Billy Baroo
13 hours ago
Rank choice voting is as crooked as ballot harvesting. //

anon-rnsl
14 hours ago
Here is my solution as a Constitutional amendment:

If you're not eligible to vote for a candidate for public office, you cannot contribute to their campaign.... Period.

But this is a high bar indeed.

Better results might occur at the state level.... after all Sates, not the Federal Government, runs elections.

So here ya go....

You're not eligible to vote for an initiative, proposition, or candidate... you can't contribute to them.... Period.

FWIW - For Whatever Its Worth

mopani anon-rnsl
14 hours ago
I like it. Cuts out the outside money, helps focus the candidates on their constituents.

ConservativeInMinnesota
an hour ago
Ranked choice voting uses multiple rounds of voting. That’s effectively more than one vote per person. That arguably makes it unconstitutional. //

anon-rnsl
3 minutes ago
Here is my solution as a Constitutional amendment:

If you're not eligible to vote for a candidate for public office, you cannot contribute to their campaign.... Period.

But this is a high bar indeed.

Better results might occur at the state level.... after all Sates, not the Federal Government, runs elections.

So here ya go....

You're not eligible to vote for an initiative, proposition, or candidate... you can't contribute to them.... Period.

FWIW - For Whatever Its Worth

With the Electoral College votes now cast, here is a recap of how Americans voted in 2024. //

Trump won 77,284,118 votes, or 49.8 percent of the votes cast for president. That is the second highest vote total in U.S. history, trailing only the 81,284,666 votes that Joe Biden won in 2020. Trump won 3,059,799 more popular votes in 2024 than he won in 2020 and 14,299,293 more than he won in 2016. He now holds the record for the most cumulative popular votes won by any presidential candidate in U.S. history, surpassing Barack Obama. Running three times for the White House obviously helps.

Kamala Harris won 74,999,166 votes or 48.3 percent of the votes cast. That was 6,285,500 fewer popular votes than Biden won in 2020, but 774,847 more than Trump won in 2020.

More than 155 million Americans voted in 2024: 156,302,318 to be exact. That’s the second largest total voter turnout in U.S. history in absolute terms. It is also just the second time that more than 140 million people voted in a presidential election.

In relative terms, voter turnout nationally in 2024 was 63.9 percent. That is below the 66.6 percent voter turnout recorded in 2020, which was the highest voter turnout rate in a U.S. presidential election since 1900. Nonetheless, turnout in 2024 was still high by modern standards. The 1960 election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon (63.8 percent) is the only other election in the last 112 years to exceed 63 percent voter turnout. If you are wondering, the election of 1876 holds the record for the highest percentage voter turnout: 82.6 percent. That was one of America’s most controversial and consequential elections—and not in a good way. It was also an election in which more than half the adult-age population was ineligible to vote.

Wisconsin holds the place of pride as the state with the highest voter turnout in 2024—76.93 percent of eligible voters in the Badger State voted. Five of the six battleground states that switched from Biden to Trump saw their turnout exceed the national average; only Arizona (63.6 percent) was below, and then just barely. Hawaii holds the distinction of being the state with the lowest voter turnout. Just 50 percent of Hawaiians voted.

A Landslide Election or Not?

Early election coverage described Trump’s victory as a landslide. But whether you go by the Electoral College vote or the popular vote, it was anything but. The 312 Electoral College votes that Trump won are just six more than Joe Biden won in 2020, twenty less than Barack Obama won in 2012, and fifty-three less than Obama won in 2008. Trump’s Electoral College performance pales in comparison to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s landslide victory in 1936 (523 electoral votes), Lyndon Johnson’s in 1964 (486), Richard Nixon’s in 1972 (520), or Ronald Reagan’s in 1984 (525). In terms of the popular vote, more people voted for someone not named Trump for president than voted for Trump in 2024, and his margin of victory over Harris was 1.5 percentage points. That is the fifth smallest margin of victory in the thirty-two presidential races held since 1900. //

The 2024 election was the tenth presidential election in a row in which the margin of victory in the popular vote was in the single digits. That is a record. The longest prior streak began in 1876, when seven consecutive elections were decided by single digits. The last person to win the presidency by a double-digit margin was Ronald Reagan in 1984. He won by eighteen percentage points. The last time someone won the presidency by more than five percentage points was Barack Obama in 2008. He won by seven percentage points. The bottom line is that whatever one makes of the mandate that Trump did or did not win last month, the United States remains deeply divided politically.

it’s past time for Republicans to provide a pithy answer to counter the Democrat’s deceptive question.

