Tag Archives: Voting

Not Voting: Neglecting Our Stewardship – Alex McFarland

White-House-podium

Important Takeaways:

  • Neglecting Our Stewardship: Why Many Church Leaders Are Failing To Call Christians To Vote
  • [Alex McFarland] I spoke at a large church conference some time ago where the pastor told his congregation after my message that he didn’t vote and thought it was a waste of time for anyone else to vote. But is that true? Should Christians vote in America’s 2024 election?
  • The pastor’s attitude represents a growing concern about evangelicals who refuse to exercise their responsibility to vote. When I face this issue, I look to Scripture and America’s history where I find overwhelming evidence to support the view that Christian participation in voting is vital to the future of our nation.
  • Scripture offers several passages supporting the importance of government, including our role on Election Day.
  • First, the government and its leaders are established by God. Romans 13:4 states, “For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good.” Shouldn’t we desire to help select the best leaders possible to serve in the roles that lead our communities, state and nation?
  • Second, a Christian worldview challenges us to support godly values wherever we live. When the prophet Jeremiah wrote to Jews exiled to Babylon, he instructed them to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper” (Jeremiah 29:7). The same principle remains true today to vote and support leaders who most closely align with our biblical convictions.
  • Third, voting can be viewed as a form of stewardship (Matthew 25). We are responsible for voting for candidates who will best honor God and moral values. Otherwise, we waste the opportunity given to us as believers and as Americans, leaving the decision to others who may not share our convictions.
  • Why are many Christians, including church leaders, failing to speak up to challenge American evangelicals to vote? Some believe the “system” is corrupt and that there is no hope for improvement. This is simply inaccurate.
  • The real reason many Christian leaders are silent on the issue of voting is fear. Pastor Jack Hibbs of Calvary Chapel Chino Hills in California earlier this year spoke out on behalf of California U.S. Republican Senate candidate Steve Garvey, telling his congregation God wants them to support a pro-life candidate.
  • The Freedom From Religion Foundation soon released a statement noting they “will be asking the IRS to ensure that Pastor Hibbs’ church no longer receives the benefits of 501(c)(3) status and that donations made to his church are no longer treated as tax deductible.” Why? Because Pastor Hibbs made the comments from his pulpit.
  • The views of our Founding Fathers that once united our country now increasingly result in threats of legal action. We no longer live in a culture that will easily accept a biblical worldview on many political issues. If we choose to speak out or vote for our values, we will face persecution.
  • This response should not be shunned but embraced. After all, our Savior warned us that in this world we would have trouble (John 16:33). Let us not shy away from voting for our values, but stand firm in our beliefs, calling others to join us in supporting the freedoms and values that have made our nation strong for 248 years.
  • Christians agree that our ultimate trust is in the Lord Jesus Christ. But until we get to Heaven, we must use our voice as an influence for good, including with our vote during the 2024 elections.

Read the original article by clicking here.

Efforts to replace the Electorate

Voting Station

“When once a Republic is corrupted, there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles; every other correction is either useless or a new evil.” ~ Thomas Jefferson

Important Takeaways:

  • ILLEGALS ARE ALREADY VOTING
  • By some counts, the Biden Junta has allowed more than eight million foreign nationals to enter the United States illegally. Donald Trump and others contend that Democrats are “signing them up” to vote. As legal immigrants and legitimate citizens should know, illegals have been voting for a long time in California, the model Democrats now seek for the entire country.
  • In 1996, illegals cast 784 votes against Republican Robert Dornan in a congressional race Democrat Loretta Sanchez won by only 984 votes. Spearheading the voter fraud was the Stalinist Bert Corona, founder of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional. He failed to comply with a subpoena and the Justice Department declined to take any action. For the vote fraudsters it was more steps forward with no steps back.
  • In 2013 the state passed Assembly Bill 60 the “Safe and Responsible Drivers Act,” which enabled false-documented foreign nationals to get driver’s licenses. In 2015 California passed Assembly Bill 1461, the “California New Motor Voter Act” which automatically registered the illegals to vote. “At the latest, for the 2018 election cycle,” Secretary of State Alex Padilla told the Los Angeles Times, “I expect millions of new voters on the rolls in the state of California.”
  • By March, 2018, the DMV had given licenses to more than one million illegals. Padilla wouldn’t say how many of the illegals actually voted in 2018, but his previous reference to “millions” provides a ballpark figure.
  • For years Pew Research pegged the number of illegals in the United States at 11 million, but according to a 2021 study by scholars at MIT and Yale, the true figure is more than 22 million.

