up short,” Raffensperger said. Meanwhile, Georgians voted down-ballot for state representative, state senator, congressman, but did not vote for anyone for president, according to Raffensperger’s latest claim, Rome News-Tribune reported.
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Former President Donald Trump highlighted the findings of an analysis from former Wisconsin Supreme Court Judge Michael Gableman about the November 2020 election.
Gableman, who was authorized by Republicans in the state legislature to investigate the process, produced multiple concerns and noted questionable legal procedures in his 136-page report.
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Former Wisconsin Supreme Court Judge Michael Gableman completed his review of the November 2020 election, issuing a 136-page report on his findings and testifying before the Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections.
In his report, Gableman called for additional oversight and transparency for the state’s elections, detailing questionable actions taken by the Wisconsin Elections Commission and the Center for Tech and Civic Life.
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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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Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Rebecca Kleefisch, who is running to replace Governor Tony Evers, proposed establishing an Office of Election Integrity & Public Trust in order to “restore confidence in elections.”
The new organization would be housed within the Wisconsin Department of Justice and have the power to investigate election complaints.
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Tuesday morning on The Johns Fredericks Show, host Fredericks welcomed current Congressman Jody Hice (R-GA-10) to the show to talk about his campaign in the race to replace Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and election integrity.
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The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled to uphold a temporary ban on the use of drop boxes for the state’s upcoming spring elections.
Opponents of the use of drop boxes argue the law only allows two specific ways to cast an absentee ballot in the state: through the U.S. mail or delivered in person to a municipal clerk.
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Anyone with half an ounce of integrity knows the manner in which the 2020 election was conducted was neither free nor fair. Never before in our nation’s history did we have a presidential election with so many safety measures that were deliberately ignored or willfully removed. And never have we had an election with so much early voting, and mail-in voting.
All of this was made possible by drastic and unconstitutional rule changes implemented illegally by Democratic secretaries of state at the 11th hour, including the expanded use of mail-in ballots, unsupervised drop boxes, and ballot harvesting.
Yet the propagandists in the corporate media have remained silent about all of it, and have shown zero interest in exploring what may actually have occurred. Donald Trump is out of office. That’s all they care about.
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Voters in Wisconsin will be able to use ballot drop boxes in the next election after all.
An appeals court in Madison on Monday unanimously ruled against a Waukesha County judge who said the drop boxes are not permitted under the state’s election laws.
The appeals court says there’s not enough time to let voters know that ballot drop boxes aren’t allowed. Some ballots for the February 15th primary election have already been mailed, and some of them say voters can return their ballots to drop boxes.
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Georgia State Sen. Burt Jones (R), who has been endorsed by former President Trump, is running for lieutenant governor of his state on a platform of election integrity as he’s pushing for the elimination of drop boxes and a return to voting on paper ballots.
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There will be more questions from lawmakers in Madison as to just what happened before and during last year’s election.
Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu on Monday announced that the State Senate is launching its own investigation into the 2020 election.
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Monday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio to weigh in on breaking news out of Georgia where chain of custody laws were broken.
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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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Fulton County election officials have failed to meet a second response date they set to provide The Georgia Star News with complete chain of custody documents for absentee ballots deposited into drop boxes during the November 3, 2020, general election. For a third time, Fulton County has extended their response date, this time to August 6, 2021.
Fulton County’s communication about the third extension comes more than eight months and five follow-up requests after The Star News filed an initial open records request on December 1, 2020, for the drop box transfer forms that document the critical chain of custody of absentee ballots deposited in 37 drop boxes installed throughout Fulton County for the 41 days of the November 2020 election period.
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Fulton County officials have failed to meet the extended response date they set for providing The Georgia Star News with complete chain of custody documents for absentee ballots deposited into drop boxes during the November 3, 2020, general election.
More than seven months and five follow-up requests after The Star News filed an initial open records request on December 1, 2020, Fulton County Legal Assistant Shana Eatmon said they needed until July 15, to provide the requested documents.
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A preliminary analysis by The Georgia Star News of Fulton County drop box transfer forms covering five days in October 2020 that were previously missing reveals that 68 percent lack a recording of the time the absentee ballots were received by the registrar or designee which documents the ballot chain of custody.
Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB) News published a report on the transfer forms that they said they received from Fulton County on June 15.
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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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Monday morning on the Tennessee Star Report, host Michael Patrick Leahy welcomed Star News Network’s Senior Reporter Laura Baigert to the newsmakers line to weigh in on Fulton County Georgia’s differential treatment in a request to absentee ballot discrepancies.
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In a stunning admission about the critical chain of custody documents for absentee ballots deposited into drop boxes in the November 3, 2020, election, Fulton County election officials have said that “some procedural paperwork may have been misplaced.”
This is the first time that an election official has made an admission regarding the occurrence of significant election issues.
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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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Nearly half a year after the 2020 Election, and four months after the original inquiry, Fulton County has failed to fulfill the Open Records Request with The Georgia Star News. Although the county did provide some chain of custody documents, initial analysis by The Star News indicates that the Fulton County ballot transfer form records sent may be incomplete.
On January 22, Fulton County Officials responded to the Open Records request made by The Star News with two PDF files. As previously reported, of those two files – one with a label that ended with BX-1, and another with a label that ended with BX-3 – showed ballot transfer form records for 36,635 absentee votes by mail ballots deposited in drop boxes.
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Twitter paired up with far-left news outlet Reuters Tuesday to prepare the public for a drawn-out runoff election process in Georgia.
“Why the winners in Georgia runoffs might not be known for days,” a Twitter “moment” said.
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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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With the January 5 run-off election for two U.S. Senate seats underway and election practices in Georgia for the November 3 presidential election remaining under intense scrutiny, DeKalb County has failed to produce the drop box absentee ballot transfer forms that are required under a State Election Board emergency rule.
Absentee ballot transfer forms are a critical piece in the chain of custody for votes deposited into the approximately 300 drop boxes deployed throughout the state of Georgia for the November election. DeKalb County, with its 34 drop box locations, accounted for more than 10 percent of Georgia’s absentee ballot drop boxes.
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As early in-person voting began Monday, December 14, for the general election run-off of two U.S. Senate seats in Georgia, significant changes for absentee ballot signature verification and drop boxes put into place by Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and the State Election Board without the state legislature’s approval are still in place.
Meanwhile, registered voters “mailing” an absentee ballot for the general election run-off for the federal offices started more than three weeks ago on November 18, according to Georgia’s election calendar.
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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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The Republican National Committee and the Georgia Republican Party filed a lawsuit to ensure Georgia election law is properly followed for the January 5 runoff election.
The lawsuit demands that poll watchers be allowed to do their jobs as permitted under Georgia law, and safeguards in the law for ballot “drop boxes” are upheld, according to a statement issued Tuesday by the Republican National Committee.
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