Tag: voting

More Questions Than Answers: Maricopa County Supervisor Releases “Explanation” of Controversial Late-Night Election Video

On October 10, The Gateway Pundit published an article that revealed concerning video allegedly showing two election workers, one carrying a toddler, entering the Ballot Tabulation Center (BTC)M after hours and inserting a device into one of the adjudication terminals.

Days prior, the Logic & Accuracy (L&A) testing had already been completed. The terminals reportedly had “port blockers” installed over the USB ports in order to ensure no foreign devices were inserted into the systems following the completion of the L&A testing.

On October 14, Maricopa County published via X a “Joint Statement Addressing Election Misinformation” from the Board of Supervisors Chair Kate Brophy McGee and Vice Chair Debbie Lesko. 

The statement described the work as “authorized and necessary work to update software and upload election data to a computer terminal” that is air-gapped and did not involve the Election Management System or tabulators.

The update required a USB drive “to load authorized election files onto the duplication terminal,” according to the statement. It also claims that, “The entire process is subject to rigorous audits during and after every election.”

Following the joint statement from the Chair and Vice Chair, Supervisor Mark Stewart posted a video to X with “Eric,” the Chair of the Libertarian Party and “Michelle,” who is described as “a friend” of Stewart’s from the Republican Party.

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The Picture They Won’t Keep

I have spent years asking Florida counties for the records that prove they counted your vote correctly. What I got back was fee estimates, exemption letters, a script written by a private lobbying corporation, and, in one hearing, a claim that it would take 18,000 hours to hand over a file that takes under a minute to export.

This is a long one. It has to be, because the officials who run our elections are counting on you not reading the manuals. I read them. Here is what they say, with the receipts.

Your vote is counted from a picture. Not from the paper.

Start with what the vendors say about their own machines, because the whole argument ends right there.

There is not one scanner in use in Florida or California today that reads a mark off the paper. The old machines did. The ES&S Model 100 and the old Diebold and Sequoia units shined infrared light at fixed spots on the sheet and registered whether it bounced back. No picture was ever made. The U.S. Election Assistance Commission’s own glossary draws the line: “Most older optical scan systems use Infrared (IR) scanning technology and ballots with timing marks to accurately scan the ballot. Newer (digital) optical scan systems can also capture images of ballots as they are tabulated.”

Every machine in both states is the newer kind. Florida’s 67 counties run two vendors. The Division of Elections’ own December 2025 map shows 49 counties on ES&S and 18 on Democracy Suite, whose maker the map now lists as “Liberty Vote USA” with a footnote: “formerly Dominion Voting Systems, Inc.” California’s 58 counties, per the Secretary of State’s April 30, 2026 list, run 39 on Liberty Vote (Dominion) ImageCast Central, 13 on Hart Verity, 5 on ES&S, and Los Angeles on its own VSAP Tally system. Every single one is a digital image scanner.

Here is the sequence, and it is the same on all of them. The read head is a contact image sensor, or on Dominion’s central scanner an off-the-shelf Canon document scanner. It photographs both sides of your ballot as the paper moves through. The software then goes to work on the photograph. It finds the timing marks, locates every oval from the election definition, counts the dark pixels inside each oval, and records a vote when the count crosses a threshold that the county set for that election. The vote is derived from the image. There is no second sensor reading the paper.

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South Carolina Democrat State Lawmaker Arrested For Pointing Gun at Family Member of Opponent at Polling Location on Primary Day

A South Carolina Democrat state lawmaker was arrested on Friday for presenting and pointing a handgun at a Democrat polling location on primary day.

On June 9, State Rep. Michael Rivers (D-St. Helena Island) retrieved a handgun from the glove compartment in his vehicle and pointed it at a relative of his opponent.

Michael Rivers engaged in a “brief verbal altercation” over the political campaign for his seat. He faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison for the felony pointing charge.

Rivers lost his primary to Shannon DeLocach.

An attorney for Rivers said his client is innocent.

“Representative Rivers is asserting his innocence to this accusation levied against him by a political opponent. Michael has served admirably in the State Legislature and he is a retired member United States military. He has been an upstanding citizen for nearly seven decades. We ask for the public to withhold judgment until the facts come to light and this matter is resolved in a Court of law,” the attorney, Seth Rose, said in a statement to WIS.

Rivers was released on a $15,000 bond.

