Michigan Minors Could Face Social Media Restrictions, Increased Parental Oversight

Kids on Tablet

Michigan House lawmakers are taking steps to increase online child safety by introducing a bill that would impact minors, their parents and social media companies.

The Social Media Regulation Act, introduced by State Rep. Mark Tisdel, R-Rochester Hills, would require social media companies to verify the ages of new and existing users, restrict companies from collecting data or sharing minors’ personal information, and provide extensive parental controls.

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GOP State Senator May Be Holding Up Arizona Legislature from Sending Election Integrity Measure to Ballot

Ken Bennett

The Arizona Legislature is considering sending an election integrity measure to the ballot this fall.

HCR 2056 was debated in the Senate Elections Committee last week. The bill would require voters to show photo ID when dropping ballots off. All early ballots dropped off will be tabulated at the voting location where they were submitted. Seven counties already do that. The bill also prohibits election officials from accepting funds from foreign entities to help administer an election.

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Commentary: Everyone Can Agree on Election Integrity

Polling Place

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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Report: Minnesota Election System ‘Weakest in the Nation’

A Minnesota think tank released a new report this week exposing flaws in the state’s election system and recommending a number of possible reforms.

The “‘vote now, check later’ verification process” that Minnesota uses for same-day voter registrants has a number of “weaknesses,” according to the report.

Minnesotans who register to vote prior to Election Day are subjected to a verification process before their vote is counted. Same-day registrants go through the same verification process but only after the election.

“Their vote is counted,” the report says. “The county auditor runs the same verification using the Department of Public Safety database and the Social Security database. But if a problem is discovered, it is too late, because the vote has already been counted.”

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Commentary: Voter Photo IDs Are the Rule in Europe and Elsewhere

Democrats and much of the media are pushing to make permanent the extraordinary, pandemic-driven measures to relax voting rules during the 2020 elections – warning anew of racist voter “suppression” otherwise. Yet democracies in Europe and elsewhere tell a different story – of the benefits of stricter voter ID requirements after hard lessons learned. 

A database on voting rules worldwide compiled by the Crime Prevention Research Center, which I run, shows that election integrity measures are widely accepted globally, and have often been adopted by countries after they’ve experienced fraud under looser voting regimes.

Britain is Europe’s outlier in generally not requiring voter IDs, but Prime Minister Boris Johnson aims to change that. He went to the polls in May with wife-to-be Carrie Symonds.

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