As I explained last year when the legacy media hounded then-Sen. J.D. Vance to say Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, there is a fundamental flaw in the question: “The query includes an undefined term — ‘lost’ — which holds a different meaning to Trump supporters and to the anti-Trump inquisitors.”

“If ‘lost’ merely meant Biden is the president of the United States, then that’s an easy answer: Yes, of course, Trump lost, as Biden was inaugurated,” and he is currently nearing the end of his four disastrous years in the Oval Office. But that’s not what those demanding an acknowledgement that Trump lost mean by “lost,” and yesterday’s hearings confirmed that reality, for Bondi repeatedly and expressly attested that, yes, Joe Biden is the president of the United States.

What Durbin, Blumenthal, and pretty much everyone else demanding a “yes” or “no” answer to whether Trump lost the 2020 election seek is a concession that Trump’s election challenges were frivolous, unfounded, or wrong. Democrats inject such concessions into their meaning of “lost.”

That’s why Bondi answered Durbin’s question as she did, by stating both that she accepted that Biden is president of the United States and that she saw firsthand issues in Pennsylvania’s election.

In other words, it depends on what you mean by “lost.”. //

“If asked whether Trump ‘lost’ the 2020 election, meaning that if all legal votes were counted and all illegal counts discarded — and the counting was done legally pursuant to controlling election law —” the answer should be a resounding, “I don’t know.”

As I wrote last year: “No one can possibly know the answer to that question because in 2020 there were too many election laws violated or ignored, and too many illegal votes counted. But the lawsuits challenging the election outcomes were tossed as moot once the votes were certified, so there was never a determination on the validity of the tallies, leaving uncertain the accuracy of the election results.” //

So, here’s a simple, soundbite for the next Trump nominee cornered with the query, “Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?”

“It depends on what you mean by ‘lose.’ Joe Biden is the president of the United States. But Biden did not win a free and fair election, and the country has suffered the devastating consequences for the last four years as a result of the Biden presidency.”

And the 2020 election was not free and fair: Not when the FBI pre-bunked the Hunter Biden laptop story, causing social media companies to censor the evidence of Joe Biden’s involvement in his son’s pay-to-play scandal; not when the Biden campaign’s senior advisor, Antony Blinken, “set in motion” the release of a public statement signed by 51 former intelligence agents that falsely framed Hunter’s laptop as Russian disinformation; not when there were “systemic violations of election law” which “disparately favor[ed] one candidate,” and “allow[ed] for tens of thousands of illegal votes to be counted;” and not when illegal drop box were placed in Democrat-heavy precincts and Zuckbucks were used to get out the Democrat vote.

The battle of wits had begun. And Kinzinger clearly went into a gunfight with a spork.

“Just a quick point, both parties have always accepted the presidential election until one, four years ago,” Kinzinger falsely claimed.

Jennings countered, quite simply, “False, they have not."

Curtis Houck @CurtisHouck
·
PANTS ON FIRE: Adam Kinzinger falsely claims Scott Jennings lied in saying this was the first time in our lifetime both parties won't object to a presidential election result.

Kinzinger and Ashley Allison say Jennings mentioning 2000, 2004, and 2016 are why we're so divided

1:36 PM · Jan 6, 2025. //

Democrats have objected to election results in each of the Republican-won elections this century.

In 2000, 15 Democrats, including 12 members of the Congressional Black Caucus at the time, would object to counting Florida’s electoral votes.

This was after then-Vice President Al Gore refused to accept the free and fair election results and would not concede defeat to George W. Bush. He instead tied up the election process through litigation in the courts for months.

Gore consistently lost his bid to overturn the election results in the lower courts and kept fighting in the Florida Supreme Court. He would not concede until mid-December of that year, a month and a half after Election Day.

In 2004, 31 Democrats voted in favor of rejecting electoral votes from Ohio, trying to delegitimize President Bush once again, despite the fact that he won the electoral count by a wider margin and the popular vote count over John Kerry.

In 2016, seven different Democrats objected 11 times to certifying the results of the 2016 presidential election victory for Donald Trump. Additionally, 67 Democrats boycotted Trump’s inauguration, with many claiming “his election was illegitimate.”

There was violence in the streets, and Democrat lawmakers were most assuredly trying to “obstruct, influence, impede or delay” the certification of the presidential election, just as Republicans are accused of doing on January 6.

Never forget. //

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and ten other senators objected to the certification of the 2020 election. It wasn't a unique tactic by any stretch. If anything, Democrats wrote the playbook on election denialism.

