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An Arizona judge upheld an injunction on Wednesday prohibiting enforcement of provisions in the state’s election guidance that her court found “restricted free speech.”

Writing for the Maricopa County Superior Court of Arizona, Judge Jennifer Ryan-Touhill denied a request by Democrat Secretary of State Adrian Fontes to place a stay pending appeal on the court’s recent injunction barring election officials from implementing parts of the 2023 Election Procedures Manual (EPM). In Arizona, the EPM is crafted by the secretary of state and provides guidance to election officials relating to mail ballots, voter registration, and other election-related matters.

In her initial ruling, Ryan-Touhill determined the provisions governing Arizonans’ conduct at polling locations went “too far” by attempting to police the behavior of both election officials and the public. She ruled that they constitute “speech restrictions in violation of our Arizona Constitution,” and noted that the EPM “misstates or modifies [state] statutes, and fails to identify any distinction between guidance and legal mandates.”

The court deemed the aforementioned rules “unenforceable,” prompting Fontes’ office to pledge to appeal the decision. Fontes filed a motion on Aug. 14 asking the court to place a stay on its decision while litigation on the matter continued.

Rejecting the motion, Ryan-Touhill noted Wednesday that while the court “understands Defendants’ position that the disputed section is intended to be ‘guidance’ for election officials,” it “simply disagreed with Defendants’ position and found the disputed section was not guidance, but, instead, an overreach by the Secretary of State that restricted free speech.”

“To reiterate, while Defendants claim confusion exists over the Court’s Ruling because Defendants believe they have issued advisory assistance to poll workers, the Court finds this without merit and reminds Defendants all citizens must follow the law,” Ryan-Touhill wrote. “It is not this Court’s duty to parcel through the EPM to analyze every phrase that does or does not comply with hypotheticals propounded by Defendants. The Court is instead tasked with the duty of analyzing the law and facts provided; that is what this Court did.”

The Arizona judge further noted that the court was “not persuaded” by Fontes’ arguments that plaintiffs’ concerns about free speech violations “ring[] hollow.”

“The Court reiterates its prior finding: ‘[I]t is always in the public interest to prevent the violation of a party’s constitutional rights,” she added.

According to local media, Fontes “still retains the opportunity to argue, at a full-blown trial, that the [EPM’s speech] restrictions are both constitutional and necessary.” Such a scenario would reportedly not occur until after the November election, meaning the prohibition on the disputed guidance will remain in effect for those contests.

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This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

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The Republican National Committee this week filed election-related lawsuits in Michigan and North Carolina, coming off a Supreme Court victory last week over election procedures in Arizona.

An RNC initiative called Protect the Vote has filed more than 100 lawsuits across 25 states and recruited more than 150,000 lawyers and volunteer poll watchers across the country.

“We are defending the law and fighting for commonsense security measures that benefit all Americans—like stopping illegal immigrants from voting, mail ballot safeguards, voter ID measures, stopping leftist dark money, and cleaning the voter rolls,” Gineen Bresso, director of election integrity for the Republican National Committee, told The Daily Signal in a written statement. “We are winning in court and have recruited over 150,000 volunteers for the election. We are protecting the vote for all Americans.”

The Democratic National Committee didn’t respond to inquiries for this story.

Previously, however, the DNC issued statements criticizing Republicans’ litigation and asserting that RNC leadership was chosen by former President Donald Trump to “push lies” about the 2020 election. That leadership would be “anti-democracy” and promote conspiracy theories, the DNC said.

In August, the Democratic National Committee filed lawsuits opposing Republican-backed election procedures in Arizona and Georgia.

The Republican National Committee has pending litigation in Georgia, Nevada, and other states where the Nov. 5 presidential election looks close. Here, however, are five states where the GOP has gained major victories.

1. Arizona and Noncitizen Voting

The Republican National Committee won a partial victory Aug. 22 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 to allow Arizona to enforce its law requiring proof of U.S. citizenship during voter registration. 

Under the ruling, election officials may reject voter registration forms without proof of citizenship. The high court stayed a federal district court ruling while it awaits a hearing before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The lower court struck down provisions of Arizona’s law that require an election official to reject a voter registration that doesn’t include proof of U.S. citizenship. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, both Democrats, opted not to defend the state law.

So the RNC filed an emergency application to the Supreme Court to allow the state to fully enforce the law, which its ruling did.

