Free Republic

When Ugandans went to the polls last Thursday in presidential and parliamentary elections, they participated in the most heavily-contested political battle since multiparty democracy began in 2005. But they also discovered that their access to social media and mobile payment services had been cut off, part of a three-day ban by the government that limited political discussion and temporarily halted financial transactions across the country. When the dust had cleared, incumbent, 30-year president Gen. Y.K. Museveni had been re-elected for another five-year term along with his National Resistance Movement (NRM) party, the leader of the largest opposition party was under...

Our federal government is once again pushing the Constitution aside and using federal agencies to manufacture laws against the will of the American People. Our President-in conjunction with the Justice Department-is attempting to give illegal aliens the right to vote. It is a proven fact that over 1.4 million non-citizens were allowed to vote in the 2008 elections. Of those who voted in 2008, over 80% voted for Democrats, thanks to promises of free, taxpayer funded benefits being given away by the federal government. The non-citizen vote may well have delivered North Carolina to Obama in 2012. If this is...

Russell Kirk was a great American thinker of the last century - and giant of conservative thought. He was a student of the Founding Fathers, but also of their fathers, and of their mentors' mentors. He knew Edmund Burke's philosophy cold, and history's big lessons all the way back to Plato. Kirk hated "ruinous taxation," like Lecky, who wrote "Democracy and Liberty." Kirk hated "corrupt Washington," as Henry James, who wrote "Democracy." Kirk loved individual liberty and was a scholar of our Constitution's roots, including its "natural law" origins. Kirk was effectively the Father, or wise man, of modern conservatism....

A video posted on YouTube by James Porter purports to show Hillary Clinton voters bypassing the registration area to cast ballots in the Nevada caucus Saturday."They're letting them into the caucus right now without registering them," a woman can be heard yelling as a steady line of people stream by. "They're going to do the count. They're all going to be part of the count," anther woman can be heard saying in reply. "But they're not registered," a man says.

Our nation’s impending illiteracy and apathy, were the principal causes for electing the likes of a Barack Obama to the presidency of the nation as well allowing for a Hillary Clinton or a Bernie Sanders to contend for the presidency If you are like me, a political enthusiast of sorts, you probably have not missed any of the political debates that have taken place in the last few weeks, just as you might have followed the overwhelming blitzkrieg of national polls with last-minute details on how candidates are doing in their presidential races. By now, I am almost sure, you...

This year's presidential primary is the first in which New Hampshire's voters will be required to show identification before they can cast their ballots ... When New Hampshire voters go to the polls Tuesday for the first presidential primary of the 2016 race, they will have to do something new. This year's presidential primary is the first in which the state's voters will be required to show identification before they can cast their ballots. Before the state's new voter ID law went into effect in 2013, voters could just give their name and address, get checked off the roll, and...

In her 1957 masterpiece, Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand introduced us to a powerful concept which she called “the sanction of the victim.” This concept is defined as “the willingness of the good to suffer at the hands of the evil, to accept the role of sacrificial victim for the ‘sin‘ of creating values.” As Rand explains through the character of her hero, John Galt, “Evil is impotent and has no power but that which we let it extort from us,” and, “I saw that evil was impotent…and the only weapon of its triumph was the willingness of the good to...

Iowa's Secretary of State says a recent mailer from Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz's campaign "misrepresents Iowa election law." The mailer bills itself as a "voting violation" and tells the recipient it's been sent due to "low expected voter turnout in your area." It then grades the recipient's voting history and that of several neighbors, citing public records. Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate says in a statement that there's "no such thing as an election violation related to frequency of voting" and insinuating otherwise is "not in keeping in the spirit of the Iowa Caucuses." The bottom of...

First, kill the Iowa caucuses. Please note: I didn't say, "Kill the Iowans." I like Iowans and I like Iowa. But we need to get Iowa's boot off our neck. That may be misunderstood, as well. You see, we're not under the heel of all Iowans. If we were, that'd actually be better because that would mean lots of Iowans turned out to vote. But most don't. As Jeff Greenfield recently noted in Politico, rumors of Iowa's commitment to democratic engagement are wildly overstated. In 2008, a record-shattering 350,000 caucus-goers caucus-went. All the buzz was about the precedent-shattering turnout for...

