Tag: elections

Democracy in Georgia Is Under Threat by the US Congress and the Helsinki Commission

 It was Lincoln who once said “I would like to see someone proud of the place in which they live.” The 16th president never made it to the South Caucasus, but here reside a people quite justly proud of the place in which they live. Among the most striking differences between the vision offered to Georgian citizens by the ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party and by the Western-backed opposition parties is that the former is unabashedly so.

From the perspective of an American of rather longstanding, it seems the politics of the GD are not dissimilar to those of MAGA Republicans; Hungary’s Fidesz; France’s National Rally; Poland’s Law and Justice; or the UK’s Reform Party. The pro-NATO, pro-EU Georgian opposition coalition, having lost a democratic election by a convincing margin last October, continues to call for foreign powers (the US, the EU) to sanction members and funders of the GD. The bedraggled youth who sit in protest on the steps of the Georgian Parliament under the flags of a foreign powers are calling for those powers to sanction the legitimate winners of their country’s last national election: Do they not know what “democracy” means?

For some reason, the Georgian opposition thinks Washington and Brussels (a EU and NATO “Information Center” resides in a handsome building just off Tbilisi’s Freedom Square) have something to teach Georgia about democracy. Still worse, the illusion that Washington has both the right and duty to teach Georgia how to govern itself persists in the American media and in the halls of Congress.

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House Passes Bill to Repeal D.C. Law Allowing Non-Citizens to Vote — 56 Democrats Join Republicans in Stunning Rebuke of Radical Policy

The U.S. House of Representatives just voted 266–148 to repeal Washington, D.C.’s Local Resident Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2022, which allowed non‑U.S. citizens, including potentially illegal immigrants and foreign agents, to cast ballots in local elections.

Led by Rep. August Pfluger (R‑TX), the vote drew support from 56 Democrats, proving GOP fears that D.C.’s progressive experiment threatens the sanctity of American elections.

“PASSED: My bill to prohibit noncitizens from voting in DC elections just passed the House!” Pfluger wrote on X.

He added, “It’s common sense: Only American citizens should be able to vote in U.S. elections!”

“It’s hard to go back to your district as a Democrat and say, yeah, I want foreign agents to be able to vote in our elections – ‘Oh yeah, it’s not federal elections,’ some may say. But it has an impact on the way the city is run,” Pfluger told Fox News.

“This could be Russian embassy personnel, they could be Chinese embassy personnel – a number of folks. It’s just wrong. It goes against the fabric of our society,” he added.

The bill—H.R. 884—not only strips this expanded voting bedrock but also delivers a crippling blow to the District’s autonomy by reversing reforms aimed at limiting police union powers.

In a 235–178 side vote, lawmakers restored collective bargaining rights for the D.C. Police Union—an unmistakable signal that law enforcement trumps local sovereignty.

One of D.C.’s own reps, Eleanor Holmes Norton (D‑DC), slammed the action as “paternalistic, undemocratic incursions,” condemning the vote as a calculated stunt to score headlines rather than a serious legislative priority.

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A Disappointing Finish – Three Groups Worked Hard to Throw the South Korean Presidential Election

The outcome of the election in South Korea on June 3, 2025, was disappointing but pre-determined.  The reason for the election was routinely misreported in Western Media.

The BBC, a cauldron of left leaning drivel said, “It (South Korea) is still recovering from the martial law crisis last December, when the president, Yoon Suk Yeol, tried to orchestrate a military takeover.”

Fact Check:  False.  The purpose of the six-hour declaration of Martial Law by former President Yoon Suk Yeol was to raid the National Election Commission (NEC) to retrieve evidence of election fraud.

No one was harmed, disappeared, or arrested during the six-hour period last December when President Yoon used his Constitutional authority to declare this period.  There was not even a hint of a military takeover.

Lee Jae-myung, is the Democrat Candidate who is now the South Korean President after the June 3 election.

The Korean election made Fulton County, GA look trustworthy.  Lee performed first class street theater wearing a visible bullet proof vest and often appearing behind bullet proof glass while denouncing the “Yoon Insurrectionists” and vowing to imprison all of them.

Lee’s theatrics eerily resembled the same script of Biden and Harris after the stolen 2020 election and their creation of a fortress around the U.S. Capitol to add drama to their sparsely attended inauguration.

Lee Jae-myung’s inauguration had a very small gathering on the lawn of the National Assembly which was outnumbered by the media on the inauguration platform.  Stunning for someone who supposedly won the election by 6%.

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250,000 Texans Voted to Decriminalize Marijuana, So Why Are Politicians Trying To Override Them?