“This is a major victory for election integrity that upholds a simple principle: American elections must be decided by American citizens,” RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said in a public statement on the high court’s decision. 

Fontes, Arizona’s secretary of state, opposed the court ruling.

“My concern is that changes to the process should not occur this close to an election, it creates confusion for voters,” Fontes said in a public statement. “We respect the court’s decision and will implement these changes while continuing to protect voter access and make voting a simple process.”

Earlier this year, Arizona’s election system garnered increased scrutiny when billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk posted on his social media platform X, formerly Twitter: “Arizona clearly states that no proof of citizenship is required for federal elections.”

That’s technically correct, but no other state requires proof of U.S. citizenship to vote in federal elections, either. Arizona, however, requires such proof before someone may vote in state and local elections.

That’s because in 2013, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Ariz. Inc. that the 1993 National Voter Registration Act, known as the motor voter law, determined that every state must accept the same standardized voter registration forms for federal elections.

However, the ruling, written by then-Justice Antonin Scalia, said Arizona’s law requiring proof of U.S. citizenship to vote could apply to state and local elections but not federal ones. 

As a result, Arizona uses two different ballots for state and federal elections. A state resident with documented proof of citizenship may vote using both ballots. A voter without proof of citizenship may still vote for president and Congress.

2. Stopping Presumptions in Michigan

The Republican National Committee joined the Michigan Republican Party and Wayne County Republican Committee this week to sue the city of Detroit for not hiring a sufficient number of Republican election inspectors.

Michigan law requires hiring an equal number of Democrats and Republicans for election roles. But the GOP plaintiffs allege that Detroit has hired seven times as many Democrats as election inspectors.

The RNC gained a victory in Michigan after suing Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, regarding her instructions to local election clerks to presume—rather than verify—the validity of an absentee voter’s signature.

“In Michigan, we stopped the secretary of state’s illegal instructions to ignore mail ballot safeguards,” the RNC’s Bresso said. 

The RNC teamed with the state Republican Party to argue that the instruction violated the Michigan Constitution, which requires verification of signatures. They won a partial victory in June when state Judge Christopher Yates ruled that Benson’s decision is a presumption that is “a foul under Michigan law.”

After the ruling, a spokesperson for Benson’s office noted that the judge agreed the secretary of state has authority to implement other ballot rules for the state’s more than 1,500 independent election clerks.

“Michigan’s clerks have and will continue to carefully review every ballot signature to ensure they agree sufficiently with the signature on file before accepting any ballot,” Benson spokesperson Angela Benander said, according to The Detroit News.

Going back to 2020, the RNC and the state party teamed to intervene in a lawsuit brought by a Democratic super PAC, Priorities USA, to strike down Michigan’s state ban on the process known as ballot harvesting.

In September 2022, a federal court upheld the ban, which allowed for the tracking of absentee ballots.

Ballot harvesting is when political operatives distribute or collect large quantities of absentee ballots, prompting concerns of voter intimidation or improper influence.

3. Poll Watchers in North Carolina

The Republican National Committee also filed two lawsuits against the North Carolina State Board of Elections in a span of four days in late August.

One lawsuit alleges the state election board failed to require identification to prove U.S. citizenship, a violation of the 2002 Help America Vote Act. The state and national GOP contend this lapse opens up the opportunity for as many as 225,000 noncitizens to vote.

The previous week, the RNC sued the Tar Heel State alleging that it failed to check jury questionnaire responses to identify and remove noncitizens from voter registration lists.

These cases go on after an earlier Republican National Committee victory in North Carolina.

In a 2022 case, the RNC argued that the State Board of Elections was trying to weaken the rights of poll watchers. It scored a victory that August when the state’s Rules Review Commission rejected restrictions on the election board’s new poll watchers.

The State Election Board’s rules would have prevented poll watchers from standing too close to voting machines or poll books, and also give election officials the authority to remove poll watchers.

The following October, Wake County Superior Court Judge Vince Rozier sided with the RNC and blocked the rule preventing “at-large,” party-appointed poll watchers from going to different polling locations throughout Election Day.

The county court, however, also sided with the state board and moved back the date by which ballots must be accepted to Nov. 14, six days after the Nov. 8 election in 2022. The normal deadline of Nov. 11 fell on Veterans Day that year.

