the Electoral College was not just provided for on a whim; the framers spent many hours and days debating the way we should elect our president. Among other goals, they were trying to balance out the popular vote in order to make sure that the most populous regions didn't simply overpower the rest of the country:

The Founding Fathers established the Electoral College in the Constitution, in part, as a compromise between the election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens. However, the term “electoral college” does not appear in the Constitution. Article II of the Constitution and the 12th Amendment refer to “electors,” but not to the “electoral college.” //

There are many reasons why simply abolishing the College might sound good but actually have unintended consequences. Here are some common arguments for keeping it as it was intended:

• The Electoral College ensures that all parts of the country are involved in selecting the President of the United States...

• The Electoral College was created to protect the voices of the minority from being overwhelmed by the will of the majority...

• The Electoral College can preclude calls for recounts or demands for run-off elections, giving certainty to presidential elections...

Raskin and the Democrats hate the Electoral College because it tries to give a regional balance to our presidential elections and helps smaller states have a say, not just blue behemoths like California and New York.

Brian Taber @socalcg69
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Rep. Jamie Raskin slams Electoral College as an 'obsolete' and deadly system. What an Idiot. The founding fathers knew from history that people migrate to the Coast and Big Cities. The Electoral College was for the future, like now! 😎
7:15 PM · Sep 13, 2024

The vote counting joins other major events such as the national nominating conventions, presidential inaugurations and the president’s annual State of the Union address. But this is the first time the Electoral College counting and certification has been designated.

Curious, isn't it? It strikes me as a political move, made to remind the country of the so-called January 6, 2021 "insurrection" by Trump loyalists. Nah, the Biden-Harris administration would never do that, right? //

Libs of TikTok @libsoftiktok
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"Donald Trump left us the worst attack on Democracy since the Civil War." -Kamala Harris

Tomorrow is 9/11
Embedded video
9:16 PM · Sep 10, 2024

In a hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Greg Murphy, R-N.C., asked Democrat Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson if there are dead people on the state’s voter rolls, and she would not answer yes or no.

“Why the hell are deceased people still on your voter rolls?” Murphy asked. “Do you have deceased people on your voter rolls, yes or no?”

“We do everything we can, and just like every other state, to remove — ” Benson said.

“Should a deceased person be on your voter roll?” Murphy insisted.

“No, and that’s why we remove them once we receive information,” Benson replied. //

He brought up a lawsuit by the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which alleged that as of 2021, there were close to 26,000 dead voters on Michigan’s voter rolls. The group claimed Benson did not contest that the dead voters were registered and said she was not taking adequate steps to remove them.

“Why does it take a lawsuit by the Public Interest Legal Foundation to sue you to get those people off the voter rolls?” Murphy asked Benson.

“That lawsuit was dismissed,” Benson replied.

A district judge ruled Benson was performing ongoing list maintenance and tossed out the case, as The Federalist previously reported. But PILF appealed the case to the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, saying the court never fully determined Benson was making a “reasonable effort” to remove dead voters from the rolls.

With massive leftist voter registration efforts in play, election integrity advocates warn of many more noncitizens on voter rolls.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the federal government decided to only go after 35 criminal cases of aliens voting in American elections from 2001 to 2021 — the latest year for which data is available. //

Von Spakovsky spoke about his experience as an election official in Fairfax County, Virginia, where his oversight in 2011 discovered nearly 300 aliens on the voter rolls in just that county alone. His research further revealed that 117 of them had actually voted.

The Fairfax County election board reported its findings to the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, which is responsible for prosecuting such crimes. At the time, that section was headed by Jack Smith, the same lawfare attorney appointed by Biden Attorney General Merrick Garland to go after former President Donald Trump for posing questions about the integrity of the 2020 election.

“We took them off the rolls and then sent them over to DOJ, and DOJ did absolutely nothing about it,” von Spakovsky said. “They just ignored them.”

Despite reporting these people to the Justice Department at the time, BJS data shows that from 2010 to 2012 zero cases were brought under 18 U.S.C. 611: Voting by Aliens, a statute passed in the mid-1990s making it a crime for an alien to vote in federal elections. //

Last month, Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced Virginia had removed 6,303 noncitizens from its voter rolls, who had either “accidentally or maliciously” registered. Youngkin did not go into detail about whether those voters had ever voted, but his state was not the only one with thousands of noncitizens registered to vote.