As the executive director of Ground Game Texas, I lead a team organizing working-class Texans to pass movement-driven local policies at the ballot box. In a state where our elected officials are openly hostile to justice, and voter suppression is rampant, we take the fight directly to the people. And the people are showing up.

Through our local campaigns, we’ve gathered hundreds of thousands of petition signatures and earned a quarter of a million votes to decriminalize marijuana across Texas—from Austin to Killeen, Lockhart to Dallas. In a state with low voter turnout, marijuana decriminalization has earned a supermajority of the vote in every city, and over-performed compared to the rest of the ballot. But instead of respecting the will of the voters, politicians in this state are doing everything they can to overturn these democratically elected policies.

We are fighting locally, fighting statewide, and fighting crony courts. Last year in Lockhart, the city attorney tried to split our single policy into 13 separate ballot items to bury it in bureaucracy. We stopped them. A state appeals court just upheld a lawsuit designed to stop our cities from implementing our marijuana decriminalization. And at the legislature, five separate bills were introduced this session to gut local control and block citizens from changing the law through ballot initiatives.

This is about more than plants with healing properties. It’s about power. It’s about democracy. And it’s all connected.

The war on drugs isn’t a failed policy—it’s a successful tool of oppression. A tool used to criminalize poverty. A tool used to lock Black and Brown Texans into cycles of incarceration. A tool used to destabilize families, punish veterans and disabled people and make survival a crime.

And when we rise up to change those laws, the people in power rewrite the rules to keep control. That’s not new. It’s a familiar playbook.

From Jim Crow poll taxes to modern-day gerrymandering and felony disenfranchisement, this country has always created new systems to block the people most impacted by oppression from changing it. What’s happening in Texas right now is just the latest chapter.

Let’s be clear: The issue isn’t that Texans don’t care. The issue is that the system was designed to keep most Texans out.

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Conservative Colombian Presidential Candidate Uribe Shot In The Head In Bogota Event

Conservative Colombian senator Miguel Uribe Turbay was shot in the head on Saturday in an apparent assassination attempt. There was no immediate confirmation from the authorities on the status of his condition.

The 39-year-old senator is a member of the opposition conservative Democratic Center party, founded by former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe. The two men are not related.

According to a party statement condemning the attack, the senator was hosting a campaign event in a public park in the Fontibon neighborhood in the capital on Saturday when “armed subjects shot him in the back.”

The party described the attack as serious, but did not disclose further details on his health.

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Justice Department Backs Judicial Watch in Oregon Elections Case Over Alleged Violations of National Voter Registration Act — Files Statement of Interest

In a major win for election integrity advocates, the Department of Justice has sided with Judicial Watch in a lawsuit against the Oregon Secretary of State over the state’s failure to follow federal law requiring transparency in how it maintains its voter rolls.

The DOJ filed a Statement of Interest on Friday, in the case Judicial Watch v. Read, confirming that Oregon cannot hide behind its counties or bureaucratic red tape to avoid its clear legal responsibilities under the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA).

The case centers on Oregon’s refusal to hand over public records detailing efforts to clean up its voter rolls — including lists of people sent confirmation notices and whether they responded — as mandated by Section 8 of the NVRA.

Judicial Watch and other plaintiffs allege that Oregon’s Secretary of State, Tobias Read, failed to make a reasonable effort to remove ineligible voters from the rolls and unlawfully withheld critical records from public inspection — a violation that could conceal voter fraud and election mismanagement.

In a stunning rebuke of Oregon’s handling, the DOJ’s legal filing emphasized that states, not counties, are directly responsible for maintaining and disclosing these records.

Oregon’s own response to Judicial Watch’s 2023 records request admitted that fulfilling it would take 5,000 hours due to lack of central coordination.

The DOJ made clear: this is no excuse.

“To the extent that the state does not have in place and must fashion ad hoc methods to access and retrieve the records from the counties and ensure the records are preserved for at least two years, the state’s laws and practices would not be consistent with the state’s obligations under the NVRA,” the DOJ wrote.

The DOJ warned that any state law attempting to delegate those responsibilities to local officials must yield to federal law under the Constitution’s Elections Clause.

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Michigan House Sues Secretary of State Over Subpoenaed Election-Worker Training Materials

The Office of Legal Counsel for the Michigan House of Representatives filed a lawsuit on June 4 against Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, over her refusal to turn over subpoenaed election materials to the House Oversight Committee.

The lawsuit, filed in the Michigan Court of Claims, requests a declaratory judgment from the court that the Michigan House has issued a valid subpoena and that Benson must comply with it. The lawsuit also requests an injunction prohibiting Benson or the Michigan Department of State from modifying any relevant records.