Patrick Gannon, the spokesperson for the State Election Board, told the Carolina Journal: “We are grateful that the judge denied the plaintiffs’ request to shorten the absentee ballot deadline. … The county boards of elections will, of course, abide by the judge’s ruling tweaking the replacement procedure for party observers. That is a polling place management issue that our bipartisan poll workers can be trusted to handle.”

4. Parity in Wisconsin

In Wisconsin, the Republican National Committee won a case to enforce the state’s law requiring an equal number of Republican and Democrat poll workers. 

“We successfully fought for poll worker parity and poll watcher protections,” the RNC’s Bresso told The Daily Signal.

The RNC also notes that it sued after finding the city of Appleton, Wisconsin, didn’t have GOP poll workers to assist in nursing homes. The city agreed to hire Republicans as well as Democrats.

The RNC also sued to achieve an equal number of election workers from each major party in the Wisconsin cities of Green Bay and Milwaukee.

State law requires the two major parties to have relatively equal numbers of election workers.

In September 2022, a state court ruled in favor of the RNC’s challenge of guidance by the Wisconsin Elections Commission.  The guidance had instructed local election officials to fill in missing information on absentee ballot forms and to witness affidavits.

Judge Michael Aprahamian ruled that the elections commission “cannot continue to promulgate advice it knows—or should know—violates state law and the intent of the Legislature.”

Others objected, such as Claire Woodall-Vogg, executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission, who told The Associated Press: “Historically, voters have not been penalized for minor errors in voting where intent is clear.”

5. Verifying Mail-In Ballots in Pennsylvania

In May, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on a mail-in ballot verification case in Pennsylvania that had worked its way through state and federal courts.

In the 2022 midterm elections, several county election boards in Pennsylvania announced plans not to enforce a law requiring voters to put a date on their mail-in ballots in order for the ballots to be counted.

The Republican National Committee teamed with the Pennsylvania Republican Party to sue and force those county boards to enforce the law. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court sided with Republicans, prohibiting the counting of undated or misdated ballots.

In response, several liberal groups sued in federal court to challenge the state law requiring mail-in ballots to be dated before being counted.

Among them were Pennsylvania branches of national left-leaning organizations such as the NAACP, the League of Women Voters, and Common Cause. They were joined by state-based or local groups such as Philadelphians Organized to Witness, Empower and Rebuild; the Black Political Empowerment Project; and Make the Road Pennsylvania.

Last November, a federal district court struck down Pennsylvania’s requirement of dated mail-in ballots.

But in May, the 2-1 ruling by a 3rd Circuit panel upheld the law.

Ari Savitzky, the senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project who argued the case, told reporters after the ruling that “voters may be disenfranchised for a minor paperwork error like forgetting to write an irrelevant date on the return envelope of their mail ballot.”

“We are considering all of our options at this time,” Savitzky said.  “And we will not stop fighting for voters.”

Whatley, the RNC’s chairman, said: “Pennsylvanians deserve to feel confident in the security of their mail ballots, and this 3rd Circuit ruling roundly rejects unlawful left-wing attempts to count undated or incorrectly dated mail ballots.”

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This article was published by The Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

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Editors’ Note: The following article by the brilliant Jeffrey Tucker is arguably the most important piece published by The Prickly Pear since it began. The scope of censorship and the anti-American deliberate entanglements of the social media platforms and the United States government, especially the Executive branch and its administrative state, have removed much of the free speech rights of Americans with enormous consequences. Remember, the social media platforms run by extraordinarily rich and powerful leftist elites like Zuckerberg acted as willing agents of the federal and state governments in their censorship and suppression, thereby violating Americans’ First Amendment rights beyond anything ever seen in the Republic’s history. In some ways, the 2024 Presidential election is about this attack on liberty and the defeat of this malignant control of all information and the elimination of free speech. Your vote in the coming election could well spell the renewal or the elimination of the freedoms granted us, i.e., liberty, in the United States Constitution and every consequence thereof.

Consider Mark Zuckerberg’s revelation and its implications for our understanding of the last four years, and what it means for the future.

On many subjects important to public life today, vast numbers of people know the truth, and yet the official channels of information sharing are reluctant to admit it. The Fed admits no fault in inflation and neither do most members of Congress. The food companies don’t admit the harm of the mainstream American diet. The pharmaceutical companies are loath to admit any injury. Media companies deny any bias. So on it goes. 

And yet everyone else does know, already and more and more so.