In 2019, the state of Pennsylvania admitted it had registered nearly 12,000 noncitizens to vote. The same year, Texas Secretary of State David Whitley had similarly found 95,000 noncitizens registered to vote, and further that 58,000 of them had voted at some point since 1996.

Earlier this year, research group Just Facts published a study showing that between 10 percent and 27 percent of noncitizens, or about two to five million, are illegally registered to vote. For more election news and updates, visit electionbriefing.com.

“Plaintiff has neither pointed to any source of law that prescribes and defines a duty to withdraw a candidate’s name from the ballot nor demonstrated his clear legal right to performance of this specific duty, let alone identified a source of law written with ‘”such precision and certainty as to leave nothing to the exercise of discretion or judgment,'” the Monday order reads. “Thus, the plaintiff has not shown an entitlement to this extraordinary relief, and we reverse.”

Justices David F. Viviano and Brian K. Zahra dissented, saying the “ruling will do nothing to rebuild the public’s trust in the fairness and accuracy of our elections.”

“No statute prohibits a presidential candidate from withdrawing his or her candidacy. And there is no practical reason for denying a request to withdraw before the ballots have been printed for the general election,” the dissent reads.

The ruling has the potential to affect the election’s outcome with a “significant cost to the integrity of the election,” as “voters will be improperly denied a choice between persons who are actually candidates, and who are willing to serve if elected,” Viviano and Zahra argued. //

At the same time, Benson and state Democrats have been pushing to keep third-party candidate Cornel West off Michigan’s ballot, citing technicalities with his identity notarization and “and allegations that West’s petitions to get on the ballot were fraudulent,” according to The Detroit News.

The state supreme court declined to take up a Democrat appeal to an earlier decision by the court of appeals, which said West must remain on the ballot. West’s presence on the ballot could likely hurt Harris’ chances, as noted by PBS.

After being asked why Benson was working to keep Kennedy on the ballot and Cornel West off the ballot, Benander told The Federalist that Benson’s office “did not seek to overturn the Appellate Court’s decision on Cornel West.”

Sending notices to absentee voters and preparing signs for in-person voting should be a secondary plan, however. Election officials should make every effort to reprint new ballots that correctly list the candidates actually running for office. But there is an obvious solution that can be used to adequately inform voters even if that is not possible.

Any refusal by election officials to, at a minimum, prepare such notices will be a violation of their duty as public officials to fairly and honestly administer the upcoming election. Given the ease of this solution, it will be hard to imagine any refusal to implement it that is based on anything other than election officials engaging in partisan misbehavior that is intended to misinform voters and manipulate the results of the presidential election.

Election officials who engage in that type of misconduct are betraying the public trust and should not be in office.

In one such case, the Justice Department recently announced that an alien has agreed to plead guilty to several charges of stealing a U.S. citizen's identity, and illegally voting in multiple elections, including primaries and general elections, in addition to illegally obtaining a passport. //

Another question came to mind as I wrote this article. Who, if anyone, helped Francisco? Who showed her the ropes? These two questions and answers will grow in compounding importance if Kamala Harris wins in November, a fact of which you're well aware. //

The question is, how many other "Angelica Maria Franciscos" have done the same? //

veritaseequitas
12 hours ago
Where did a supposedly poor, downtrodden, hopeless, illegal alien invader, get the money to travel to her home country of Guatemala four times?
And if its so bad there that she had to come to the US, why would she want to go back?
And how has she flown under the radar for 10 years?

It's official. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act will indeed be a part of the continuing resolution (CR), which Speaker Mike Johnson introduced on Friday in a 46-page proposal to fund the U.S. government through the 2024 election. And the other side of the aisle is speaking out loudly in opposition to it.

via The Hill:

The 46-page plan would keep the government funded into March 2025, while tacking on language for stricter proof-of-citizenship requirements for voting, setting the stage for a budget showdown with Senate Democrats later this month. //

President Joe Biden has promised to veto any bill that crosses his desk containing the SAVE Act.