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Biden-Appointed Activist Judge Sparkle Sooknanan Blocks Trump DOJ’s Nationwide Voter Roll Cleanup Effort — Even in States That Voluntarily Cooperated

A Biden-appointed federal judge has once again stepped in to shield dirty voter rolls from federal scrutiny, striking down the Justice Department’s nationwide effort to collect registration records and identify suspected non-U.S. citizens on the rolls.

U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago, ruled that the Department of Justice overstepped its bounds by demanding unredacted voter registration lists and cross-referencing them using federal databases.

According to the 78-page ruling, the DOJ began requesting complete, unredacted statewide voter registration lists (including names, dates of birth, addresses, and driver’s license or partial Social Security numbers) from 49 states and the District of Columbia starting in May 2025. At least 18 states fully cooperated.

The department then shared the data with DHS for runs through the expanded Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system and urged states to remove voters flagged as potentially ineligible.

The Justice Department maintained that its actions were authorized by federal laws governing voter registration and election administration.

Sooknanan rejected that argument.

Sooknanan concluded that the Justice Department’s policy violated the Privacy Act and the Paperwork Reduction Act, exceeded the agency’s statutory authority, and was arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act.

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Gov. Spanberger admits scheme to restore voting rights included … the dead!

In a blunder that likely will leave Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger the butt of jokes for years to come, her leftist agenda to make voting for everyone possible included a scheme to restore voting rights to convicts.

She did. Including the dead.

She now says her state is “looking into it.”

A report posted online by the Washington Examiner said Spanberger admitted it was possible that she “restored the voting rights of deceased individuals.”

She had announced her requirement that the state restore the voting rights for 66,085 previous felons in the state.

“The commonwealth’s constitution automatically and permanently strips voting rights of all convicted felons, but it leaves the power to restore them individually after a person completes their prison sentence to the sitting governor,” the report said.

As part of the process she launched, “she automatically restored voting rights for previous felons who had already died,” the report said.

“Spanberger did not deny the reports and said her office is ‘digging into’ the case to investigate instances where that ‘appears to be the case,'” the report said.

“We’re certainly looking into that possibility and recognizing that there has been a focus on a number of cases where that appears to be the case,” Spanberger said.

She did complain that the databases that list people who do not have voting rights might not include the pertinent information that they have died.

The report noted, “Spanberger also added that it’s a felony to cast a ballot on behalf of someone else, living or dead.”

Fox News reported Virginia resident Howard “Skip” Lambert posted online a notice signed by Spanberger and a later notification telling the recipient her voting rights had been restored and she should re-register to vote.

The problem was the recipient was his daughter, who passed away two years ago.

He explained, “Interesting this letter arrives as early-voting begins… yet the provided official order is dated July 1,” he said on Sept. 24. “Just because cash doesn’t change hands doesn’t mean the governor isn’t trying to buy votes.”

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‘Out of their ever-loving minds?’: Judge rules on leftist demand to be allowed to cast 2 ballots in midterms

A judge in Wisconsin has rejected a demand by the leftists in the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin to be allowed to vote by mail, and then vote again by appearing and voting on Election Day.

A commentary at RedState ripped into the people who demanded the court give them that very permission.

“Now, we have Democrats pushing to flood our system with as many hard-to-track mail-in ballots as possible, seeking to do away with voter IDs, advocating for non-citizens to potentially vote in elections, hiding their dirty voter rolls, and then claiming it’s perfectly normal for people to cast a mail-in ballot and show up to ‘vote’ again on Election Day. Are these people out of their ever-loving minds? Let me spare you the suspense: Yes, yes they are.”

A report at WisPolitics revealed the LWV had sued the Wisconsin Elections Commission demanding the court block enforcement of state rules that say “an elector who mails or personally delivers an absentee ballot to the municipal clerk is not permitted to vote in person at the same election on Election Day.”

The League wanted voters who mailed their ballots to be allowed to vote on Election Day … just in case the mail service didn’t deliver their ballots on time.

The judge in Dane County refused to suspend election rules for that.

Rep. Calvin Callahan, a Republican in the Wisconsin Assembly, had intervened in the case in opposition to the double-voting plan.