This is why the admission of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was so startling. It’s not what he admitted. We already knew what he revealed. What’s new is that he admitted it. We are simply used to living in a world swimming in lies. It rattles us when a major figure tells us what is true or even partially or slightly true. We almost cannot believe it, and we wonder what the motivation might be.

In his letter to Congressional investigators, he flat-out said what everyone else has been saying for years now.

In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire, and expressed a lot of frustration with our teams when we didn’t agree….I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it. I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today. Like I said to our teams at the time, I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction – and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.

A few clarifications. The censorship began much earlier than that, from March 2020 at the very least if not earlier. We all experienced it, almost immediately following lockdowns. 

After a few weeks, using that platform to get the word out proved impossible. Facebook once made a mistake and let my piece on Woodstock and the 1969 flu go through but they would never make that mistake again. For the most part, every single opponent of the terrible policies was deplatformed at all levels.

The implications are far more significant than the bloodless letter of Zuckerberg suggests. People consistently underestimate the power that Facebook has over the public mind. This was especially true in the 2020 and 2022 election cycles. 

The difference in having an article unthrottled much less amplified by Facebook in these years was in the millionfold. When my article went through, I experienced a level of traffic that I had never seen in my career. It was mind-boggling. When the article was shut down some two weeks later – after focused troll accounts alerted Facebook that the algorithms had made a mistake – traffic fell to the usual trickle.

Again, in my entire career of closely following internet traffic patterns, I had never seen anything like this.

Facebook as an information source offers power like we’ve never seen before, especially because so many people, especially among the voting public, believe that the information they are seeing is from their friends and family and sources they trust. The experience of Facebook and other platforms framed the reality that people believed existed outside of themselves. 

Every dissident, and every normal person who had some sense that something odd was going on, was made to feel like some sort of crazy cretin who held nutty and probably dangerous views that were completely out of touch with the mainstream.

What does it mean that Zuckerberg now openly admits that he excluded from view anything that contradicted government wishes? It means that any opinions on lockdowns, masks, or vaccine mandates – and all that is associated with that including church and school closures plus vaccine harms – were not part of the public debate. 

We had lived through and were living through the most significant far-reaching attacks on our rights and liberties in our lifetimes, or, arguably, on the history record in terms of scale and reach, and it was not part of any serious public debate. Zuckerberg played an enormous role in this. 

People like me had come to believe that average people were simply cowards or stupid not to object. Now we know that this might not have been true at all! The people who objected were simply silenced!

During two election cycles, the Covid response was not really in play as a public controversy. This helps account for why. It also means that any candidate who attempted to make this an issue was automatically downgraded in terms of reach.

How many candidates are we talking about here? Considering all the US elections at the federal, state, and local levels, we are talking about several thousand at least. In every case, the candidate who was speaking out about the most egregious attacks on liberty came to be effectively silenced.

A good example is the Minnesota governor’s race in 2022 that was won by Tim Walz, now running as VP with Kamala Harris. The election pitted Walz against a knowledgeable and highly credentialed medical expert, Dr. Scott Jensen, who made the Covid response a campaign issue. Here is how the vote totals lined up.

Of course, Dr. Jensen could get no traction at all on Facebook, which was enormously influential in this election and which just admitted that it was following government guidelines in censoring posts. In fact, Facebook banned him from advertising completely. It reduced his reach by 90% and likely lost him the election. 

You can listen to Jensen’s account here: 

Consider how many other elections were affected. It’s astonishing to think of the implications of this. It means that quite possibly an entire generation of elected leaders in this country was not legitimately elected, if by legitimate we mean a well-informed public that is given a choice concerning the issues that affect their lives.

Zuckerberg’s censorship – and this pertains to Google, Instagram, Microsoft’s LinkedIn, and Twitter 1.0 – denied the public a choice on the central matter of lockdowns, masking, and shot mandates, the very issues that have fundamentally roiled the whole of civilization and set the path of history on a dark course. 

And it is not just the US. These are all global companies, meaning that elections in every other country, all over the globe, were similarly affected. It was a global shutdown of all opposition to radical, egregious, unworkable, and deeply damaging policies.

When you think about it this way, this is not just some minor error in judgment. This was an earth-shattering decision that goes way beyond managerial cowardice. It goes beyond even election manipulation. It is an outright coup that overthrew an entire generation of leaders who stood up for freedom and replaced them with a generation of leaders who acquiesced to power exactly at the time it mattered the most. 