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David Beauchamp’s Biblical Perspective on Voting

Romans 13:1 says, “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.”

Important Takeaways:

  • Is Voting Biblical?
  • What does the Bible say? Romans 13:1 says, “Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.”
  • As a citizen of the United States, “we the people” are the authority.
  • Actually… yes! I believe that based on Romans 13:1, the authority for the people to have authority, by voting, is established by God. Paul states in verse 2, “whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted.” I have concluded that I believe God wants me to vote.

Read the original article by clicking here.

Medical official: air strike kills at least 43 in Ethiopia’s Tigray

By Katharine Houreld

ADDIS ABABA (Reuters) -An air strike killed at least 43 people in the town of Togoga in Ethiopia’s Tigray region on Tuesday, a medical official told Reuters, after residents said new fighting had flared in recent days north of the regional capital Mekelle.

Ethiopian military spokesman Colonel Getnet Adane did not confirm or deny the incident. He said air strikes were a common military tactic and that government forces do not target civilians.

The bomb hit a market at around 1 p.m., according to a woman who said her husband and 2-year-old daughter had been injured.

“We didn’t see the plane, but we heard it,” she told Reuters on Wednesday. “When the explosion happened, everyone ran out. After a time we came back and were trying to pick up the injured.”

The woman said the market had been full of families, and she did not see any armed forces in the area. “Many, many” people had been killed, she said.

Reuters could not independently verify her account. She and other sources asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals.

The medical official confirmed at least 43 fatalities, citing witnesses and first responders.

A spokesperson for Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed and the head of a government task force on Tigray did not respond to requests for comment on the incident.

A senior United Nations official said on Wednesday that he was “disturbed by reports of bombing yesterday that killed and wounded civilians in a market in Togoga, Tigray.”

“All parties to the conflict must respect their obligations under international humanitarian law,” said Ramesh Rajasingham, the U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs.

“I call on the Ethiopian authorities to carry out a prompt and effective investigation into this attack,” he added.

News of the airstrike came as Ethiopian officials counted ballots from national and regional parliamentary elections held this week in seven of the nation’s 10 regions.

No voting was held in Tigray, where the military has been battling forces loyal to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), the region’s former ruling party, since November. Security concerns and problems with ballot papers also delayed voting in two other regions.

Residents reported that TPLF forces had entered several towns north of Mekelle in the past three days, withdrawing from one of them within hours.

AMBULANCES BLOCKED

The official and two other health workers helping with the response in Togoga told Reuters on Wednesday that Ethiopian soldiers were blocking the main road from Mekelle to the town and preventing ambulances from reaching the scene.

“Patients are dying right now,” said the official.

He said two ambulances had been able to reach the town via a back road late on Tuesday but did not have the necessary equipment and were not being allowed to leave.

He said the teams had counted at least 40 dead at the scene, three people had died overnight, and there were 44 critically wounded patients needing treatment.

Another medical worker said around 20 health workers in six ambulances had tried to reach the wounded on Tuesday but soldiers stopped them at a checkpoint.

“They told us we couldn’t go to Togoga. We stayed more than one hour at the checkpoint trying to negotiate. We had a letter from the health bureau – we showed them. But they said it was an order.”

Military spokesman Getnet denied that the military was blocking ambulances.

(Additional reporting by Ayenat Mersie and Giulia ParaviciniEditing by Toby Chopra, Peter Graff, Catherine Evans and Jonathan Oatis)

Americans want voting to be easier, also worry about election fraud

By Chris Kahn

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Americans want to make it easier to vote but most adults also favor strict voter identification laws and remain concerned about election fraud, Reuters/Ipsos polling shows.

The latest poll, conducted June 11-17, shows that both Democrats and Republicans can claim some degree of popular support as they debate sweeping changes to the way elections are held.

Republican-controlled state legislatures have rolled out a series of voting restrictions this year, including limits on early voting hours and tougher ID requirements. Republicans say their efforts are focused on preventing election fraud.

Democrats, meanwhile, are hoping to counter that with federal protections that would guarantee a minimum number of early voting days, automatic voter registration, and less restrictive voter identification requirements, for example.