“I got into this case to defend the law the Legislature wrote,” Callahan said. “If you mail your absentee ballot back to your clerk, you do not get another vote at the polls. The League of Women Voters asked a Dane County judge to suspend guidance that simply reiterated that law weeks before a statewide election. The court said no. One person, one ballot. That is a foundation of our election system, and it should not be rewritten in the middle of an election through a court action.”

The League had insisted the judge give them a temporary injunction allowing their plan to move forward. The fight still remains in the court, but the injunction demand was rejected, meaning double-voting likely is not being allowed in this election.

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Watch the Hosts of ‘The View’ Openly Campaign for Texas Democrat James Talarico on the Air

This week, Ana Navarro, Whoopi Goldberg, and the rest of the crew on ‘The View’ openly campaigned for far left Texas Democrat James Talarico on the air, in what seems to be a clear violation of FCC rules.

This has been happening a lot lately. Less than two weeks ago, Ana Navarro openly campaigned for a Democrat running for a House seat in Florida.

Trump’s FCC has been looking into these claims. It couldn’t be more obvious, could it?

The hosts are openly cheerleading for the Democrats to win.

Transcript via NewsBusters:

SUNNY HOSTIN: I think we will. I think we will see Texas go blue, actually.

I really do.

In September not only one but eight pollsters had Talarico ahead. 51 to 45 percent. That’s significant given a Democrat hasn’t won statewide office in 30 years. That same poll showed that he is leading Paxton among women, 56 percent to 40 percent. Among voters, 18 to 29, 66 percent to 22 percent. And among Hispanics 62 percent to 30 percent. We are talking about Texas. He is going to win this race.

GOLDBERG: We’ll see. We’ll see.

GOLDBERG: Remember. As – I’m sorry. As you guys pointed out the other day, we’ve seen this before. We have seen – I and suddenly some weird number comes out. And you’re going, ‘wait, what happened?’ So, fingers crossed.

ANA NAVARRO: You’re not kidding. 2016 left me scarred.

GOLDBERG: I know.

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The Left Doesn’t Count Votes. It Finds Them.

f you saw a recent NYT report on Brazil’s election between incumbent socialist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and conservative Flávio Bolsonaro, you may have noticed that the Left’s “paper of record” made an astounding, if unintended, admission in the headline: it reveals its conception of elections. In its words, “Flávio Bolsonaro’s first round lead leaves President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva three weeks to find the votes to stop Brazil’s rightward shift” (italics mine). It doesn’t say “prevail in the election by voter turnout,” but it casts the election as an implied political obligation to manufacture ballots to block voter will and engineer an imposed social order against it. This is clearly the Left’s intention in November.

While this may read as routine journalism, or perhaps just wishful thinking on the writers’ part, it may strike some readers as more of a Freudian slip about how the Left’s mental worldview works: leftist parties operate under a duty to manufacture enough ballots to overcome an election deficit. If your candidate falls behind, you intervene on the sidelines to close the gap. This is now their “normalized” concept of an election.

More than that, progressives have inverted the structure of an election from one that sets two opponents in passive receipt of votes to an actively managed, planned event that aids one side during the election. What was traditionally an arm’s-length contest becomes a pre-existing agreement.

Rather than preserving a quiet period after the close of campaigning to measure the public result of candidate marketing through voluntary voter turnout, the election becomes merely part of their total political campaign operation. It turns votes into indicators, and the indicators into corrective ballot measures.

This obviously goes by other names, such as rigging, stealing, cheating, and fraud, but the extraordinary aspect of this language in the NYT is how it reveals a shift in political psychology and a determination to make that abnormal psychology generally accepted behavior. It resembles the Left’s efforts to make people think that transgender athletes are legitimate contestants among biological females: it asks you to accept a fraud as a right, and, more than that, that you are wrong for questioning it. That is how election fraud works: objections violate a higher moral standing claimed by the victor, even though the victor obtained it through deception.

To use an analogy, it is like two horses in a race where the spectators rush the racetrack on the losing horse, inject him with amphetamines, block the other rider, and the racing judge looks the other way, while the crowd is asked to keep quiet out of fairness to the horse.

To use a good legal analogy, it would be like two legal opponents in a trial, along with their lawyers, actually accompanying the jury into the deliberation room and trying to measure which way they’re leaning and “tip” the scales. Jurors privately deliberate after closing arguments because they weigh what they heard and reach a protected verdict based only on the evidence presented in open court.