The top election official for swing state Nevada’s most populous county relented and finally decided to look into “bad addresses” on the state’s voter rolls. While claims of voters residing at strip clubs, bars, and casinos should have raised red flags for Clark County Registrar of Voters Lorena Portillo, apparently it took the threat of a court order to grab her attention. //

It sounds absurd, but this is serious stuff on the election integrity front, especially in a state accused of having “impossibly high” voter registration numbers, and one that allows late-arriving ballots to be counted long after Election Day. //

The foundation received no response before filing a lawsuit in Nevada’s 8th Judicial District Court seeking a writ of mandamus ordering the elections official to do her job. According to Bis, the Clark petition drew the attention of bogus Russian dossier peddler and Democrat Party problem fixer Marc Elias. “As we filed the lawsuit, Mark Elias filed the motion to intervene,” she told me.

Bis also told me that Secretary of State Francisco “Cisco” Aguilar then came calling. He planned to intervene in the lawsuit. “Shortly after, we got a call from the Secretary of State saying they would file a motion to intervene,” she said.

While Aguilar is a partisan Democrat, PILF assumed he would intervene on behalf of election law and clean voter rolls. Nope. He planned to defend the county registrar’s recalcitrance, Bis said.

But a funny thing happened leading up to the court hearing, scheduled for last week. Portillo apparently agreed to PILF’s demands to investigate the well-documented bad addresses on Clark County’s voter rolls ... //

“I think part of them didn’t want to go up against us in court, where we would show photos of the strip clubs and bars where these individuals said they resided,” Bis told me in an interview. “It was bad optics all around and really indefensible, and I think they did not want to be in a court of law defending the status quo.”

“This election will be won on the margins, and with only three months until the election, every vote matters,” the DNC investment announcement states. “In what will be a close election, the DNC is leaving no stone left unturned to ensure that Kamala Harris will be the next president of the United States.” //

DNC Executive Director Roger Lau explained the decision in a statement, saying “[t]his election will be won on the margins, and every single vote counts.” He claimed this “innovative investment in Democrats Abroad” aims to “register and earn the votes of the nearly 9 million Americans living and serving overseas,” and that “Democrats are leaving nothing to chance.”

That’s a huge number of voters, and it contradicts a 2022 analysis from the Defense Department’s Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP), which claims that “of the estimated 4.4 million” U.S. citizens living overseas, only about 2.8 million of them are of voting age. //

As a correspondent for the election integrity group Michigan Fair Elections (MFE), I talked with MFE Chair and Founder Patrice Johnson, who told me her theory: “They appear to be citing 9 million to set expectations and nurture public acceptance of that number, despite the federal government indicating only 2.8 million voting-aged citizens reside overseas,” she suggests. //

“Many” states also “allow citizens who have never resided in the U.S.” to vote using a parent’s address, according to FVAP. The lax requirements lead activists like Johnson to fear that UOCAVA could “open[] the door to unlimited foreign voting with no verification of residency or citizenship.”

It's not hard to figure out the Democrat Party. It's actually pretty easy. Everything Democrats support or oppose — and I mean everything — can be connected to the ballot box with no more than two dots.

Perfect example: Proof of citizenship to vote.

Even more perfect: Weaselly Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and his refusal to say why he opposes a House bill that would include a requirement of proof of citizenship to register to vote, which is bipartisan. //

Let's start with an easy-to-answer question. If Schumer and the Democrats thought that a majority of illegal aliens — "undocumented immigrants," whatever — would vote Republican if they were allowed to vote, would Chuck and the Democrats be strongly in favor of requiring proof of citizenship?

Mike Ford
8 hours ago edited
I'm tired of hearing outright or by implication/assumption, that Putin prefers Trump to be POTUS. That is flat out BS

Anyone who believes that to be true, is either stupid, ill-informed and/or flat out lying.

Putin is a cold warrior. the one thing the former USSR (now Russia) craves in a U.S. President...is predictability.

With Trump, they are terrified because they do not know which way he will jump....That's why they referred to Ronaldo's Magnus as a "cowboy" during his election.

They would much rather have to face the unintelligent, weak willed Harris across the negotiating table than Trump

I would remind all and sundry...that of the last 4 presidents...only Trump did not cede ground to Putin.

