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Patriot Pony
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EDITOR’S NOTE—This section is reserved as an editorial and may not necessarily reflect the policy of this publication.
Trump Proven CORRECT As Supreme Court Rules Mail In Voting Due To COVID-19 Unconstitutional
DC Enquirer
By Reed Smith
Saratoga County Supreme Court Judge Dianne Freestoneruledon Friday that New York Democrats “exceeded” the state’s constitution by “violating the spirit of absentee voting.” In her 28-page decision, she reacted to a signed law from former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo which allows someone who is “concerned” about COVID-19 to vote by absentee ballot.
She says Cuomo’s 2020 legislation allows any voter to qualify for an absentee ballot, which violates the constitution. Her decision will likely take into effect before the 2022 midterm election day, which is only weeks away, but does not affect absentee ballots that have already been cast.
“But [Freestone’s] decision could lead to the overturning of a state law that blocks people from changing their mail-in votes by showing up to cast in-person ballots on Election Day,” the New York Postreports.
“This court is skeptical of such a pollyannaish notion,” Freestone said. “There is nothing before this court to suggest that the continued overreach of the Legislature into the purview of the New York state constitution shall sunset or that this authority once taken shall be returned,” she added. (Continue reading).
Wisconsin appeals court outlaws practice of spoiling absentee ballots to vote again
Elon Musk vows to review why Just the News story was censored
Few voters end up "spoiling" ballots.
By Just the News staff
A Wisconsin appeals court has upheld a lower court's ruling forbidding the practice of "ballot spoiling," requiring the state's election commission to rescind guidance it had earlier issued on the matter.
The state's 2nd District Court of Appeals on Thursday upheld a county circuit court's directive that ordered the Wisconsin Elections Commission to rescind its earlier instructions issued to voters who wished to void their submitted ballot and cast a new one.
That practice, known as "spoiling," is relatively rare in U.S. voting, though upwards of 33,000 voters in Wisconsin spoiled their ballots during the 2020 presidential election, according to the Associated Press.
That figure constituted about 1% of all votes cast in the state, which Joe Biden won in 2020 by about 0.63%.
The Wisconsin Elections Commission on Friday held an emergency meeting and voted to comply with the court's directives.
Hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin residents have already voted by absentee ballot under the state's early voting rules.
Twitter's Musk era begins with throttling of JTN report on Democrat alleging ballot harvesting in Florida. Fed-backed consortium flags "rumors" about arrest of poll worker management firm's CEO for alleged storage of data on Chinese servers.
By Greg Piper
If it's true that, as the adage has it, personnel is policy, then billionaire Elon Musk has already made an indelible mark as the new owner of Twitter by firing the top executives responsible for its strategic removal of purported misinformation and hate speech and deplatforming of high-profile users.
Whether and how quickly those censorship practices will meaningfully change is another question.
Not only do scores of prominent accounts, from the Christian satire website The Babylon Bee to former President Donald Trump, remain inaccessible to their owners or permanently suspended, but Just the News reporting continues to be throttled.
Shortly before Musk took ownership Thursday night, Twitter slapped an "unsafe" warning on a JTN report about a former Democratic candidate's sworn affidavit alleging years of illegal ballot harvesting in politically important central Florida, which prompted a state criminal probe.
The warning tells readers the "misleading" content "could lead to real-world harm." It's not inherently tied to the report's web address, but only displays as an interstitial when shared by certain accounts, including those of JTN founder John Solomon and Upward News.
It appeared on polling firm Rasmussen Reports' tweet within a minute of its posting. Twitter appears to be suppressing search results for tweets sharing the report —not even Solomon's shows up.
Twitter put the same warning on a JTN report about the legal distinctions between fully approved and emergencyuse COVID-19 vaccines last year. It also suspended Solomon for sharing that vaccine report and a subsequent report about a peer-reviewed study of COVID vaccines.
The platform has apparently taken no punitive action comparable to suspension against recent provably false claims in favor of Democrats, such as President Biden's claim that gas prices averaged more than $5 a gallon when he took office or that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis met with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas a day before Roe v. Wade was overturned. (It did add a reader note to Occupy Democrats' viral tweet about the latter.)
Monitoring and censorship of purported election "misinformation" was systematized and integrated with social media content moderation practices (Continued on page 16) "Twitter should be even-handed, favoring
neither side," Musk said.
