World, US, Culture, Market, and Sci-Tech News Aggregation from MSM and Independent News
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Socialist Los Angeles City Councilwoman Nithya Raman appeared to concede defeat Tuesday night after it looked like Spencer Pratt would advance to the November runoff election against incumbent Mayor Karen Bass. But then votes kept pouring in days after the Tuesday election, and by Sunday evening, Raman had taken the lead over Pratt.
The 180-degree-turn has left many scratching their heads: How does a candidate who was down by roughly 40,000 votes suddenly jump to second place after she herself publicly signaled her path to victory had all but disappeared? (Raman currently leads Pratt by more than 20,000 votes, after post-election ballot dumps have gone overwhelmingly in her favor.)
For NBC’s Meet the Press host Kristen Welker, however, questions about such outcomes are apparently evidence of nothing more than public ignorance. During a Sunday interview, President Donald Trump said the 2020 election was “rigged” (and he’s right — but more on that later) and that the same rigging is happening in California.
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“Fraud warnings were elevated to the most senior levels of the Minnesota state government, meaningful corrective action was delayed or avoided.”
A Republican-led House Oversight Committee report has alleged that the fraud that has been highlighted in Minnesota’s social services programs was caused by year of inaction from Democrat Governor Tim Walz, Minnesota AG Keith Ellison, and other officials, allowing for the siphoning off of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds going to fraud. The report found that fears of getting called “racist” also contributed to the inaction.
“Fraud warnings were elevated to the most senior levels of the Minnesota state government, meaningful corrective action was delayed or avoided, and payments continued long after credible signs of fraud emerged,” the report read in part.
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As people watch the insane vote counting in the Los Angeles Mayor’s race, which comes just weeks after Newsom said the state had a ‘break glass in case of emergency’ plan in the event Republicans won the gubernatorial jungle primary, Rep. Anna Paulina Luna is calling on Congress to cut off federal funding to California until it cleans up its ‘shady election process.’
The US gov sends billions to California to subsidize their failed policies. It is time we STOP until they clean up their shady election process.
— Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (@RepLuna) June 8, 2026
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First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli is accusing California of blocking a federal audit of its voter rolls as accusations of a rigged primary election swirl.
Woke Los Angeles Mayoral Candidate Nithya Raman, who previously conceded defeat, surged into second place over the weekend with the help of late mail-in ballots, bumping popular Republican trailblazer Spencer Pratt into third place.
As of Monday, Raman led Pratt by roughly 3,000 votes with about 83 percent of post-election ballots received.
Thanks to four Republican Senators, efforts by the GOP to pass the SAVE Act failed once again. The Act would make Voter ID mandatory. Senator Lindsay Graham (R-SC) attempted to add it as an amendment to DHS funding bills, but the provision failed thanks to four GOP no votes.
The Supreme Court of the United States has upheld a recent redistricting Map from the Alabama GOP that will eliminate the sole “majority-black” district. The ruling is another gerrymandering wars win for the GOP.
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President Donald Trump has criticized California for its vote-counting delay in the gubernatorial and Los Angeles mayoral races, accusing the state’s Democratic leaders of “BIG cheating.”
While California polls closed at 8 p.m. local time on Tuesday, that state’s counting appears to remain at a standstill as of Thursday morning.
‘Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS.’
Only 56% of the votes have been counted in the race for governor and 62% in the mayoral election, according to the Associated Press. This is a 2% decrease for both races compared to Wednesday morning.
In the race to replace Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, former Fox News host and small-business owner Steve Hilton (R) currently holds a slight lead over former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra (D), and climate advocate and businessman Tom Steyer (D) remains in third position.
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Representative Brandon Gill, chairman of the Task Force on Defending Constitutional Rights and Exposing Institutional Abuses, delivered opening remarks on Wednesday during a fraud hearing where he highlighted the widespread fraud within Medicaid waiver programs, particularly among the Somali community.
At the hearing titled “Universal Basic Fraud: Vulnerabilities in Medicaid Waiver Programs,” Gill cited recent reporting on alleged abuses of Medicaid-funded programs in Ohio, claiming that fraudulent billing schemes have resulted in an estimated $1.2 billion in taxpayer losses in the state alone.
“I know that the Democrats are going to cheat. No one’s really addressing the problem that I spent my time in prison as retribution for, and that was exposing the election machines that allow the votes to be flipped. I’m very concerned and burdened with why no one is talking about this.” – Tina Peters, Election Fraud Whistleblower, after being released from prison. She had been locked up for 20 months.
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The court has granted Fulton County’s request to unseal their case against the Department of Justice, who issued a subpoena seeking the identity information of everyone associated with the 2020 election.
