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By Charles M. Phipps on February 17th, 2016 
Earlier this month the city in which I live held an election to recall the mayor and to vote on two city council seats. The recall effort was one of the more contentious local elections I’ve ever seen and the entire process dragged on for more than six months, from petition to campaign to voting day. The mayor and his supporters were claiming the city’s public safety unions were attempting a power play and wanted to install someone as mayor who would take orders from the unions. The public safety unions were claiming the mayor and the city manager were trying to close one of the city’s six fire stations and take a fire truck out of service, endangering the citizens and putting the city’s ISO insurance rating in jeopardy. Whichever side was right is irrelevant for the purposes of this post, but the result was the mayor was recalled by an overwhelming margin.
The relevant thing to note about […] → Keep reading
By Charles M. Phipps on December 18th, 2013 
If you live in Oklahoma, I hope you enjoy hearing about the school storm shelter issue because it’s shaping up to be the issue for the next year. Yesterday, State Rep. Joe Dorman (D-Rush Springs) launched an exploratory committee to begin raising funds and examine a possible run for Governor of Oklahoma next year. Dorman would be running against the popular incumbent, Mary Fallin. While announcing the committee Dorman said that education is going to be the top issue. “Visiting with teachers… about the conditions we’re seeing in schools, what we’ve seen Governor Fallin and Superintendent Janet Barresi do to education, I think that has to be one of our most critical issues we’ll look at.” For the past several months Dorman has been a strong advocate of an initiative petition that would allow the public to vote on issuing up to $500 million in bonds for the construction of storm shelters in Oklahoma schools. Franchise tax revenues would be […] → Keep reading
By Charles M. Phipps on November 6th, 2013 
While watching the poll results come in on the Virginia Governor’s race last night I was not surprised to see Terry McAuliffe take the lead and emerge as the winner. There are several reasons why I believe he was able to defeat Ken Cuccinelli and I have seen most of them mentioned or discussed on other sites. But there is one factor I have wondered about and it is not something relating solely to yesterday’s election, or to any one election of the last few years. That being that we, as a nation, might no longer be under the protection of God. I’m sure to some that may seem a ridiculous concept, but to others it might not. As a student of the Bible I know that even Israel, God’s chosen people, were in and out of favor with God throughout parts of the Old Testament. More than once he turned them over to their enemies for chastisement when they […] → Keep reading
By Charles M. Phipps on October 22nd, 2012 
At the request of liberal groups such as the NAACP, the ACLU and the The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the United Nations will be sending at least 57 poll watchers to various locations around the United States to observe the election on November 6. The groups sent a letter to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a United Nations partner on democratization and human rights projects, and warned of a “coordinated political effort to disenfranchise millions of Americans – particularly traditionally disenfranchised groups like minorities.”
Giovanna Maiola, spokeswoman for OSCE, has said the monitors won’t limit their observations to what goes on at the polls but will also be focusing on a number of areas on the state level, including the legal system, election administration, the campaign, the campaign financing and new voting technologies used in different states.
This is not the first time that OSCE had monitored a US election but the monitoring […] → Keep reading
By Charles M. Phipps on August 28th, 2011 
Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) had an op-ed in the New York Times on Friday in which he condemns the move in a number of states to require photo identification be presented when voting, calling it an unconstitutional poll tax. Rep. Lewis tries to make his case by conveniently omitting some crucial facts and getting others completely wrong.
“Despite decades of progress, this year’s Republican-backed wave of voting restrictions has demonstrated that the fundamental right to vote is still subject to partisan manipulation. The most common new requirement, that citizens obtain and display unexpired government-issued photo identification before entering the voting booth, was advanced in 35 states and passed by Republican legislatures in Alabama, Minnesota, Missouri and nine other states despite the fact that as many as 25 percent of African-Americans lack acceptable identification.”
Let’s take the states he mentioned one at a time and see what the truth is.
Alabama – A bill passed this year would require […] → Keep reading
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