Why did Zuckerberg choose now to make this announcement and publicly reveal the inside play? He was obviously unnerved by the assassination attempt on Trump’s life, as he said.

Then also you have the French arrest of Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov, an event which surely rattles any major CEO of a communication platform. You have the arrest and incarceration of other dissidents like Steve Bannon and many others. 

You also have the litigation over free speech back in play now that RFK, Jr has been cleared as having standing, kicking the case of Missouri v. Biden back to the Supreme Court, which wrongly decided last time to deny standing to other plaintiffs.

Zuckerberg of all people knows the stakes. He understands the implications and the scale of the problem, as well as the depths of the corruption and deception at play in the US, EU, UK, and all over the world. He may figure that everything is going to come out at some point, so he might as well get ahead of the curve.

Of all the companies in the world that would have a real handle on the state of public opinion right now, it would be Facebook. They see the scale of the support for Trump. And Trump has said on multiple occasions, including in a new book coming out in early September, that he believes Zuckerberg should be prosecuted for his role in manipulating election outcomes. What if, for example, his own internal data is showing 10 to 1 support for Trump over Kamala, completely contradicting the polls which are not credible anyway? That alone could account for his change of heart.

It becomes especially pressing since the person who did the censoring at the Biden White House, Rob Flaherty, now serves as Digital Communications Strategist for the Harris/Walz campaign. There can be no question that the DNC intends to deploy all the same tools, many times over and far more powerful, should they take back the White House.

“Under Rob’s leadership,” said Biden upon Flaherty’s resignation, “we’ve built the largest Office of Digital Strategy in history and, with it, a digital strategy and culture that brought people together instead of dividing them.”

At this point, it’s safe to assume that even the most well-informed outsider knows about 0.5% of the whole of the manipulation, deception, and backroom machinations that have taken place over the past five or so years. Investigators on the case have said that there are hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence that are not classified but have yet to be revealed to the public. Maybe all of this will pour forth starting in the new year.

Therefore, the Zuckerberg admission has much larger implications than anyone has yet admitted. It provides a first official and confirmed peek into the greatest scandal of our times, the global silencing of critics at all levels of society, resulting in manipulating election outcomes, a distorted public culture, the marginalization of dissent, the overriding of all free speech protections, and gaslighting as a way of life of government in our times.

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This article was published by the Brownstone Institute and is reproduced with permission.

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression is suing the city of Surprise over a local woman being arrested and charged with trespassing after criticizing the city attorney at a meeting on August 20.

Rebekah Massie, a Surprise resident, was criticizing the decision by the council to give City Attorney Robert Wingo a raise.

“I have concerns with allocating the more funds to him specifically for a few different reasons,” Massie stated, saying that she has public records requests under “legal review” and does not believe that Wingo should get a raise given job performance and that he is one of the highest paid city officials in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area making over $265,000, according to a Daily Independent story.

Mayor Skip Hall then cut her remarks off stating that people cannot “lodge charges or complaints against” city employees or the elected officials during the meeting, according to rules he was reading from.

“You are violating my First Amendment rights,” Massie said at one point.

“That’s your opinion,” Hall responded.

“It’s not a matter of opinion.”

“Do you want to be escorted out, Ms. Massie? Because that’s what’s gonna happen. And it’s gonna happen in the future also,” he responded.

A police officer came over to escort Massie out after Hall requested, but she was arrested after she questioned and resisted the grounds for removal. According to case records, she was given a citation for third degree trespassing.

“City of Surprise: We’ll see you in court,” the organization tweeted Monday morning. “The First Amendment protects Americans’ right to criticize public officials without being arrested.”

The foundation, also known as FIRE, handles numerous First Amendment cases, including ones on college campuses.

“This is an action taken by the mayor,” Councilman Jack Hastings told The Center Square.

“Simply based on what she was saying, I personally would have left her finish talking,” he added. “I wouldn’t have done it, personally.”

Sources told The Center Square that she regularly makes public comments at council meetings critical of city officials and decisions, which led to the tensions boiling over between her and Mayor Skip Hall, who is in his last term.

The city did not respond to requests for comment in time for publication. Both Hall and Wingo are facing criticism, including calls for both of them to resign from their positions following the situation.

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This article was published by The Center Square and is reproduced with permission.

Image Credit: City of Surprise TV