On Tuesday, Gov. Rick Snyder signed into law Senate Bill 13, which eliminates the option on election ballots to vote a straight party ticket with a single action. Michigan voters who want to vote a straight-party ticket can still do so, but will have to mark their votes for each candidate one at a time. Some evidence suggests that Democratic voters use the straight-party voting option more than Republican voters do. Republicans in Michigan have tended to support eliminating it, while Democrats have been united behind keeping it in place. This marks the third time the Michigan Legislature has voted...

Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade...

Progress comes at the ballot box - and nothing changes the ballot box more than drastic changes in national demography. ... Democracy Works, a New York 501C3 is perhaps the epitome of this trend: its first product, TurboVote, focuses directly on the voter and removes barriers to their actual participation in elections by using software to automate sending a filled out envelope with completed voting forms and text messaging for reminders to ensure voters complete needed tasks at the deadline, and Ballot Scout, their second, is software that local election officials integrate into their systems to better track mailed in...

Massive database exposed to public, major political data managers deny ownershipA misconfigured database has led to the disclosure of 191 million voter records. The database, discovered by researcher Chris Vickery, doesn't seem to have an owner; it's just sitting in the public – waiting to be discovered by anyone who happens to be looking. What's in the database? The database was discovered by researcher Chris Vickery, who shared his findings with Databreaches.net. The two attempted to locate the owner of the database based on the records it housed and other details. However, their attempts didn't pan out, so they came...

A couple of weeks ago, before a "moderate Muslim" couple lit up San Bernardino, a duo, by the way, that BHO's boys "vetted" to immigrate into the US, I read a column telling Christians not to vote for Trump should he win the GOP ticket because he didn't pass the "Word of God" litmus test. The Christian writer said evangelicals shouldn't support The Donald primarily because Trump mocked the disabled NYT reporter Serge Kovaleski. That, for said writer, was a holy deal breaker. He also pointed out that Trump was cocky, cheeky and braggadocious and that, my dear brethren, was...

The case, Evenwel v. Abbott, No. 14-940, will address a question many thought had been settled long ago: What is the meaning of the principle of “one person, one vote”? The principle, rooted in cases from the 1960s that revolutionized democratic representation in the United States, applies to the entire American political system aside from the Senate, where voters from states with small populations have vastly more voting power than those with large ones. Everywhere else, voting districts must have very close to the same populations. But the Supreme Court has never definitively ruled on who must be counted: all...

In a major step towards global centralization of election processes, the world's dominant Internet voting company has purchased the USA's dominant election results reporting company. When you view your local or state election results on the Internet, on portals which often appear to be owned by the county elections division, in over 525 US jurisdictions you are actually redirected to a private corporate site controlled by SOE software, which operates under the name ClarityElections.com. The good news is that this firm promptly reports precinct-level detail in downloadable spreadsheet format. As reported by BlackBoxVoting.org in 2008, the bad news is that...

A civil rights group in Alabama targeted the state's voter identification law in a federal lawsuit filed on Wednesday, saying the requirement that a photo ID be shown at the polls in order to vote discriminated against minorities. The lawsuit, filed by the Alabama State Conference of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Greater Birmingham Ministries, asked for a permanent injunction to stop the law, which took effect last year.

"It's a great day to be a Republican in California!" I thought to myself when my colleagues elected me to be the next Beach Cities Republicans Club President, a growing grassroots organization in an otherwise deep blue state, which has witnessed and assisted remarkable Republican gains. I was following a long-list of who's who in the South Bay. The prior president, David Hadley, won the state assembly seat for my district, the first Republican in over two decades. Another fiscal conservative Republican won a seat in the East Bay, the first in over thirty years. Los Angeles County will enjoy...

I understand the tremendous popularity of Donald Trump in America in 2015. He is a larger than life reality TV star; he is incredibly rich and not beholden to anyone; he is fearless and speaks his mind; he articulates the frustrations and anger of millions of his countrymen; he gives the impression that he can fix our economy and will put an end to illegal immigration; he is not a Washington insider; he could be a strong leader who could face down our global enemies; he can even be winsome and self-effacing at times. Yes, I do understand all this...

The Last Refuge blog (also known as The Conservative Treehouse) has done yeoman's work exposing the GOP establishment's plot to jam Jeb Bush down the collective throats of the electorate. Despite Bush's single-digit poll numbers, the GOPe remains fixated on a Bush candidacy (and, by extension, a Hillary presidency, since Bush has zero chance of winning a general election). Most recently, Virginia's old guard has proffered a laughably obvious ploy to deter independent, Tea Party, Reagan Democrat, and Constitutional Conservatives who have abandoned the Republican establishment from voting in the GOP primary....