That’s according to a statement released Sunday from Robb Pits, chairman of the Board of Commissioners of Fulton County.
The county filed a motion to quash to keep the DOJ from enforcing the subpoena.
“The recent decision to unseal means that you will be able to follow future developments because the public and media now have access to the docket and the documents filed in the case,” Pitts said.
The subpoena comes after the FBI in January went to a Fulton County elections warehouse and seized ballots and other documents from the 2020 election, which Georgia’s certified totals showed Trump lost in the state to Biden by 11,779 votes out of nearly 5 million cast…
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A number of South Carolina Republicans in the state Senate joined Democrats on Tuesday to defeat a procedural vote needed to advance a congressional redistricting plan. The effort sought to redraw the state’s seven U.S. House districts ahead of the 2026 elections, with the aim of creating a map that would favor Republican candidates in all seven seats and draw out the lone Democrat-controlled district under the current map.
The proposal stemmed from a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that altered interpretations of the Voting Rights Act regarding congressional districts on the basis of race. In response to the landmark ruling, a number of Republican-controlled states in the South moved to draw out districts that were drawn in order to be majority black under prior criteria.
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A federal court is trying to pull a judicial mulligan after the Supreme Court gave Alabama another shot at using its GOP-backed congressional map.
The Supreme Court threw out a lower-court order barring Alabama from using the congressional map the state adopted in 2023 and sent the dispute back to the lower court for another look. But a three-judge federal panel again blocked Alabama from using that map for the 2026 midterms.
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A U.S. judge on Thursday declined to immediately block President Donald Trump’s executive order tightening rules on mail-in voting, but left the door open for the Democratic Party to challenge it again after the administration takes further steps to implement the measure.
Washington-based U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols wrote that the Democrats’ request for a preliminary injunction blocking Trump’s March 31 order, which directed his administration to compile a list of confirmed U.S. citizens eligible to vote in each state, was premature. The decision did not address whether Trump’s executive order was lawful.
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A woman casts her ballot at a polling station in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on November 3, 2024.Kamil KrzaczynskI/AFP/Getty
The Voting Rights Act is widely considered one of the most effective laws in prohibiting racial discrimination in voting. One of its key provisions has long allowed states to take race into account when drawing voting maps to ensure that nonwhite voters have electoral power. But earlier this year, the Supreme Court narrowed that provision. In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan described the court’s decision as the “now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”
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If you were looking for a pathetic excuse for what qualifies as a “statesman” these days, look no further than the so-called “red state” of South Carolina.
In complete defiance of their voters’ wishes, a cabal of Republican state senators sided with Democrats on Tuesday in tanking a proposal that sought to redistrict South Carolina’s lone Democrat congressional seat ahead of the 2026 midterms. The Democrat seat is currently held by longtime Rep. Jim Clyburn, a former member of the U.S. House Democrats’ leadership team.
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Redistricting is the fight of the year as we’re getting involved in the 2026 election season; primary elections are already being held across the fruited plain, and the battle lines are being drawn for November. By and large, the redistricting efforts have favored Republicans, but there are some truly baffling exceptions.
One of those is South Carolina, where the state Senate refused to pass a redistricting bill; several Republicans joined Democrats in opposing the measure.
The Republican-led South Carolina Senate on Tuesday voted against a measure to advance a new congressional map, ending the redistricting effort in the state for now.
The failed vote was a surprise rejection of President Donald Trump, who had urged lawmakers to pass a redrawn map that eliminated the state’s single majority-Black district, represented by longtime Democratic Rep. James Clyburn.
The South Carolina House approved the map last week in hopes of putting it into place for this year’s midterm elections. As part of the effort, lawmakers also sought to set another primary election for the affected districts in August. But after early voting began on Tuesday for the previously scheduled June primary, some Republicans changed their tune, arguing it was too late to enact new district lines.
“Neither my conscience nor my common sense will allow me to stop an election that is already underway,” said Republican state Sen. Richard Cash, a Republican who changed his vote due to timing.
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Alabama Republicans immediately called for an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court after losing a redistricting battle at a three-judge panel of a federal court.
Republicans are trying to reinstate a 2023 congressional map that would allow them the possibility of picking up a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Democrats claimed the new map would send Alabama back to the ‘1950s and 60s.’
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The explosive standoff over the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act has pushed the U.S. Senate into a pressure cooker, transforming the legislative battle into a high-stakes referendum on the leadership of Majority Leader John Thune. For a rapidly growing number of Americans, the slow, agonizing movement on this landmark election security bill is nothing short of a tactical surrender – a profound failure of nerve from a leader increasingly viewed as a worthless roadblock to the populist agenda.