The U.S. Senate is expected to vote on a Democrat-backed election reform bill on Tuesday.

The June poll found that 59% of adults, including a majority of Democrats and Republicans alike, oppose election laws that would cut back on early voting.

States that automatically send voters ballots by mail are also relatively popular: 46% of Americans said they approve of them, while 37% are in opposition. The responses were divided along party lines, however, with 70% of Democrats in support of automatic mail-in ballots and 64% of Republicans in opposition.

The poll also showed Americans largely back some restrictions that Republicans have said would protect the integrity of future elections: 72% said they support requirements that prohibit voting without government identification, including 62% of Democrats and 88% of Republicans.

And 55% of Americans support measures that require local election officials to obtain approval from the state legislature before they could set their own voting plans, while 21% were in opposition.

Americans expressed similar opinions last month. A Reuters/Ipsos survey from May showed that 75% adults felt it was “very” or “somewhat” important that “the government place new limits on voting to protect elections from fraud.” At the same time, 82% wanted the government to “make it easier for people to vote”.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online, in English, throughout the United States. It gathered responses from 4,420 adults, including 2,015 Democrats and 1,583 Republicans. It has a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of about 3 percentage points.

(Reporting by Chris Kahn; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Georgia state lawmakers approve new restrictions on voting

By Rich McKay

ATLANTA (Reuters) – Georgia’s Republican-led House of Representatives passed a sweeping elections bill on Thursday that would impose new restrictions on voting in the state that helped Democrats win the White House and narrow control of the U.S. Senate.

Republicans say the measure, approved in a 100-75 vote, would make voting more secure. Democrats and voting rights activists decry it as among the most damaging attempts to limiting access to the ballot box in the country.

The 94-page bill would add a new ID requirement for absentee ballots; limit ballot drop boxes, including eliminating them on the last four days of an election; and make it a misdemeanor crime to give food or drinks to voters waiting in long lines.

It also would also set up a fraud hotline, forbid local county elections offices from taking any breaks while counting ballots and shorten the runoff election cycle from nine weeks to four weeks.

Early versions of the bill sought to limit Sunday voting, a provision that would have curtailed traditional “Souls to the Polls” voter turnout programs popular in Black churches. Those days were restored after Democrats pushed back, and additional Saturday voting days also were included.

The bill must now be reconciled with a similar measure in the state Senate before it goes before Republican Governor Brian Kemp for his consideration.

(Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta; Editing by Colleen Jenkins, Jonathan Oatis and Bill Berkrot)

Former felons among battleground Florida voters for the first time

By Simon Lewis

ST. PETERSBURG, Florida (Reuters) – Shikila Calder, 32, thought about voting early this year, but decided to save her vote – the first of her life – for Election Day on Tuesday.

“It made it special. It was exhilarating,” said Calder, one of potentially thousands of people with past felony convictions voting in a general election for the first time this year, after their rights were restored in a 2018 referendum.

Under Florida law, Calder had been denied the right to vote owning to a conviction for which she served time and repaid her debt to society a decade ago, she said after voting at a community center in the city of St. Petersburg.

“I have my voice back,” she said, a beaming smile visible in spite of her face mask. “I’m welcomed back into my community as a person and I don’t have that big label on me as a bad person.”

An amendment to Florida’s constitution was to restore voting rights to an estimated 1.4 million felons in the battleground state, ahead of the crucial election between Republican President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

But far fewer former felons were voting on Tuesday after the Republican-led Florida Senate passed a law last year requiring that only those who had paid all legal fines, fees and restitution associated with their convictions could register to vote.

The law was challenged by voting rights groups, which argued the law disproportionately impacted African Americans, who are more likely than whites to have felony convictions and more likely to owe financial obligations.

The U.S. Supreme Court rebuffed the challenge in July, leaving the law in place.

Donors, including NBA star LeBron James and billionaire Michael Bloomberg, have been helping to pay off former felons’ fines so they could vote, but it is unclear how many were able to register ahead of Tuesday’s election.

The Florida Rights Restoration Council, a campaign group that fought for the constitutional amendment, was expected to release an estimate of how many were able to vote.

Calder, who is black, said she has paid all obligations related to her sentence.

She said she voted for Biden because she trusted former President Barack Obama’s vice president to improve education and tackle racism in America.

