When Marylanders go to the polls on May 14 to cast their ballots in the state’s primary elections, the races in some cities could be decided by 16- and 17-year-olds. Cheverly, Maryland, as well as the nearby cities of Greenbelt, Hyattsville, Riverdale Park, and Takoma Park will all allow teens to vote. And it’s not...
Election fraud cases that grab the most headlines are almost always related to vote harvesting. Vote harvesting is the term used to describe teams of people who conduct large-scale operations to illegally obtain massive amounts of ballots for a chosen candidate. It is so common in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley that harvesters have their own...
The following commentary is published on Thursdays as part of TPPF’s subscriber-only newsletter The Post. If you would like to subscribe to The Post, click here. Texas Democrats will tell you that they lose elections not because Texas is a red state but because it’s a “non-voting” state. It’s an effective coping mechanism for a party...
Since the 2020 election, chaos and order have been the yin and yang in the battle for election integrity. One side routinely introduces electoral chaos into our fragile system, causing doubt and confusion. The other side strives to restore a bipartisan loss of confidence in the system. And in this battle between order and chaos,...
There is a reason our parents always told us to beware of strangers in vans. That even applies in elections. As children, our parents taught us to beware of strangers. We were cautioned to avoid strangers offering candy or to let you pet their puppy. But perhaps above all, we were warned never to get...
Election fraud: It’s a loaded term in our nation’s public discourse but I’ve found that even politically savvy people do not fully understand how complicated, or common it is. I was a prosecutor in the Texas Attorney General’s Election Integrity Division from 2019 to 2023. I went there shortly after the office was created, when...
The following commentary is published on Thursdays as part of TPPF’s subscriber-only newsletter The Post. If you would like to subscribe to The Post, click here. With less than two weeks until the Iowa Caucus and exactly two months (tomorrow) until the Texas primaries, election season is in full swing. America’s election system should be the...
Elections officials can learn tangible lessons from Charles Dickens’ classic novel, A Christmas Carol. As we head into the 2024 presidential election, it would be wise to learn from the Ghosts of Elections Past, Present, and Future. Ebenezer Scrooge spent years in recurring misery, making the same mistakes over and over again. His cycle of...
The bill aims to reduce the backlog of uncounted ballots, potentially speeding up the final count and enhancing transparency. The gold standard in voting is to vote in person on Election Day while showing a government-issued photo ID to prove eligibility. That said, eight states conduct elections entirely through the mail — California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon,...
Bucks County, Pennsylvania, previously fraught with concerns over its elections, just proved it is responding to the pleas of voters nationwide to further secure its ballot procedures. Since the 2020 election, the county has received complaints about late election returns, meaningful poll-watcher observation, processing absentee ballot envelopes and provisional ballots, ballot shortages, issues with e-poll...
The tumultuous nature of recent elections, particularly the 2020 presidential race, showcased the critical need for attention to election administration. In 2020, the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), along with writers at The Federalist, had their social media posts flagged, suppressed, and even censored by a government-nonprofit-industry taskforce supposedly designed to combat election “misinformation” from foreign powers....
America’s republican form of government is only possible because of the one person, one vote election process. This means that we have all agreed on the mechanics of the system, and that our votes all counted equally in determining the outcome, at least in theory. This system has been the basis of popular sovereignty in...