Yesterday, an Alabama woman plead guilty to eight counts of falsifying absentee ballot applications in a 2013 City Commissioner's race. Janice Lee Hart was one of three individuals charged in the voter fraud scheme that resulted in the re-election of the sitting Dothan, Alabama commissioner Amos Newsome. Newsome's girlfriend was also allegedly involved in orchestrating the effort. 

In the 2004 election, there were allegations that supporters of John Kerry for President in Ohio at a few ballot locations were handing out flyers to voters leaving predominantly Democrat polling places AFTER voting stating: “If you feel you vote did not count, please go to one of the following places and vote provisionally.” 

With 30-40 candidates considering a possible GOP Presidential bid and 10-20 likely candidates to make the field, the RNLA has committed to a project to level the playing field for all of them. In the past, one of the challenging hurdles for even the strongest candidates has been the legal technicalities of actually getting their name on the ballot in all 50 states and 6 territories. . . . RNLA Chairman Randy Evans and RNLA President Larry Levy have appointed Stefan Passantino and Peter Schalestock as co-chairs of the GOP Presidential Ballot Access Initiative. They will chair this committee designed to ‘level the playing field’ by providing as a resource information for potential GOP Presidential candidates interested in getting their names on the ballot during the nomination process.

More details here.

On March 29, 1960, the New York Times advertised an advocacy group’s call for political change in the segregated South. The ad was propaganda and clearly embellished facts for effect. Government functionaries implicated by the ad sued for libel. The resulting case, New York Times v. Sullivan, was a landmark victory for free speech. It reaffirmed America’s “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide open.”

Mayor Don Cravins of Opelousas, Louisiana famously bragged that you should vote twice for Senator Landrieu and if you did you did no one was going to persecute you. Unfortunately, there is a lot of truth to what Mayor Cravins said, vote fraud is rarely prosecuted.  

All but partisan Democrats agree that Eric Holder has been a bad Attorney General. Many think that Holder is so bad that almost anyone with a license to practice law would be better. 

Federal Election Commissioner Lee Goodman recently published an excellent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on whether the FEC should regulate political communications posted on the Internet. As a champion of the First Amendment it is no surprise that Goodman’s answer to that question is a resounding “no.”     

The Top 10 blog posts as selected by RNLA staff and volunteers for 2014. 

Iowa’s Voter Registration Commission is poised to adopt a rule that will allow the state to enact online voter registration for individuals who have a driver’s license or photo ID issued by the Iowa Department of Transportation. By the National Conference of State Legislature’s count, Iowa would be the 22^nd state to offer online voter registration.

Judicial Watch’s Robert Popper has an excellent piece in today’s Wall Street Journal about the ongoing federal litigation challenging several changes to North Carolina’s election laws and how statistics from November’s election dispel the myth the changes suppressed the vote there. As we have seen in other states that have adopted voter integrity measures such as photo ID laws, North Carolina’s changes are proving to have zero impact on minority turnout, despite the hysterical claims made by the NAACP and Eric Holder’s Department of Justice (DOJ). In fact, African-American voter registration and turnout increased for the 2014 election.