Since serving prison time, Calder has trained as a phlebotomist and works at a St. Petersburg hospital.

“I don’t regret my past because it made me who I am today,” she said.

(Reporting by Simon Lewis; Editing by Dan Grebler)

Trump orders voting districts to exclude people in U.S. illegally

By Alexandra Alper and Nick Brown

WASHINGTON/NEW YORK (Reuters) – President Donald Trump signed a memorandum on Tuesday that would prevent migrants who are in the United States illegally from being counted when U.S. congressional voting districts are redrawn in the next round of redistricting.

U.S. Census experts and lawyers say the action is legally dubious. In theory, it would benefit Trump’s Republican Party by eliminating the largely non-white population of migrants in the U.S. illegally, creating voting districts that skew more Caucasian.

“Including these illegal aliens in the population of the State for the purpose of apportionment could result in the allocation of two or three more congressional seats than would otherwise be allocated,” the memo said.

Responses from Democrats and immigration advocates were swift and condemnatory.

Dale Ho, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, vowed litigation.

“We’ll see (Trump) in court, and win,” he said in a statement.

Tom Perez, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, derided what he viewed as an “unconstitutional order that has no purpose other than to silence and dis-empower Latino voices and communities of color.”

Proponents of citizens-only voting districts argue each vote should carry the same weight. If one district has far fewer eligible voters than another, they say, each vote there has more influence on election outcomes.

But the move carries major legal questions.

While the U.S. Supreme Court has left the door open for citizen-based voting maps for state legislatures, experts see it as a long-shot at the federal level, because the U.S. Constitution explicitly says that congressional districts must be based on “the whole number of persons” in each district.

In the memo, Trump said the word “persons” “has never been understood to include … every individual physically present within a state’s boundaries.”

Census experts say that is wrong: multiple federal laws have reinforced that apportionment must include everyone, and U.S. Supreme Court precedent has endorsed that view, said Joshua Geltzer, a constitutional law expert and professor at Georgetown Law.

“All of this makes Trump’s position outrageous,” Geltzer said.

(Reporting by Alexandra Alper in Washington and Nick Brown in New York; Additional reporting by Richard Cowan in Washington, Mica Rosenberg in New York and Mimi Dwyer and Kristina Cooke in Los Angeles; Editing by Nick Zieminski and Matthew Lewis)

Amid coronavirus, reduced voting sites in Kentucky, elsewhere a ‘recipe for disaster’

By John Whitesides

(Reuters) – Kentucky, New York and four other states face another possibly messy day of voting on Tuesday amid the coronavirus outbreak, as officials try to balance a crush of absentee mail ballots with a reduced number of in-person polling locations.

That combination has led to long lines, delays and confusion during primaries in other states, including Wisconsin and Georgia, offering a preview of possible problems if the Nov. 3 general election is conducted under the threat of COVID-19 infections.

Kentucky and New York, which are conducting statewide primaries, encouraged mail-in balloting as a safe alternative to in-person voting during the pandemic, resulting in record numbers of absentee ballot requests. Both also encouraged early voting, while cutting back on polling locations as a safety precaution.

But officials and activists are concerned about the potential for trouble in Kentucky, where polling locations statewide were cut to fewer than 200 from more than 3,000 normally, leaving one each for the biggest counties of Jefferson and Fayette.

“It’s just a recipe for disaster. I fear there will be a lot of people who want to vote but won’t,” said Jason Nemes, a Republican state legislator who joined an unsuccessful lawsuit trying to force the largest counties to open more polls.

A competitive Democratic U.S. Senate nominating battle between progressive Charles Booker and establishment choice Amy McGrath has driven up voter interest in Kentucky. They are vying to take on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in November.

Nearly 900,000 absentee ballots were issued, or about 27% of registered voters, the Kentucky secretary of state’s office said.

Fayette County Clerk Don Blevin said Kentucky officials pushed mail-in voting in hopes of keeping the numbers down at polling places.

“We have warned people from day one – please don’t do this. It’s not safe,” Blevin, a Democrat, said of voting in person on election day.

New York has seen a similar explosion of interest in absentee ballots, issuing nearly 1.9 million, the board of elections said. In the 2016 primary, about 115,000 absentee ballots were cast.