Across the country, the hatred directed at Thune is reaching a boiling point, fueled by the conviction that his deliberate inaction is a direct betrayal of the citizens he was chosen to lead. Indeed, there is no institutional excuse; his handling of the SAVE Act is a definitive reason why he should resign.
To understand the intense fury surrounding John Thune’s leadership, one must first look at the bill at the center of the storm. The SAVE Act represents a massive proposed shift in how American federal elections are conducted. The bill’s core mandate is simple but sweeping: it would require all Americans to present formal documentary proof of citizenship – such as a U.S. passport or a certified birth certificate alongside photo identification – in order to register to vote in federal elections.
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Lawmakers in the South Carolina House of Representatives have just passed a new U.S. congressional map that could eliminate the district of a powerful congressman with the only Democrat seat in the state.
The move is setting up a major political battle ahead of the 2026 midterms.
The Republican-led chamber approved the measure by a 74–37 vote after lengthy debate, sending the proposal to the GOP-controlled state Senate for further consideration.
Federal Judge Shuts Down TN Dems Over New Congressional Map– townhall.com
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Tennessee drew its new congressional map, with state Democrats filing a challenge to block its implementation. That’s likely to be the usual move as Republicans push to redraw their maps across the South following the Callais decision. The map debate caused a commotion at the state Capitol. Tennessee Democrats tried to block the map, and a federal judge put the kibosh on it (via Channel 5 Nashville):
🚨 A federal judge has declined to immediately block Tennessee’s new Republican-drawn congressional map. pic.twitter.com/ecjPsszfPC
— SCOTUS Wire (@scotus_wire) May 14, 2026
🚨 NOW: A federal judge has just REFUSED to block Tennessee’s new 2026 redistricting map, which eliminates the last remaining Democrat seat and makes the state 9R-0D
ANOTHER WIN!
Democrats are melting down after EVERY court loss, their era of racial cheating has ended 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/I8Z2JmgDN5
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) May 14, 2026
A federal judge denied a request Thursday to temporarily block Tennessee’s newly approved congressional map from taking effect ahead of the 2026 elections.
Chief U.S. District Judge William L. Campbell Jr. denied plaintiffs’ request for a temporary restraining order and canceled a hearing that had been scheduled for May 20, according to a court order filed Thursday.
The ruling stems from a lawsuit filed last week by the Tennessee Democratic Party and several plaintiffs challenging the state’s newly redrawn congressional districts approved during a special legislative session. The lawsuit argues the map unlawfully dismantles a majority-Black district and creates election confusion ahead of the August primary.
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Unsurprisingly, Democrats are willing to eliminate black-majority congressional districts through redistricting in order to gain more political power, a new poll finds. Democrat politicians and pundits have long claimed that any proposed shift away from race-based gerrymandering is racist, repeatedly weaponizing the issue to smear Republicans.
The Politico poll, conducted in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent decision on the Voting Rights Act, shows “a lot of Democrats are willing to sacrifice Black voting power to beat the GOP.” At face value, respondents — who were Kamala Harris voters — said discriminatory gerrymandering to carve out special districts for black voters and other minorities is more important “even if it means Democrats draw fewer seats.”
After the Virginia Supreme Court threw out a new congressional district map that eliminated four GOP seats, progressives want to purge the court and replace it with more loyal progressives. The plan is to lower the mandatory retirement age of judges to below the youngest member of the VA Supreme Court so they can put progressive activists in to take their place.
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A protest sign outside Alabama’s statehouse on May 7.Kim Chandler/AP
In a stunning act of political partisanship, the Roberts Court on Monday night discarded its own precedents to green-light a last-ditch effort by Alabama to use a gerrymandered congressional map for the 2026 midterms. The move, which comes less than two weeks after the court destroyed the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais, will reduce Black representation.
Monday’s 6-3 order, divided along partisan lines, shows how Republican-controlled states can use the high court’s April 29 Callais decision as carte-blanche to shut Black representatives out of Congress. In Alabama’s case, precedent, court doctrine, and a damning lower-court ruling stood in the way of the state throwing out its current map containing two majority-Black congressional districts represented by Democrats. Monday night’s decision of the Republican-appointed justices to toss all that aside shows how the court has not only unleashed a new wave of racial and partisan gerrymandering, but is sweeping away any obstacles so that Republicans nab as many seats as possible this November—enough to potentially prevent Democrats from retaking the House.
“There’s something bizarre going on with the court making choices that seem to very heavily benefit one party.”