Elections are the same: voters effectively go into private deliberation after hearing both sides, cast their ballots in private, and the verdict is then announced in the open “public court.” We have certain appeal processes for election irregularity (e.g., Florida in 2000 and Bush v. Gore), or for an election “mistrial,” as in a deadlock (a runoff or recount), including the discretion to count state electors (e.g., Pence, 2021). In all cases, the counting or verdict is subject to a quiet period, and campaigning of any kind must stand down.

The other key factor in Brazil that is reframing the Left’s vision of elections is based on its paranoia that any conservative candidate is a Trump candidate and ally and part of a larger plan to aid and abet President Trump’s mandates (“Brazil Is a Sign of Things to Come,” NYT, 10.5.26). But South America (and Cuba as well) has been dragging behind the West economically for decades because of its leftist political corruption and because it swings in the extreme between Left populists and Right militarists. Rarely has an actual business conservative, or even a moderate leader, emerged.

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Candidate Named ‘Hitler Mussolini Flores’ Wins Mayoral Election in Peru on Left-Wing Ticket

A Peruvian politician named Hitler Mussolini is on course to become mayor of a small town after winning a local election.

Hitler Mussolini Simeón Flores, a candidate for the left-wing Ahora Nación party, finished first in the mayoral race in Queropalca, a district in Peru’s central Huánuco region.

According to results published by Peru’s electoral authorities, Flores received 229 votes, securing 34.54 percent of the valid ballots cast.

His nearest challenger, Gaspar Benilde Osorio Zambrano of the Renovación Popular party, received 204 votes, while third-place candidate Itala Yovana Santillan Vara secured 187.

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Haiti Postpones Elections Indefinitely amid Political Instability and Gang Violence

The Provisional Electoral Council of Haiti (CEP) announced Wednesday that elections scheduled for December have been postponed indefinitely.

The statement did not indicate the exact reason for the postponement, but few Haitians expected the elections to be held on time, due to ongoing instability and rampant gang violence.

“Following consultations with political actors and in view of the adoption, in the Council of Ministers, on October 5, 2026, of the amendments made to the Electoral Decree of June 2, 2026, certain deadlines of the electoral process are being rescheduled,” the CEP said.

“This measure is intended in particular to allow candidates and the political structures concerned to have the necessary time to complete the formalities required under the legal and regulatory framework in force,” the statement added.

The CEP did not provide an estimated date for rescheduled elections, but said the plan would be “made public as soon as possible,” once the “technical and operational requirements of the process, as well as the conditions necessary for the proper conduct of the various stages” have been addressed.

Haiti has not held elections since 2016. The winner of the 2016 presidential election, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated at his home in July 2021. Executive power was then taken by Prime Minister Ariel Henry, until he was driven out of Haiti by gangsters and resigned under pressure in April 2024.

The government was subsequently run by a nine-member presidential transition council, which was wracked by infighting and allegations of corruption, while gang violence grew steadily worse. The council was dissolved in February 2026, leaving interim Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aime with sole executive authority.

An agreement reached in April led to elections being scheduled for December 13, with a cutoff date of October 9 for candidate registration and other documentation to be completed. The cutoff date was extended to October 31 before the CEP canceled the election entirely.

In addition to the constant threat of violence in the streets, the election plan was assailed by various political factions in Haiti as unfair, arbitrary, or rigged. Detractors of Fils-Aime accused the interim prime minister of plotting to rig the election in favor of himself and his cronies.

A member of the CEP told Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Wednesday that December 13 “no longer stands” as the election date, and the council is “working on a new timetable.”

The council member said that only 769,000 voters have been registered since July, far short of the 3-4 million voters needed to hold a reasonably comprehensive national election.

Haitians have been pessimistic about the election schedule for months. The Miami Herald found considerable skepticism among the populace in September, as voter registration lagged far behind schedule, the CEP reshuffled its leadership for the third time in two years, and international observers said it would be nearly impossible to hold a fair election amid the violent chaos of gang-infested Haiti.

The Miami Herald noted that large swaths of Haiti were completely inaccessible to election workers because they are controlled by heavily armed gangs, and gang violence has turned nearly 1.5 million Haitians into Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) – refugees in their own country who would have a very difficult time establishing residency or getting registered to vote.

No one who talked to the Herald seriously expected Haiti’s notoriously inaccurate voter rolls to be cleaned up in time for a December election.

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