An astute America First Re-Ignited subscriber, Kathy, read my article entitled 13 Million Democrat Voters Died Since 2020: Where Are The Bodies? and responded with her own list as to why we can’t find the 13 million Democrat voters’ bodies, and why/how Blue States will continue to defraud their voters:

As Congress prepares to do its duty, validate the Electoral College vote, and declare Donald Trump the 47th President of the United States, the bitter-clingers pushing the discredited "Trump is an insurrectionist" trope are making a final push to have their peculiar theory taken seriously. The latest iteration of this nonsensical twaddle was posted in The Hill in "Congress does not have to accept Trump's electoral votes."

The theory goes like this: Trump is an insurrectionist. The Constitution disqualifies insurrectionists from holding office, so Trump cannot be president. Given the right light and the correct amount of psilocybin, it makes perfect sense.

To the extent that sane people think there is one, the controversy starts with Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. //

Instead of a fraudulent vote count, they want to use a fraudulent accusation of insurrection. As damaging to the nation as this move might be, this strategy is open. All it takes is 20 percent of the House and Senate members to sign a petition to trigger a vote. If a majority of both houses vote to exclude votes, they can, and the Supreme Court has no role in the process. Their conceit is thinking that once their side does this, everyone will forget about an indisputable electoral victory being set aside by way of backroom dealing. That is the quickest way for armed men to take control of the process and turn us into Pakistan. But that seems to be what the authors want.

Nevada is investigating hundreds of potential election integrity violations from the 2024 elections, including 180 open cases of double-voting, according to a Friday report from the secretary of state’s office.

The office noted 182 investigations of potential double-voting in the state, with only two having been resolved, with no violation found. Likewise, for 2024’s primary and general elections, 762 Election Integrity Violation Reports were filed by Nevadans who believe state election law has been violated, but 515 cases have been closed with no violation found, while 243 cases remain open and four were found to be violative of election law.

“The Secretary of State’s report is only scratching the surface of this problem, which exists because Nevada’s voter rolls are still littered with voters who have moved out of state. Yet Secretary Aguilar has stymied efforts by outside groups such as the Pigpen Project to assist in cleaning them up,” Chuck Muth, president of the Citizen Outreach Foundation (COF), which runs the Pigpen Project, told The Federalist.

Trump campaign lawyer Jim Troupis, who helped guide the alternate electors plan, spoke publicly for the first time as AG files more charges.

The day before the contentious 2020 election, Jim Troupis ranked among the most respected attorneys in Wisconsin. Two years after he represented President Donald Trump in his Badger State election challenges, Troupis says he couldn’t find a lawyer to write his estate plan. A lot of the friends he worked with over his distinguished legal career disappeared faster than a lawsuit against a prosecutor.

“Nothing had changed, I had simply represented Donald Trump,” Troupis told conservative talk show host Vicki McKenna Tuesday afternoon. “This has been unbelievably painful for me and my family.”

The pain got worse Tuesday as Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, a highly partisan Democrat with higher political ambitions, announced more criminal charges against Troupis, fellow Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro, and Trump campaign official Michael Roman. The three men are caught up in Kaul’s politically driven electors prosecution, a last-ditch effort to try to lock up allies of President-elect Trump and send a message that the left’s scorched earth lawfare campaign is far from over.

‘This social media play worked because we talked to very specific niche audiences through the content creators that the public was listening to.’ //

The evolution of technology and media has consistently changed how political campaigns reach prospective voters.

First it was through partisan newspapers and political cartoons. Then came the explosion of radio and television. And now, candidates find themselves navigating the vast Internet landscape in their bid to get voters to the polls.

While the embrace of social media was a notable feature of Barack Obama and Donald Trump’s respective presidential campaigns, the 2024 contest revolutionized the way in which candidates engage new voters across Big Tech platforms. //

Working behind the scenes was Vote4America, a get-out-the-vote venture launched earlier this year that partners with conservative-leaning content creators. In collaboration with these influencers, the group sought to engage unregistered and low-propensity voters favorable to Republican causes ahead of the 2024 contest, such as those who listen to programs about outdoor sports (hunting and fishing) and veterans’ issues.

“This [was] not a ‘Turnout your base’ [election]. This [was] a ‘Go find new voters and low propensity voters and get them to the polls’ [election]. And it was the low-propensity voters that we have been focusing on the whole time, ” Vote4America spokesman Stephen Aaron told The Federalist. //

A post-election Navigator Research survey among 5,000 self-identified 2024 general election voters notably found that a significant percentage of swing voters and new Trump voters received their news from non-corporate media sources. According to a poll summary, “Leading up to the election, 45 percent of ‘swing voters’ and 52 percent of new Trump voters cited getting their news through social media, a far greater share than the national electorate (37 percent).”

