Could it be that Mitt Romney might have won last week’s election or at least received more votes than he did? Fox News has received complaints from voters who say that when they voted on touch-screen voting machines to select Mitt Romney, the machine indicated they had chosen President Obama. The voters in question realized the error and were able to cast ballots for their actual choice. “I don’t know if it happened to anybody else or not, but this is the first time in all the years that we voted that this has ever happened to me,” said Marion, Ohio, voter Joan Stevens. Stevens said that when she voted, it took her three tries before the machine accepted her choice to vote for Romney. She said that the first time she pushed “Romney,” the machine marked “Obama.” So she pushed Romney again. Obama came up again. Then it happened a third time. According to the Columbus Dispatch, one out of every five registered voters in Ohio is ineligible to vote. In at least two counties in Ohio, the number of registered voters exceeded the number of eligible adults who are of voting age. In northwestern Ohio’s Wood County, there are 109 registered voters for every 100 people eligible to vote. An additional 31 of Ohio’s 88 counties have voter registration rates over 90 percent, which most voting experts regard as suspicious. Obama miraculously won 100 percent of the vote in 21 districts in Cleveland, and received over 99 percent of the vote where GOP inspectors were illegally removed. In response to the growing number of complaints, the Republican National Committee has sent a letter to election officials in six states—Ohio, Nevada, Kansas, North Carolina, Missouri, and Colorado—-demanding tighter controls on touch-screen machines. The RNC wants the machines to be retested, more technicians added to fix any problems, and verbal reminders given by election workers telling voters to double check their ballots. Multiple voters from several states wrote Fox News to report problems similar to what Stevens reported. “How can we be sure our votes are not being stolen electronically?” asked a voter. Election officials insist that the machines are practically foolproof. They say any problems are due to human error, and that tinkering with machines is almost impossible. “It is nearly technically impossible to preprogram the voting machines in Nevada to vote for a specified candidate,” said Nevada Secretary of State Ross Miller, in a statement to Fox News. He said machines are tested by each of the state’s 17 counties individually. Meanwhile, the state of Florida says conservative black Republican Rep. Allen West lost his re-election bid by 2,442 votes, reports miami.cbslocal.com. West, however, refuses to concede. West’s campaign manager was quoted saying, “We’re simply not going to just walk away from the race until we see that the numbers add up.” West could contest the election if misconduct or fraud might have changed its result. West is a Tea Party favorite known for his strong criticism of President Barack Obama and other Democrats. He maintains that voting irregularities in St. Lucie County need to be investigated before he concedes.
Other news:
- Alabama’s “Ten Commandments judge” has climbed back to the mountaintop. Handily beating two fellow Republican challengers, Roy Moore was elected to a six-year term as the state Supreme Court’s chief justice, a position from which he was ousted in 2003 for refusing to remove a 5,200-pound granite monument to the commandments from the rotunda of the state Supreme Court’s building, reports latimes.com. Moore earned more than 50 percent of the vote during Tuesday’s election. “I have no doubt this is vindication for what I stood for,” Moore told supporters during a televised election speech. “Go home with the knowledge that we’ll stand for the acknowledgment of God.” Moore was a county judge when he came to national prominence in the 1990s for sticking an 18-by-24-inch plaque of the Ten Commandments on his Etowah County courtroom wall. A federal judge ordered Moore to remove the plaque—citing the separation of church and state—but Moore refused, turning him into a hero for many Alabama residents. Moore rode the wave of conservative, Christian support all the way to state Supreme Court, where he was elected chief justice in 2000 with 55 percent of the vote. In August 2001, not even a year into his term, Moore had a 4-foot-tall, nearly 3-ton monument to the Ten Commandments installed in the high court’s rotunda in the middle of the night. Organizations such as the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center sued, arguing the monument amounted to government endorsement of a religion. A federal judge ordered Moore to have it removed, and the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the ruling. Moore’s associate justices on the state high court sided with the federal judge as well. Moore was ousted as chief justice in 2003 by Alabama’s Court of the Judiciary for ethics breaches related to his defiance of the court order to remove the monument. The monument was removed from public viewing about a week after Moore was booted from the bench.
- Businesses with 50 or more employees who average at least 30 hours of work a week will be subject to the Obamacare insurance coverage mandate. Companies are reportedly planning large layoffs due to the implementation of Obamacare, reports cnsnews.com. But companies can potentially avoid being subject to Obamacare’s insurance requirements by limiting employees’ weekly hours to less than the 30-hour level defined by Obamacare as “full-time,” which would make a 29-hour work week possibly popular. A little-known section in the Obamacare health reform law defines “full-time” work as averaging only 30 hours per week, a definition that will affect some employers who utilize part-time workers to trim the cost of complying with the Obamacare rule that says businesses with 50 or more full-time workers must provide health insurance or pay a fine. Meanwhile, companies such as Papa Johns and Applebees already began slicing employees right after the election, reports Fox News.
