On Tuesday, hearings were held by the Committee on House Administration and the Senate Rules Committee to discuss the current state of our elections. While the hearings covered different angles of the issue, one common theme emerged: Republicans are committed to finding solutions to the most pressing election integrity issues, while Democrats balk at those solutions.

Today, the U.S. House Administration Subcommittee on Elections Chair Laurel Lee (FL-15) and full Committee Chairman Bryan Steil (WI-01) held a hearing entitled "2022 Midterms Look Back Series: Successes in the 2022 Midterm Elections." This was the subcommittee’s first meeting of the 118^th Congress.

Chair Laurel Lee (former Florida Secretary of State) gave opening remarks emphasizing the critical importance for states to safeguard the election process:

“I am passionate about ensuring every state administers safe and secure elections. And that voters across the country have confidence in our election system.  Both Republicans and Democrats have a common goal of ensuring that every eligible American citizen has an opportunity to vote and for their ballot to be counted.”

RNLA's blog covered a wide variety of topics in 2022, and we wanted to highlight some of the top posts here.  Part One focused on RNLA's top blogs on judicial issues. Part Two focuses on how unhinged the far Left has become. RNLA covered everything from cancel culture, election results denialism, and more. We hope you enjoy this recap of some of RNLA's top blog posts of 2022!

On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris used a speaking engagement at the National Urban League Conference to push the Democrats' tired talking points about election laws in Republican states. Categorically, her statements were deliberately misleading at worst and misinformed at best.

Primary elections were held on Tuesday in five states: Idaho, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oregon, and Pennsylvania. In Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, a printing error wreaked havoc on the counting process for absentee ballots. Penn Live reported:

“Upon opening and scanning the first batch of ballots it became immediately apparent that a significant number of the mail ballots did not scan,” a county press release stated. “Upon further inspection of the ballots, the county identified the ballots were printed by the mail ballot vendor, NPC, with the wrong identification code. This error prevents the ballots from being scanned on the county’s central scanners.”

For years, the GOP has criticized Harris County, Texas elections for policies that undermine confidence in the system and promote incompetence. This week, their criticism was proven justified. After calls for her resignation, Harris County Elections Administrator Isabel Longoria announced that she would leave her post in July after massive failures during a recent election led to thousands of ballots not being counted properly:

Late Saturday, election officials in Harris County said that an "oversight" led to 10,000 ballots not being counted. Those votes — 6,000 Democratic and 4,000 Republican — would be added to the final tallies on Tuesday. Longoria was also criticized for a slow count that took 30 hours to complete.

Recordings obtained from a whistleblower in Delaware County, Pennsylvania show rampant election administration problems in the suburban Philadelphia county:

To date, the videos have exposed a wide array of problems with election integrity, including on-tape admissions that the election laws were not complied with, that 80 percent of provisional ballots lacked a proper chain-of-custody, that there were missing removable drives for some of the voting machines, and that election workers “recreated” new drives to response to the Right to Know request.

Dark money king Marc Elias, of Steele dossier fame, was hired by the lagging campaign of Democrat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia in a desperate move.  As Professor Jonathan Turley wrote:

McAuliffe may be preparing to challenge any win by Republican Glenn Youngkin. He has given $53,680 to the Elias Law Group. McAuliffe does not appear disturbed by Elias’ highly controversial career or his possible exposure in the Durham investigation...https://t.co/Gb6YzAJmBo

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) October 28, 2021

After the failed S. 1 effort, the Democrats' latest effort at a federal takeover of our elections, the incorrectly named “Freedom to Vote Act, was described by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell thusly:

No amount of repackaging or relabeling will let Democrats sneak through big pieces of the sweeping, partisan, federal takeover of our nation’s elections that they have wanted to pass since they took power.

Seemingly every few weeks, Democrats take another run at this. This week’s latest ‘compromise’ is just a compromise between the left and the far left. It’s the product of Washington Democrats negotiating with each other about how much power they should grab. It contains many of the same fatal flaws as their previous attempted takeovers that have already fallen flat. . . .

We will not be letting Washington Democrats abuse their razor-thin majorities in both chambers to overrule state and local governments and appoint themselves a national Board of Elections on steroids.

On Wednesday, the Wisconsin Assembly Committee on Campaigns and Elections held a hearing to discuss recent allegations that the city of Green Bay "improperly allowed a consultant with Democratic ties to play a central role in planning for the November election." Much of the hearing focussed on a report, issued by Wisconsin Spotlight, that laid out the following allegations:

Hundreds of pages of emails and other documents obtained by Wisconsin Spotlight show that grant money from private left leaning groups, funded largely by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, resulted in Democrat activists infiltrating the November presidential election in Wisconsin’s five largest cities.