Under tight security in the depths of the W Hotel in Washington, DC a top-secret meeting took place last fall. The invite-only, closed-press confab brought together rich donors, dedicated activists, political operatives, and some of the biggest names in the current political scene.

New York City is affectionately known to all as the Big Apple, but the new administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio is demonstrating that the Big Apple may be rotten to its core.  

Federal law prevents coordination between candidate committees and Super PACs. Luckily for Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and John Sarbanes (D-MD), co-sponsors of a new campaign finance bill (H.R. 20), the same does not hold true for public-relation blitzes. The legislators and their allies are directing an organized messaging campaign to convince the public of the need for this law.

Yesterday we wrote about how the Democrat Co-Chair of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration Bob Bauer’s own firm brought a suit against a state effort to clean up voter lists that was so without merit a Virginia judge dismissed the suit saying the suit had “not presented any evidence” of their predictable and merit-less allegations of racism.

Today, the Co-Chairs of the Presidential Commission on Election Administration (PCEA) testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Rules and Administration on their recent report recommending improvements to voting in the United States. Among the key recommendations made by the Co-Chairs, Democrat Bob Bauer and Republican Ben Ginsberg, was to expand interstate data sharing agreements for voter registration list maintenance. Particularly, the Commission recommends that “[s]uch projects should strive to improve the accuracy of voter registration records, enhance the ability to detect ineligible voting and prosecute voter fraud, reduce administrative costs, and increase registration rates.”

Last week House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Congressman Paul Sarbanes published an op-ed in the Washington Post discussing H.R. 20, the Government by the People Act. The bill seeks to balance the effect of Citizens United, which according to the op-ed “shook the foundation of our democracy.” The Act would provide:

At the 2012 Democrat convention delegates were required to have IDs to vote.  Given the extreme rhetoric against voter ID this was the height of hypocrisy.   Well the NAACP has got into the act.  To protest Voter ID in North Carolina, they advised protesters to bring an ID.

A major bipartisan commission that includes prominent Democrats and Republicans issues a report making recommendations to improve our elections. However, over time some Democrats and the far left not only disagree with the report, they label all those who attempt to implement many of its recommendations (even fellow Democrats) as in favor of voter suppression and either state or imply that they are “racist.”

Following up on the thoughtful piece by Professors Eugene Kontorovich and John McGinnis or early voting, J. Christian Adams writes eight reasons against early voting.  While the professors laid out the case against early voting from a civic duty and traditional angle, Adams goes after early voting by undercutting the very reason its proponents are advocating it.

Despite the President’s recent reassurances, Americans continue to question how much government snooping is acceptable in a free society. But in the political arena, the spooks don’t need clandestine technology to monitor our every move. They ply their trade in election boards and commissions throughout the country. No matter how minuscule the expenditure, obscure the speaker, or trivial the issue, political activity is forcibly registered, catalogued, categorized, and published.