Battle for the Ballot

A protester holds a Trump flag inside the US Capitol Building near the Senate Chamber on January 06, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Federal prosecutors file seditious conspiracy charges against Oath Keepers in Jan. 6 attack

BY: - January 13, 2022

WASHINGTON — Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the far-right militia group the Oath Keepers, was charged with seditious conspiracy in organizing an attack on the U.S. Capitol and disrupting the Electoral College certification of the president, the Justice Department announced Thursday.  Edward Vallejo, 63, of Phoenix is charged along with Rhodes in connection with events […]

Tennessee State Capitol (Photo: John Partipilo)

House panel to consider congressional redistricting plan — yet undone

BY: - January 4, 2022

A Republican-controlled House committee is set to approve a congressional redistricting plan next week, though the proposal is not complete. Democrats are concerned the map will split Davidson County in an effort to put more Republicans in Congress. The current 5th Congressional District contains all of Davidson and Dickson counties and part of Cheatham County. […]

"Do masks work or don't they? questioned Rep. Vincent Dixie, D-Nashville, seeking clarification from GOP Rep. Bruce Griffey. Photo: John Partipilo)Rep. Vincent Dixie, photographed in the Cordell Hull Legislative Building in March 2021. (Photo: John Partipilo)

Dixie: Special legislative session should assess West Tennessee infrastructure

BY: - October 18, 2021

Rep. Vincent Dixie, D-Nashville, spoke with a civil-rights group Monday morning  about what to expect at Gov. Bill Lee’s special session discussing the Ford Motor Company manufacturing campus headed to West Tennessee.  The Urban League of Middle Tennessee, a non-partisan civil-rights group, asked Dixie, D-Nashville, about his goals to use the deal in an effort […]

WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 11: US President Donald Trump addresses the nation from the Oval Office about the widening Coronavirus crisis on March 11, 2020 in Washington, DC. President Trump said the US will suspend all travel from Europe - except the UK - for the next 30 days. Since December 2019, Coronavirus (COVID-19) has infected more than 109,000 people and killed more than 3,800 people in 105 countries. (Photo by Doug Mills-Pool/Getty Images)

Trump’s rhetoric on election integrity unfolds in courtrooms, tweets

BY: - October 9, 2020

See you in court! It is a threat President Donald Trump and his re-election campaign have lobbed — sometimes verbatim — at states across the country this year. Last week, the campaign threatened litigation in Pennsylvania if it wasn’t allowed to observe activity inside satellite election offices — access election lawyers say would be unprecedented, […]

n this file photo Michelle Orengo-McFarlane looks for her name on a voter registration list in San Francisco, California. Some voters don't discover they've been purged from the voter rolls until they go to vote. (Photo by David Paul Morris/Getty Images)

List maintenance or voter purges: How the practice of maintaining voter lists became so polarized

BY: - October 8, 2020

In the last decade, millions of registered voters across the country have been removed from voter rolls. In 2019, Ohio removed more than 460,000 voter registration files from its list. Georgia removed 313,000 people from its rolls in October 2019 alone, and in Michigan, from 2011 to 2018, 1.2 million voters were removed from voter […]

A sign reminds voters they need photo ID to vote at polling station at Hillsboro Presbyterian Church on Election Day, Nov. 6, 2018 in Nashville. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Supreme Court ruling on Voting Rights Act opened floodgates for new restrictions

BY: - October 7, 2020

It hadn’t even been a day since the U.S. Supreme Court dismantled one of the pillars of voting rights in America, and North Carolina lawmakers weren’t wasting any time. Republican legislators had been contemplating a bill that would require photo identification to vote. The bill had plenty of support, but it had spent the past […]

(Photo: iStock/Getty Images)

Battle for the Ballot: Voting machine hacks

BY: - October 6, 2020

There is no evidence, despite partisan claims to the contrary, that mail-in ballots are rife with voting fraud — but there are parts of the election system that security researchers say are at far greater risk for malicious activity. National elections like the one in November, when Americans will decide whether Donald Trump or Joe […]

Scott Moore sued former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, over the use of a controversial program used by Kobach’s office to look for examples of voter fraud. The program produced false positives more than 99% of the time and was vulnerable to security problems. Moore is pictured outside the federal courthouse in Kansas City, Kansas, in September 2020, (Nick Krug for Kansas Reflector)

Voter fraud myth persists despite constant failure to prove claims

BY: - October 6, 2020

TOPEKA, Kansas — Scott Moore had never heard of the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck program before election officials in Kansas and Florida exposed his personal information, along with 944 other Kansas voters. The now-defunct Crosscheck was designed to help county clerks clean up registration lists by looking for voters who had moved to neighboring states. […]

(Photo by John Partipilo for the Tennessee Lookout)

‘I just don’t trust the system any more’: Voters on edge as election nears

BY: , and - October 5, 2020

WASHINGTON—Widespread anxiety and confusion around voting, compounded by the pandemic that has spread to millions of Americans, including President Donald Trump. A vastly underfunded and decentralized electoral system that could take days and possibly weeks to certify results.  Attempts to suppress voting, interfere with elections and cast doubt on the integrity of mail-in ballots — […]