“Alternative news sources like social media and podcasts were much more prevalent among ‘swing voters’ (52 percent) and new Trump voters (59 percent) compared to the overall electorate (43 percent),” the summary reads. //

Aaron claimed the biggest hurdle for Vote4America was getting election strategists to understand that it was “low propensity voters [who] were going to swing this election” and “that talking to low propensity voters over social media was going to be the most effective way to do that.” //

The 2024 election “was largely the 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debate, where after that debate, if you could not perform on TV, you could not succeed in politics,” Aaron said. “And what we’re going to see [moving forward] is that if you can’t perform on these long-form, authentic platforms [and] can’t be yourself … you’re not going to be able to perform in politics.” //

“Trump has largely removed shame from politics, and so you don’t have to be quite as concerned anymore about, ‘Oh, am I going to say the wrong thing?'” Aaron said. “There wasn’t one candidate in this election cycle who lost his election because of a one-sentence slip in an interview or on a podcast. So, you don’t have to worry about that anymore. What you have to worry about is: Can you be yourself in front of an unfiltered, raw audience?”

There’s a new peer-reviewed study from economist and gun expert John Lott, Jr. that is going to have a lot of folks talking again about the 2020 election.

Lott found there were at least 255,000 excess votes and maybe as many as 368,000 excess votes for Biden in key battleground states.

I said Trump would outperform his 2016 numbers in Florida, not because I felt that way or because my ideology stated I had to say so, but rather because voter registration and polling data said it was going to happen. You can’t add 150k more voters in a state than the Democrats, pick up huge swings of minority voters and lose. Mathematically, it doesn’t add up.

Which is going to lead me to doing something I have been doing way too often lately: Calling BS. In every bit of math coming out of these states. In all of the polling data (*when adjusted), it told us Trump was going to win by larger margins among minority voters. The numbers literally don’t lie. In North Carolina, Democrats lost 161,000 voters since 2016 while Republicans gained 72,000 voters. You want us to believe that Republicans, who have registered as such since the Trump era, walked into the voting booth on Election day and pulled the trigger for Biden? In that state, Trump currently leads by 77,000 votes, in a state Trump won by 173,000 votes in 2016, and that Republicans picked up a 230k voter margin since? I call BS.

In Pennsylvania, Trump has won every county he won in 2016 except for one, while he picked up another county that Clinton won in 2016. Enthusiasm levels for Biden were lower than they were for Clinton in PA. Since 2016, in the state where Trump won by 45,000 votes, Democrats have lost 48,000 voters while Republicans have added 150,000 voters, outperformed amongst minorities and had record party support and Democrat cross-over vote and yet, Trump only leads by 110,000 voters? BS.

In Wisconsin, they have lost voters since 2016, to the tune of 145,000 voters. In just three counties, Milwaukee, Eau Claire, and Dane, they lost 63,000 of those. All of those counties went to Clinton by large margins since 2016. That is just considering counties as Wisconsin does not register by party. Overall, Counties won by Clinton lost 97,000 voters since 2016, while Trump counties lost just 47,000 voters, or less than half. Additionally, turnout in 2016, as a percentage of registered voters, was just 79.80%. This year, the state jumped to a statistically impossible 92.26%, a 12.46% increase over their 2016 numbers. In a state when Democrats statistically lost more voters than Republicans, we are supposed to believe that a 12% increase (largest ever) swung majority to Dems, by a factor that not only overcame the margin by which Trump won the state in 2016 but also erased any gains Republicans had in registration (by losing less) and gave Biden a 20,000 vote lead? Again, BS.

In Michigan, the trend continues.

Many of us were alarmed on Election Night 2020 when, while the results were looking good for Donald Trump, multiple states suddenly stopped counting votes. As the night wore on and went into the next day, it seemed that every update was favorable for Biden until he was ultimately named President-Elect. //

While Hounsell wasn’t able at that time to determine what had happened, it seems that Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips of True the Vote have some evidence, in the form of cell phone location data, ballot drop box surveillance video, and more, to suggest that there was a coordinated effort in key states (those in which a small number of votes could swing the state and, therefore, the Electoral College) to illegally “harvest” ballots by paying “mules” to deposit them into drop boxes throughout the given metropolitan area in the month before the election, in numbers that were small enough to fly under the radar on daily counts yet large enough to change the state’s outcome on Election Night. Filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza took this data and interviewed witnesses to create the documentary “2000 Mules,” in collaboration with Salem Media Group, to explain what True the Vote found.

