Ranked-Choice Voting Proves to Be Lightning Rod Issue in Several States

Bills to ban ranked-choice voting are causing passionate debate over a method to cast ballots that some say is fairer and some say is confusing and could lower voter turnout.

Ranked-choice voting allows people to rank the candidates, with “one” being their favorite. The votes are tallied in rounds. After the first round, the candidate with the lowest votes is eliminated. The voter’s second preference is then added to the tally. The process continues until a winner is determined.

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Commentary: Post-Election Audits Should Be the Norm for Every State

I may be dating myself, but the old saying goes, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

We can get much more than an ounce’s worth of prevention by engaging in post-election process audits. It is much easier to fix process problems early before they blow up and become problems that require litigation and other nasty fixes. Ahead of the 2024 election, state legislatures should require full process audits to ensure transparency and build trust in our elections.

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Federal Judge Rejects Bid to Remove Trump from West Virginia Ballot

Trump Happy Courtroom

A federal judge rejected a bid Thursday to remove former President Donald Trump from the ballot in West Virginia.

Obama-appointed District Judge Irene Berger ruled that John Anthony Castro, the little-known presidential candidate who brought the lawsuit to remove Trump, lacked standing to sue. The decision comes days after Colorado’s Supreme Court found Trump was ineligible to appear on the state’s ballot under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, likely setting up Supreme Court review of the issue.

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Commentary: Mitt Romney and Joe Manchin Are Wrong About Ranked-Choice Voting

U.S. Sens. Joe Manchin and Mitt Romney recently praised Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV), lauding it respectively as “mesmerizing…we should do it” and “a superior way to proceed.” But the two lawmakers are wrong.

Their statements might ring true if they understood they are endorsing a system that encourages fringe candidates and skews election outcomes.

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18 States, DC Accept Ballots after Election Day, with North Dakota’s Deadline Facing Lawsuit

Poll workers counting ballots

North Dakota is facing a lawsuit over its acceptance of mail-in ballots 13 days after Election Day and is among 18 states and Washington, D.C., that accept and tabulate ballots post-election.

The lawsuit, which was filed Wednesday against North Dakota State Election Director Erika White, alleges that the state’s law to accept ballots up to 13 days after Election Day violates federal law.

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Connecticut’s Early Voting Costs Could Top $9 Million

Connecticut’s embrace of early voting will make it more convenient for millions to cast a ballot, but comes with a hefty price tag for the state and local governments.

That’s according to a new report by the state’s Office of Fiscal Analysis, which determined the move could cost from $6.9 million to $9.2 million over the next several years, depending on how many days of early voting are offered. 

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Prominent Pollster Says Time for America to Mandate All Ballots Be Counted on Election Day

With states like Arizona, Nevada and Alaska taking days to determine midterm election results, influential pollster Scott Rasmussen says there is overwhelming support for America to mandate ballots be in and counted by Election Day.

“One of the 80% issues, and there aren’t a whole lot of 80% issues in America-one of them is that all ballots should be in by Election Day,” Scott Rasmussen said Wednesday night on the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show. “We should know the results on Election Day.”

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‘Free, Fair and Honest’: Former Trump Spokesperson Praises States’ New Election Laws

Former Trump spokesperson Hogan Gidley praised seven states for protecting election integrity in an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

Seven states are being praised by the America First Policy Institute’s (AFPI) Center For Election Integrity (CEI) in a new report for recent legislative efforts to prevent voter fraud. Hogan Gidley, director of the CEI, explained the importance of the report during an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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Voters Increasingly Returning to In-Person Ballots over Mail

In many states across the country, voters appear to be returning to in-person voting for their top preference, after vote-by-mail was greatly increased and heavily promoted during the coronavirus pandemic.

According to the Associated Press, many states, including key swing states, have seen massive drops in the number of requests for mail-in ballots. In Georgia, where nearly one million ballots were cast by mail in the primary elections in 2020, only about 85,000 voters have requested mail-in ballots for this year’s primary. Other states that saw similar declines include Ohio, West Virginia, and Indiana.

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Commentary: No More Ballots in the Wild

When the French people voted for a new president in April, they did so on a single day using paper ballots filled out in the privacy of official polling stations. France, being a normal First World democracy, takes election security seriously. Electronic voting machines are virtually never used. Mail-in voting has been banned nationwide since 1975 out of security fears. Voter rolls are regularly purged of the dead and those who have moved. It is a given that every French voter must show identification before being allowed to fill out a ballot. 

The United States, by contrast, is an oligarchy (a regime where the elite rules) that is only pretending to be a democracy. This is why we use a Third World banana republic election system. 

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Georgia Ballot Harvesting Probe Advances as State Elections Board Approves Subpoena

"VOTE ONE MORE TIME" sign on an electric pole in Atlanta, Georgia

The Georgia Elections Board has approved a subpoena to secure evidence and testimony in an ongoing investigation into whether third-party liberal activists illegally gathered thousands of absentee ballots in the 2020 general election and a subsequent runoff that determined Democrat control of the U.S. Senate.

The vote was a major win for Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who announced the investigation into alleged ballot harvesting in January and was seeking the subpoena authority to assist the probe.

The subpoena power will allow Raffensperger’s team to secure evidence about a whistleblower who alleged to an election integrity group that he participated in a large operation to gather ballots in which activists were paid $10 for each ballot they delivered.

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Arizona Senate Study Estimates 200K Ballots Counted in 2020 with Mismatched Signatures

Astudy of Maricopa County’s mail ballots in Arizona’s 2020 presidential election estimates that more than 200,000 ballots with mismatched signatures were counted without being reviewed, or “cured” — more than eight times the 25,000 signature mismatches requiring curing acknowledged by the county.

Commissioned by the Arizona State Senate, the signature verification pilot study was conducted by Shiva Ayyadurai’s Election Systems Integrity Institute, which released its final report to the public on Tuesday. Ayyadurai is an engineer and entrpreneur with four degrees from MIT who bills himself as the inventor of email, a claim which critics have alleged is exaggerated.

Of the 1,911,918 early voting mail ballots that Maricopa County received and counted in the 2020 presidential election, the county reported that 25,000, or 1.3%, had signature mismatches that required curing, but only 587 (2.3%) of those were confirmed mismatched signatures.

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Election Watchdog: ‘Not Ready for 2024’ Elections, ‘Still Have Many of the Same Problems’ from 2020

Election integrity issues from the 2020 presidential election have yet to be resolved, “so we are not ready for 2024,” Phill Kline, Director of the Amistad Project, warned on Monday.

Kline was asked by “Just the News, Not Noise” TV show cohosts John Solomon and Amanda Head if election integrity issues had been solved after the 2020 election. “No, we still have many of the same problems,” he replied, explaining that this is “because the legislatures have not taken the time to understand the problem.”

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