ByMadeleine Hubbard
Twitter owner Elon Musk on Sunday said he would "look into" why a story from Just the News about election ballots was marked as "unsafe" on the social media platform.
"I will look into this. Twitter should be evenhanded, favoring neither side," Musk tweeted early Sunday morning in response to Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, who posted the Just the News article, "Election 'misinformation' policing returns as Twitter flags JTN ballot harvesting report."
"I am grateful that Elon Musk is reviewing this matter," Just the News Editor-in-Chief John Solomon said.
Shortly before Musk took over the social media outlet Thursday, Twitter flagged a tweet from Solomon about an on-the-record story detailing a Democrat whistleblower complaint that alleged a long-running, widespread ballot harvesting operation took place in Florida.
"All Just the News wrote was a straight story, quoting Florida officials announcing that they were investigating ballot harvesting allegations in the Orlando area," Solomon said. "There is no reason that this content should've been flagged as potentially harmful, and I am confident that Twitter's new owner will conclude so. A special thanks to Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton for getting Elon Musk's attention on this."
The article Musk responded to also noted how the new owner pledged to change Twitter's censorship policies after he took over last week, but Just the News' account appeared to still be throttled, or have decreased interaction compared to the number of account followers.
When Musk took over Twitter, he fired top executives responsible for censorship on the platform.
Judge allows group to monitor local ballot dropboxes in Arizona
ByBen Whedon
A federal judge on Friday declined to prohibit a local group from monitoring ballot drop boxes in Arizona.
"The Court cannot craft an injunction without violating the First Amendment," District Court Judge Michael Liburdi wrote.
He did not end the case and said he would allow the Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans to again make a case against Clean Elections USA, per Politico.
The ruling follows reports of armed and masked individuals monitoring ballot boxes in Arizona counties ahead of the midterms, the outlet noted. Ballot drop boxes have long attracted scrutiny from election integrity watchdogs over the potential for fraud.
Liburdi observed that no comments from Clean Elections USA existed to substantiate the notion that their actions presented any threat. Arizona is a constitutional carry state, which means the public carrying of fire(Continued on page 16)
(Continued from page 15)
in 2020, with the formation of the Election Integrity Partnership, a Department of Homeland Security-endorsed private consortium that claimed tech platforms took action on 35% of URLs it flagged for election misinformation. The consortium has kept a close eye on Just the News since its afteraction report on the 2020 election listed JTN among other news organizations on the 20 "most prominent domains across election integrity incidents" that were cited in flagged tweets.
JTN showed up in EIP's Oct. 28 blog post on "conspiratorial narratives" on election vulnerability disclosures. The consortium noted Solomon tweeted JTN's report on a University of Michigan computer scientist's warning about a "serious privacy flaw" in Dominion Voting Systems' machines.
"The conversation about the disclosure itself remained largely factual on the platform, though notably it spread primarily among accounts on the right who were already mistrustful of the security of Dominion voting machines," the post said.
In the consortium's Oct. 10-16 weekly report on its activities, it sought to dispel "rumors" about "potential foreign interference in elections" triggered by the arrest of poll worker management systems firm Konnech's CEO on charges related to storing data on Chinese servers.
EIP has a history of trying to knock down allegations of ballot harvesting, regardless of their factual grounding.
While acknowledging that the legality of thirdparty ballot collection and delivery varies by state, and that it can't flag harvesting narratives with "no falsifiable claims," EIP said two years ago the term "harvesting" is "increasingly disassociated with its original meaning and applied broadly to vote stealing and vote tampering allegations," usually against Democrats.
In an unsigned statement to Just the News, consortium member UW Center for an Informed Public said the EIP did not take action to encourage Twitter to flag the recent JTN story on ballot harvesting. It emphasized that "platforms are independent entities and make their own decisions about whether and how to respond" to submissions by EIP and others.
This spring UW's Center for an Informed Public aimed to knock down the related narrative of ballot "trafficking" made popular by the Dinesh D'Souza documentary "2000 Mules."
Such rhetoric, the center declared on its web site, "encompasses a potentially misleading framing of ballot collection violations and invites confusion of the ultimate impact of such violations," implying that ballots themselves are "invalid or illegal" and connecting to "terms popular in conspiracy theory communities."