- One of Scotland’s leading Christian thinkers has said that atheist professor Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion book has actually paved the way for the church to share its message about God, because it drew millions of people around the world to the debate on God and the Bible, reports The Christian Post. “Richard Dawkins has done us a big favor,” said the Rev. David Robertson, a minister from the Free Church of Scotland. “A book about God and the Bible has become a bestseller and as a result has opened up a discussion that many people thought was over,” Robertson added to the Stornoway Gazette. “I recently did a show with Marcus Brigstocke, the comedian, in which he declared—‘Before I read The God Delusion I was a an atheist, after I read it I was an agnostic—I don’t want to read it again in case I turn into a Christian’!” The God Delusion is the atheist professor’s best-selling book and has sold millions of copies worldwide. In it, he argues how science and the universe exist without any sort of divinely inspired notions, and how a belief in God is detrimental to human development and progress. Dawkins’ work has been challenged by many religious leaders, but it has also engaged masses in a discussion about the role of faith and religion in today’s world. And while the author’s work argues against God, Robertson insists that the discussion generated alone is enough to awaken minds and lead many people toward God, rather than away from Him. “I actually know of people who have been converted through reading The God Delusion and interacting with the discussion. Dawkins has opened the door. We now have to walk through it,” said the Christian minister.
- During his acceptance speech earlier this week, President Obama alluded to immigration reform for millions of illegal aliens currently residing in the U.S. The New York Times best-selling book Fool Me Twice: Obama’s Shocking Plans for the Next Four Years Exposed documents how Obama may go about granting mass amnesty in his second term, reports WorldNetDaily. The work, by Aaron Klein and Brenda Elliott, documents Obama’s specific second term agenda in all major policy areas, including the economy, jobs, immigration reform, health care, the military, and electoral reform. While the president did not specify what kind of immigrant he was referring to, many took his statement as an ode to a future amnesty program. According to Klein’s and Elliott’s book, progressive organizations behind White House policy have already crafted specific, second-term plans for Obama to issue amnesty to millions more illegal aliens living inside the U.S. There are also designs to remove the caps on H-1B visas and green cards, a move that would bring in an untold number of new immigrants. Other second-term plans include a program for government agencies to immediately register as voters the new Americans who would receive amnesty. The second-term amnesty plans come in the form of interagency directives, legislative attempts, and a series of executive orders similar to Obama’s June order to stop deporting young illegal immigrants who entered the United States as children, if they meet certain requirements.
- A status quo election has left conservative evangelicals and other social conservatives with little optimism they will see pro-life and pro-family advances by the federal government in the next two years, says Baptist Press. The Democrats’ retention of the White House and Senate, as well as the Republicans’ continued majority in the House of Representatives, appears to do more than set the stage for likely, continued gridlock until at least the 2014 congressional elections. It also seems to place the burden on the House GOP to stop even further intrusions on the sanctity of human life and other socially conservative positions.
- The revelations about Attorney Gen. Eric Holder and his connection to an abortion clinic are becoming worse as new information has come to light showing he failed to disclose his wife’s co-owning of an abortion business, reports lifenews.com. Just before the election, Human Events broke the news that Holder’s wife and sister-in-law co-own, through a family trust, the building where a controversial abortion practitoner operates. The Holder family transferred ownership to a family trust in 2009, eight months after President Barack Obama’s inauguration and a deed names Holder’s wife and sister-in-law as trustees.
- Another campus Christian organization is fighting accusations of discrimination for its requirement that leaders share a common profession of faith, reports onenewsnow.com. A student-led judiciary at Tufts University has voted to derecognize InterVarsity’s Tufts Christian Fellowship chapter. The vote was based on a complaint from the Tufts Coalition Against Religious Exclusion, a group formed specifically to push TCF off campus. InterVarsity Field Director Greg Jao says that this is actually not a new situation for the campus group. “The student body’s decision to derecognize the fellowship doesn’t particularly surprise us; we see ourselves as a mission on campus, and, of course, the mission field doesn’t always welcome the missionary who’s there,” he notes.
- The Alliance Defending Freedom organization currently is in federal court in the nation’s capital defending Tyndale House Publishers in the first post-election challenge to the HHS mandate. Based on its Biblical convictions, Tyndale objects to the requirement that it provide free insurance coverage for drugs that cause abortions. The Bible publisher filed suit Oct. 2 on behalf of the Illinois-based organization that is owned by a foundation. As OneNewsNow reported earlier, the largest privately held Christian publisher of Bibles, Christian books, and Biblical media is not considered “religious,” even though it is a nonprofit foundation that provides grants to meet physical and spiritual needs of people worldwide. ADF attorney Matt Bowman told OneNewsNow very serious constitutional issues are at stake. “Bible publishers should be free to do business according to the book that they publish,” Bowman contends. “For the government to say that a Bible publisher is not religious is alarming. It demonstrates how clearly the Obama administration is willing to disregard the Constitution’s protection of religious freedom to achieve certain political purposes.” The foundation that owns Tyndale distributes 96.5 percent of its profits to religious nonprofit causes worldwide. Still, the publisher is subject to the mandate because the Obama administration rules for-profit corporations as categorically non-religious.
- Proponents of traditional marriage in Washington State have conceded the election, and one proponent of the effort says people of faith can expect persecution. Spokesman Joseph Backholm told OneNewsNow that even though Washington is a bastion of liberal thinking, natural marriage proponents came within four percentage points of winning. “It was a race where we were outspent by $10 million-plus dollars,” he detailed. “And when you’re outspent by a factor of five- or six-to-one in a race this close, that makes a huge difference.” Backholm asserted that “regardless of what people want reality to be, marriage is always going to be a relationship between a man and a woman.” “The struggle that we’re going to be confronting now is how much legal trouble is that proposition going to create for people who share our conviction about this issue, and how challenging is it going to be to engage in the public square,” the FPIW spokesman offered. As an example, Christian-owned businesses in New Mexico, Illinois, and New York are facing penalties for declining to allow their facilities or services to be used to celebrate homosexual unions or weddings. Backholm concludes that the reality now is that people of faith “are going to suffer.”
