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Arizona Secretary of State and current candidate for governor Katie Hobbs (D) charged that “efforts by right-wing extremists to observe ballot drop boxes is a fundamental invasion of a voter’s right to cast a ballot in total secrecy. The reason why we place our drop boxes in unsupervised public locations is meant to ensure a secret ballot. We don’t monitor these boxes in-person or by video cameras as part of our responsibility to ensure that no one has the right to observe another person voting.” Hobbs’ opponent in the governor’s race, former TV news anchor Keri Lake (R), challenged Hobbs’...

Citing freedom of speech, U.S. District Court Judge James Browning issued a ruling barring New Mexico from prosecuting the Voter Reference Foundation (VoteRef.com) for publishing a searchable database of voter registration records. The database includes names, addresses, and when people voted in past elections. "These are public records," Browning said. "There is no valid reason for concealing them from the public." Foundation director Doug Truax said "our database is an aid to ensuring election integrity. Voter rolls in many states are replete with duplicate registrations for the same person and addresses that turn out to be empty lots. Election officials...

There is also talk that Republican senators may choose a secret ballot so their voting base will not know how each member voted. If they do that the party is over. It’s already floundering after House leaders Kevin McCarthy and Liz Cheney blamed President Trump for the violence in the US Capitol on January 6th.

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Germany's Ursula von der Leyen has been elected as the European Commission's first female president. Her nomination was approved by 383 votes in a secret ballot on Tuesday evening at the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France. There were 327 votes against her and 22 abstentions. After being elected by a narrow margin of just nine votes over the required 374, von der Leyen called for a "united and strong Europe." The 60-year-old outgoing German defense minister and multilingual mother of seven will succeed Jean-Claude Juncker, who has served as president since 2014.

"We have to make sure that, we can not just count the ballots but verify every name and signature!"

The St. Louis County Republican Caucus was held today at the Missouri River Township Caucus at the Westminster Christian Academy – near highways 40 and 270 this afternoon. Lloyd Sloan was at the conference today. Here is his firsthand account: There were two slates that were voted on today at the convention. One was called “Cruz” and the other “Trump.” So there was no confusion there. The vote took place by a public count. It’s when there is a standing vote and everybody is counted off. It is pretty above board. The vote was tied, 27-27. But a few people...

Mary Katharine already covered the first part of this exchange and noted the second, but it’s worth revisiting for Mitch McConnell’s brief rebuttal. The Republican incumbent scoffs at Alison Grimes’ invocation of a sacred right to avoid answering an obvious question, and demonstrates it by announcing he “proudly” voted against Barack Obama in the last two presidential elections: Mitch McConnell Proudly Voted For Mitt Romney There’s also no sacred right to not announce how we vote. I voted for Mitt Romney, proudly. I voted for John McCain. And by the way, 116 out of 120 Kentucky counties agreed with my...

Labor: Union bosses have contended for some time that a secret ballot isn't needed to unionize a workplace. All that's needed, they said, was employees' signatures on cards. But Chattanooga proved them wrong. For months the United Auto Workers have said a majority of workers at the Volkswagen plant in Tennessee had signed cards expressing their interest in unionizing. Why bother with a secret ballot when the workers had already spoken through the "card check" approval process? Before a much-anticipated and widely followed union-representation vote held last week, the AP reported that Gary Casteel, Tennessee-based regional director for the UAW,...

Euro MPs prompted uproar last night by plotting to try to block the budget deal using a secret ballot so voters cannot hold them to account. It emerged that they are planning to use a little-understood procedure to allow them to vote in private and defy the 27 EU leaders. Martin Schulz, president of the European Parliament and former leader of its socialist group, suggested a vote on the budget should be conducted in secret to allow MEPs to break away from prime ministers and party leaders and maximize the chances of it being rejected. A vote behind closed doors...

Virginia is moving towards making card-check—the controversial union proposal to replace secret-ballot elections with simple card-signing petitions—unconstitutional in the state. The effort is led by State Sen. Bryce Reeves (R-Spotsylvania) who said that “no citizen” should be denied the ability to vote by secret ballot. …

Saying there is no fundamental right to a secret ballot, a federal judge Friday dismissed a lawsuit filed by elections integrity activists that challenged whether counties can print ballots with identifying numbers that critics say can be traced back to individual voters easily. ... [Judge] Arguello said activists had not shown the plaintiffs had suffered or would suffer any specific injury that could be remedied by a federal court. She said that even if a ballot could be traced back to a specific voter, it doesn't show that a person's voting rights were violated, saying there was no "fundamental right"...