In a spring presentation on the consortium's "rapid response coding schema" in anticipation of the 2022 midterm elections, a CIP researcher said they did a "small scale proof-of-concept test with the codebook" on the phrases "ballot trafficking" and "2000 Mules" on Twitter. She said they also worried about "disinformation" that makes people "fearful of becoming vaccinated."
Musk has tried to play both sides of the freespeech debate. In a statement to advertisers, some of whom reportedly threatened boycotts if Trump is reinstated, Musk said he wants to make the platform "a common digital town square where a wide range of beliefs can be debated" without becoming "a free-for-allhellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!"
Free speech advocates, including Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression CEO Greg Lukianoff, are pushing the Tesla CEO to adopt First Amendment principles in Twitter's content moderation practices.
Election integrity storm brewing in PA: Over 250k ballots sent to voters with unverified ID
Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Jeremy Tedesco, who manages its Viewpoint Diversity Score Business Index, told Just the News that Musk's actions "so far are a good indicator that he's serious about implementing change for the better."
Twitter can raise its 6% index score by "eliminating speech codes that rely on vague terms like 'misinformation' and 'hate speech,'" which functionally protect "popular ideas and powerful people," Tedesco said.
It has a history of hypocrisy by using "hateful conduct" or "misinformation" policies to "crack down on viewpoints concerning gender ideology, Covid lockdowns, and other contentious issues its employees disagree with."
Whatever limits it places on content "should be shaped with surgical precision to give users clear notice of the boundaries and prevent employees' biases from infecting their enforcement decisions," Tedesco said. His index won't "penalize or reward advertisers" based on how they respond to Twitter policy changes, however.
Arizona
(Continued from page 15)
arms is legal.
"Plaintiffs have not provided the Court with any evidence that Defendants’ conduct constitutes a true threat," Liburdi wrote. "On this record, Defendants have not made any statements threatening to commit acts of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals."
The Arizona Alliance for Retired Americans has vowed to appeal the ruling.
"We continue to believe that Clean Elections USA’s intimidation and harassment is unlawful," the group said, per Politico.
The Pennsylvania Department of State has provided conflicting guidance regarding the handling of mail ballots that do not have verified identification, state legislators wrote in a letter.
By Natalia Mittelstadt
More than 250,000 ballots have been mailed to Pennsylvania voters without their identities being verified, according to state data collected by election integrity group Verity Vote.
On Tuesday, 15 Pennsylvania state legislators sent a letter to acting Secretary of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Leigh Chapman regarding unverified ballots sent to voters. As of Thursday, state data show that more than 250,000 ballots have been mailed to voters without verifying their identification.
The legislators noted that during a state House of Representatives committee meeting in September, Deputy Secretary for Elections and Commissions Jonathan Marks testified that there is no identification requirement for voter registration in the state but that it is required for mail-in ballots.
Marks was asked by state Rep. Francis Ryan about "the large number of requests submitted to the Social Security Administration Help America Vote Verification (HAVV) system." Marks explained that the HAVV systems were being used to verify Social Security numbers for mail ballot applications.
However, the deputy secretary added that if someone submits an invalid Pennsylvania Department of Transportation ID number or if the last four digits of their Social Security number cannot be verified for a mail ballot application, then the counties must still send the ballot to the voter without the ID verification. Marks also said that "the ballot doesn't count unless the voter provides a valid form of ID."
In their letter, the legislators cited Pennsylvania Department of State guidance issued nearly two weeks after Marks' testimony that contradicted him, saying that voter identification must be verified "before sending the ballot to the applicant."
"Due to this conflicting information, conscientious election workers could unknowingly accept and count ballots for which no verification has ever occurred," the legislators wrote. According to county election officials, "a letter may be generated and mailed to" some applicants whose identification didn't match the Social Security Administration records to notify them "to produce a valid form of identification to the county board of elections," the legislators continued. But if a verified ID isn't provided, then "the county election officials report that they can and do count the ballots without the ID from the voter."
The legislators noted that "several counties report that they can and do 'fix' the invalid ID in the system and accept the ballot (with no action taken by the voter.)."
Marks also testified that there was only a "small percentage" of ballots sent without verified ID, but the legislators explained that a quarter of a million ballots "is an enormous number" that "according to the law, must be set aside and not counted for the 2022 General Election unless the voter produces ID."
The legislators asked how much "additional staffing is allocated for counties to attempt to contact and verify the identity of these quarter…(continue reading)