The House Legal Counsel filed the verified complaint for declaratory judgment and injunctive relief under the authority of House Resolution 117, which states that the “House Office of Legal Counsel is directed to take steps necessary and proper to ensuring compliance with the House’s subpoenas, including the initiation of legal action.”

The filing also requests immediate and expedited consideration by the Court of Claims, the judicial body that resolves all disputes where the state or its agencies are the defendant.

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The Left Is Alienating Its Minority Base

Not long ago Susan Rice, the former top official in the Obama administration, was removed from the Defense Policy Board. That’s a group of grandees that advise the Defense Department. They’re political appointments. And traditionally, when a new president comes in, they get rid of most of the prior Defense Policy Board because they feel they’re partisans.

And in the case of Susan Rice, she was appointed in a late appointment by then-President Joe Biden, who pretty much wiped out all of the Trump appointments. So, her dismissal by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth was not unusual.

And yet, she fired back at him and said he was dumb as a rock and ultra-MAGA. But what was interesting, she said, “white male, cisgender.” In other words, she attacked his race. And she said her administration would’ve fired him for the Signal chat scandal. But of course, she was the one that came out on Sunday talk shows and lied five times about the disaster in Benghazi, among other things later in her career. But why inject race into it?

At almost the same period, we had a number of Afrikaners—I should say a very small number, about 60 people—asked for refugee status, felt they had been endangered by black-on-white violence, which is demonstrable and beyond controversy in South Africa. And President Donald Trump allowed them to come in as refugees. And of course, during the prior administration, thousands of people came in as refugees. But because, apparently, they were white, this caused a storm of criticism.

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Federal Judge Smacks Down DNC’s Election Lawsuit Against Trump Admin

President Donald Trump and his administration were handed a critical win from a federal judge this week.

And, surprisingly, it came from a judge put on the bench by former President Joe Biden.

U.S. District Judge Amir Ali dismissed a lawsuit from the Democratic National Committee targeting a number of Trump’s many executive orders Tuesday, according to Fox News.

Specifically, this DNC lawsuit claimed that some of Trump’s executive orders would erode the Federal Election Commission’s independence.

One of the key orders in question involved a Feb. 18 executive order entitled “Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies.”

“The Constitution vests all executive power in the President and charges him with faithfully executing the laws,” Trump stated in the order. “Since it would be impossible for the President to single-handedly perform all the executive business of the Federal Government, the Constitution also provides for subordinate officers to assist the President in his executive duties.

“In the exercise of their often-considerable authority, these executive branch officials remain subject to the President’s ongoing supervision and control.”

“However, previous administrations have allowed so-called ‘independent regulatory agencies’ to operate with minimal Presidential supervision,” Trump continued. “These regulatory agencies currently exercise substantial executive authority without sufficient accountability to the President, and through him, to the American people.

“Moreover, these regulatory agencies have been permitted to promulgate significant regulations without review by the President. ”

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Iowa Bans Ranked-Choice Voting, Authorizes Requests for Proof of Citizenship at Polls

Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds signed two election-related bills into law on June 2—one to prohibit the use of ranked-choice voting in any election across the state and allow poll workers to request proof of voter citizenship, and another that overhauls and standardizes the state’s election recount procedures.

Reynolds’s office announced the signing of both bills—House File 954 and House File 928—in a June 2 press release, with Secretary of State Paul Pate sharing photographs from the signing ceremony on social media and saying the move was a win for election integrity in Iowa.

The more sweeping of the two measures, HF 954 bars any use of ranked-choice voting—also known as instant-runoff voting—at the state, local, or federal level in Iowa. Though not currently in use in the state, the method has gained support in some U.S. jurisdictions. Supporters of ranked choice voting say it is more democratic as it ensures majority winners, while critics say it complicates vote tabulation and undermines transparency.

The bill also authorizes election workers, beginning July 1, to request proof of citizenship status, expanding current law that already permits challenges over age and residency. Additionally, it empowers the Iowa Secretary of State’s Office to enter into agreements with state and federal agencies and private vendors to verify voter eligibility using a broader range of data.

The law also mandates that the Iowa Department of Transportation (DOT) provide the Secretary of State’s Office with a list of individuals aged 17 and older who have submitted documentation indicating that they are not U.S. citizens. Voters flagged through this process must provide documentation affirming their legal eligibility to vote in order to remain on the active voter rolls.

“I commend the Iowa Legislature and Governor Reynolds for recognizing the importance of these bills in strengthening and maintaining Iowa’s election integrity,” Pate said in a statement. “These new laws add additional layers of integrity to our robust election procedures, supporting our efforts to balance election integrity and voter participation.”

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