The board did not provide the number of polling places closed across the state, but activists said consolidations had not been as widespread as in Kentucky and some other states.

There are also primary elections for some congressional, state and local offices in areas of South Carolina, Mississippi, North Carolina and Virginia.

(Reporting by John Whitesides; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Peter Cooney)

Georgia’s election mess offers a stark warning for November

By John Whitesides and Jason Lange

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Georgia’s tumultuous primary elections on Tuesday offer a grim preview of what could happen in November if states move to voting by mail and polling places are sharply reduced due to concerns about the coronavirus pandemic.

A huge increase in absentee ballots overwhelmed officials and many voters did not receive requested ballots. That forced some to crowd into consolidated polling places on election day, exacerbating the hours-long waits for those voting in person.

Unless states expand early in-person voting and make more polling places available, the chaos that plagued Georgia’s voting could become the norm in the Nov. 3 general election, Democrats and voting rights groups warn.

The problems, which also included issues with voting machines rolled out for the first time on Tuesday, were particularly prevalent in minority neighborhoods in Democratic strongholds of Fulton County and DeKalb County in metropolitan Atlanta. That has raised fears among Democrats and voting rights groups that tens of thousands of voters, especially African Americans, could be disenfranchised.

Tuesday’s contests were relatively low-stakes primary elections, featuring nominating battles including the White House race where President Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden have already secured their parties’ nominations.

But Georgia, a long-time Republican bastion, has emerged as a vital political battleground in November. Biden is hoping a strong African-American turnout can make him competitive with Trump in Georgia, and two U.S. Senate seats are in play that could be crucial to control of the chamber.

“We have to address these problems now,” said Helen Butler, executive director of the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, a voting rights group. “If we don’t, we’ll be right back in the same place in November.”

The meltdown in Georgia was the latest example of voting problems amid the coronavirus pandemic. Voters in South Carolina and Nevada also encountered long lines on Tuesday.

As in some other states, the final results in some Georgia races were delayed as officials tallied up a record volume of mail ballots. About 1 million voted by mail, roughly 30 times the 37,000 votes cast by mail in the 2016 primary elections.

In Pennsylvania, votes were still being counted on Wednesday a week after its June 2 primary. The state has not reported results for four of more than 9,000 voting districts, according to its election results website.

The delayed results in battleground states such as Pennsylvania and Georgia have raised the prospect that November’s winner may not be known on election night.

Counting mail ballots is often slower because a voter’s identity must first be validated, a process handled in a polling center for ballots cast in person, said Richard Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine.

UNPREPARED

Georgia had pushed back it’s voting from March and mailed absentee ballot requests to 6.9 million active voters in response to the coronavirus outbreak. Along with the 1 million Georgians who cast absentee ballots by mail, more than 300,000 voted early.

But Tuesday’s problems suggest officials were unprepared for large numbers also voting in person on election day, particularly in counties with large black populations in and around Atlanta, where dozens of polling stations closed due to COVID-19 concerns.

Fulton, which includes most of Atlanta and is 45% black, was operating only 164 of its planned 198 polling locations. In DeKalb County, which includes part of Atlanta, 27 polling stations in 191 voting precincts were moved because of worries over the novel virus, said county executive Mike Thurmond, a Democrat.

Despite expanded voting by mail, voters of color have been slow to embrace it. A statewide study in May by a University of Florida professor showed Hispanic voters requested absentee ballots at a rate about three times lower than white voters, while black voters requested them at about half the rate of white voters.

“They need to come up with a plan for high voter turnout in person,” said Susannah Scott, the president of the League of Women Voters of Georgia.

In Georgia, difficulties with new voting machines slowed the process further. Many workers were not adequately trained on the new equipment, while some polling locations struggled to start the machines or did not receive the equipment in time to start, officials said.

Fulton County’s top election official, Richard Barron, said Tuesday was a “learning experience” and officials would try to improve poll worker training and the absentee ballot process for November.

Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who called for probes into the problems in Fulton and DeKalb counties, blamed county officials who did not adequately train workers.

Raffensperger told Reuters he would take a “hard look” at whether to send absentee ballot applications to all active voters for November, as he did for the primary.

“We did that because of the situation with COVID-19, and we don’t know where we will be in November,” he said.

(Reporting by John Whitesides and Jason Lange; Editing by Soyoung Kim and Stephen Coates)