Phoenix—In a strong rebuke to the Obama Administration Wednesday, federal district court Judge Frederick J. Martone ruled that the Secret Ballot Amendment, which protects workers’ right to secret ballot in union-organizing elections, is constitutional. Drafted by the Goldwater Institute in 2009, the Save Our Secret Ballot amendment was added in 2010 to state constitutions in Arizona, South Dakota, South Carolina, and Utah, by voter majorities ranging from 60 to 86 percent. The constitutional amendment was sought after President Obama and congressional Democrats attempted to end the use of secret ballots in union-organizing elections and force workers into a system called...

Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed a bill Tuesday that would have made it far easier for farmworkers to join labor unions, 36 years after making history in his first term by signing a law giving the low-wage employees the right to organize. Brown's veto disappointed and angered dozens of farmworkers who had camped outside his office late into the night Tuesday to try to pressure him into signing the measure. Democratic lawmakers joined supporters in the hallway as they awaited his decision, which came at 11 p.m. in the form of a press release to reporters. The governor refused to come...

Labor unions can't persuade Congress to destroy workplace voting rights, but their Obama-appointed lackeys at the National Labor Relations Board do their dirty work anyway. Twice in the past six weeks, the NLRB has sided with union bosses over ordinary workers, smothering the ideal of secret elections. On Friday, the NLRB threatened to sue four states whose voters recently passed referendums guaranteeing the right to secret-ballot elections for union organizing. The NLRB says the new laws in Arizona, South Carolina, South Dakota and Utah would deny unions a second method of organizing allowed by federal law, namely by showing "majority...

The National Labor Relations Board announced on Friday that it planned to sue Arizona, South Carolina, South Dakota and Utah in an effort to invalidate recently approved state constitutional amendments that prohibit private sector workers from choosing a union through a process known as card check. The labor board asserts that the amendments conflict with federal laws and are pre-empted by those laws. The state amendments were promoted by various conservative groups concerned that Congressional Democrats and President Obama would enact legislation allowing unions to insist on using card check, in which an employer recognizes a union as soon as...

Having failed to pass the legislation they want, union bosses turn to the executive branch.After spending over a billion dollars to elect Barack Obama president and Democratic majorities to Congress in 2008, Big Labor thought it had bought enough support to ram through a “card check” bill that effectively eliminates secret-ballot votes for unionization and lets federal bureaucrats dictate contracts to employees and employers. But despite an intense, union-boss-backed lobbying campaign, attempts to pass card check stalled as elected officials felt the heat from voters, who are overwhelmingly against the bill. With a vote on the legislation unlikely between now...

Unions: Republican senators have warned the president not to appoint Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board while Congress is in recess. But he will — and American workers and consumers will be worse off for it. There's good reason to oppose Becker sitting on the NLRB, the five-member federal agency that administers the National Labor Relations Act governing relations between unions and private-sector employers. It's not so much because Becker is a lawyer for the AFL-CIO and the Service Employees International Union and would be the first NLRB member to come straight from the legal staff of organized...

Labor Policy: And you thought card check legislation was dead? That certainly appeared to be the case last spring. But now there's talk of attaching it to a jobs bill. Dirty politics and lousy policy. Card check, known last year as the Employee Free Choice Act, is an attempt to fundamentally change the way unions organize. Under a card check law, a union would be certified if a simple majority of workers signed the cards that were used to gauge their interest in unionization. A follow-up vote through a secret ballot, the traditional method of certifying a union, would not...

Still looming on the legislative horizon is something deceptively called the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA, H.R. 800), the provisions of which will make it easier for union organizers to impose union representation on a group of workers by circumventing the current secret ballot method of deciding for or against union representation with an odious mechanism called “card check.” Secret ballot voting has been a feature in US elections for more than two centuries, and that includes union elections. However, if the EFCA were to become law, the federal government will have tilted the playing field toward labor unions by...