As we witness the mass breakdown of voting machines on the single day of the year they’re supposed to work, cameras going down in vote-counting offices, and the endless drip-drip of ballot dumps — curiously in the most hotly-contested races and most critical precincts for political control in the country — remember that this is all commonplace and normal. And if you think otherwise, you’re not only unhinged, but you might be a domestic terrorist.

This is the gaslighting we have been getting from our political class and the media over the last two federal election cycles. It is purposeful propaganda meant to obscure the truth that our betters have fundamentally transformed voting policies and practices, and then exploited the new rules to the maximum extent.

The reality is that those skeptical about the integrity in our brave new election world are not a “threat to democracy.” They are defenders of the republic. America is in serious danger if the public unquestioningly accepts the fact that authorities made radical changes, sometimes unduly and under cover of crisis, that made less safe, secure, or at minimum trustworthy the processes by which we elect our representatives.

Fulton County failed to follow the legal requirement to compare the total number of votes recorded with the total number of people who cast ballots, according to Fulton County Board of Elections member Julie Adams and another person who requested anonymity. //

Except Fulton County never did any of this, according to Adams and another source familiar with the matter who requested anonymity. Nonetheless, FCBRE members were forced to rubber-stamp the results of the election even though the law to ensure the tallies were accurate was allegedly not followed. That’s because a judge ruled in October that election superintendents may not “refuse to certify or abstain from certifying election results under any circumstance.”

The county elections board decided to accept the votes of deceased residents despite guidance from the state board to remove them. //

The voters in question had cast ballots either during early voting or via absentee voting prior to Election Day but had passed away after casting ballots and before Nov. 5, which could theoretically disqualify their votes. The controversy highlights one of the glaring problems with having a season of voting instead of a single day to hold an election. In recent memory, before elections took place over a period of months, none of the individuals at issue would have been able to vote because they passed away before Election Day.

Retired Professor
2 hours ago edited
Anything that builds public trust is to the good. Only those who have something to hide resist transparency.

It wasnt me Retired Professor
an hour ago
Trump won every State with ID required.
Harris won every State that ID was NOT required. //

Rain or Shine Colorado 2022
an hour ago
If you want public trust, seems 1st step is to trust the public.

and hold violators accountable

American Majority Action turned out low-participation voters in battleground States to help Trump and fellow Republicans to victory. //

If you want to win the war, you’d better have a good ground game.

It’s taken Republicans a long time to learn that basic truth on the battleground of politics, often through painful losses. But some grassroots conservative groups got it in the latest election cycle, and the armies they deployed in ballot-chasing battles across the seven battleground states appear to have had a pronounced impact on the outcome of this month’s presidential election.

Taking a page from the successful ground game playbook in Florida’s successful 2022 elections, American Majority Action (AMA) developed and launched a blanketing ballot-chasing initiative in four swing states — Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina and Wisconsin. //

Consultant Shannon Love told the publication there’s “no secret” to the Republicans’ success.

“They do the work. I think that Democrats get caught up in the message and the polls instead of doing the consistent work,” Love said.

“We’ve heard for four years how Republicans were a threat to democracy, they were going to overturn democracy. But really what is happening is that the election deniers, the people who are trying to thwart the rule of law, trying to thwart what a state constitution allows when it comes to elections, are the Democrats,” the Republican congresswoman said.

Casey is unlikely to change the result without counting defective or challenged ballots. Fortunately, law and precedent “does matter in this country.” There are still officials who can transcend their political preferences to maintain the rule of law. After the last presidential election, many Trump appointees ruled against the former president, and many Democratic judges rejected the effort to strip Trump from ballots.

That does not mean that Democrats who value the weaponization of law will not continue to embrace lawfare warriors like New York Attorney General Letitia James (D).

Others will use the rage of these times as a license to ignore legal and ethical obligations altogether. They are arguably the saddest manifestation of our political discord. They are people who have not just lost faith in our system but in themselves. They have become untethered from any defining principle for their own conduct. This election has left them adrift in a sea of moral and legal relativism, with only their rage as a following wind. They cling to that rage as reason vanishes like a distant shore.

For the rest of us, there is work to be done as a nation committed to the rule of law. We cannot win at any cost when that cost is the very thing that defines us.