Southwest Asi was not on fire and the Chinese were not impeding freedom of navigation.

Expanding funds from the Center for Tech and Civic Life and other leftist groups to rural areas only expands election insecurity. //

Nonprofit election grants were so concerning in 2020 that 28 states enacted legislation limiting or banning the use of private funds to run elections, but even states that have banned private funds are not necessarily safe from undue influence from similar organizations. Rural and nonmetro areas in other states are certainly still vulnerable to other forms of nonprofit pressures and should still be alert to the Democrats’ overarching strategy to claw at rural, nonmetro areas that have traditionally run red.

A Pennsylvania court Friday sided with left-wing special interests, blocking the state from enforcing part of a law that required mail ballots to be properly dated in order to be counted. //

The majority opinion, however, while citing “prior litigation,” stated that “the date on the outer mail-in ballot envelopes is not used to determine the timeliness of a ballot, a voter’s qualifications/eligibility to vote, or fraud. Therefore, the dating provisions serve no compelling government interest.” //

The RNC plans to appeal the decision, according to a statement from Election Integrity Communications Director Claire Zunk reportedly obtained by Votebeat Pennsylvania reporter Carter Walker, which notes how both “[t]he Pennsylvania Supreme Court and US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit have both upheld Pennsulvania’s dated ballot requirement.”

The unsealed report highlighted critical vulnerabilities in Georgia’s election infrastructure and the ongoing challenges to public confidence ahead of the 2024 election.

Shiva Ayyadurai is fighting to get on ballots, but the naturalized U.S. citizen from India fails to meet a key constitutional requirement. //

In the complaint, Ayyadurai argued that the First Amendment guarantees his right to run for president regardless of the Constitution’s pesky qualifications. And he asserted that such a qualification has been “abrogated and implicitly repealed” by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution. //

allowing a foreign-born, naturalized citizen access to the presidential ballot changes the Constitution without the benefit of amendment.

“The first thing I want to point out is, you know, we use words like ‘anomalies,’ ‘suspicion,’ and everything else because we try to be PC, I guess. But this is fraud, outright fraudulent behavior,” said Hamilton County Board of Elections member Alex Triantafilou, who also serves as chairman of the Ohio Republican Party. “Who’s responsible or how they’re responsible, that will be up to somebody other than me. It’s plain and obvious to me when you get this many registration cards [holds up the stack] with the very same handwriting that someone is trying to defraud the elections process in Hamilton County.”

Not just Hamilton County. Election integrity issues involving employees of a leftist company committed to “Building Long-Term Progressive Power,” have been popping up all over Ohio. //

Meanwhile, potential voter registration fraud as suspected in the Black Forks incidents counter the incessant dubious claims of election integrity deniers that there’s little to no fraud in U.S. elections.

“So to the extent that there’s any press watching, voter fraud is real, it does happen. It happens oftentimes in the form of phony registrations all in the same handwriting,” Triantafilou, the Hamilton County Board of Elections members said at the July meeting.

The complaint asks Kemp to “remove” the three board members and “further, refer the matter to the Attorney General for prosecution, in the event that [he] discover[s] evidence of an actionable violation.”

President and CEO of Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections Derek Lyons said in a statement given to The Federalist that this “noise is what happens every time someone tries to ensure the integrity of our elections.”

“It’s important to remember that what they’re complaining about is the mere idea of having local boards check that election results are accurate before certifying them,” Lyons continued. “So, you have to ask yourself, what are the reasons to object to that?”

The Georgia State Election Board (SEB) passed a series of rules clarifying that county election board members have the right to make a “reasonable inquiry” into elections before certifying the results. Another rule clarifies board members are entitled to review election-related material as part of their inquiry. But the Democratic National Committee (DNC), alongside Georgia Democrats, filed a lawsuit Monday over the rules, essentially demanding the courts force county election officials to rubber-stamp elections without any questions asked. //

“If you actually read the rule, you’ll see there’s nothing in there that would delay certification,” Grubbs told The Federalist.

Grubbs told The Federalist that election superintendents are “withholding documents needed for people to certify the election,” including in her own county (Cobb County).

“The very people that they have in hysterics over it are the same people in control over the information,” she said.