In its coverage of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s recent cast vote record decision, Democracy Docket framed the ruling as a dangerous victory for “election deniers” and claimed it gave a “DHS conspiracy theorist access to 2020 election data.”

That framing misses the central point of the case: The court did not authorize the exposure of anyone’s private vote. It allowed access to election records that help the public verify whether reported vote totals match recorded vote data.

In a republic, ballot secrecy protects the voter. Transparency protects the result. Both principles can coexist, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court understood that.

Americans across the political spectrum have lost faith in election systems at different moments and for different reasons.

The court’s actual holding was straightforward: Cast vote records, or CVRs, are not the “contents of ballot boxes or voting machines” under Pennsylvania’s Election Code and therefore are not categorically exempt from public disclosure.

A CVR is not a physical ballot. It does not contain information about voters. It contains information about ballots — and ballots do not contain personally identifying information.

A properly configured CVR cannot link a ballot to a voter in a way that compromises ballot secrecy. In the Lycoming County system at issue, the data was randomized and did not contain personally identifying voter information.

The court explained that the CVR numbers do not correspond to the order in which voters checked in or cast ballots and that those randomization features “significantly decrease the likelihood” of identifying an individual vote. The court concluded that disclosure would allow the public to check the math without violating ballot secrecy.

There is a line of thinking that says a CVR can be kept from the public if there is some edge case where the voter behind a ballot could be reasonably guessed. What that argument misses is that ballot secrecy exists to protect voters from the state — not to protect the state from public scrutiny.

If a government builds or certifies a voting system that allows officials, vendors, or anyone else to identify which voter cast which ballot, the problem is not the citizen asking for public records and the remedy is not secrecy for the government. The remedy is fixing, randomizing, or decertifying the system.

If a county claims that it cannot disclose a CVR because the public could determine how individual voters voted by matching multiple records together, that should trigger an immediate and serious response from state election authorities.

A voting system that allows ballots to be connected back to voters is not merely inconvenient for public-records compliance. It is a direct threat to ballot secrecy.

Public access to CVRs is not about exposing voters. It is about allowing citizens to confirm that election totals add up. Bloomberg Law captured the ruling more accurately: Pennsylvanians may review raw voting records to ensure elections are accurate; the court said disclosure promotes trust, confidence, and legitimacy without violating voter secrecy law.

Americans across the political spectrum have lost faith in election systems at different moments and for different reasons. In September 2024, Gallup found that only 57% of Americans were confident that presidential votes would be accurately cast and counted nationwide, with a massive partisan gap: 84% of Democrats expressed confidence, compared with only 28% of Republicans.

After the 2024 election, AP-NORC found that about six in 10 Americans believed the presidential vote was counted accurately nationwide, while independents remained notably less confident.

In April 2026, Reuters/Ipsos found sharp partisan divides on election fraud beliefs, while also finding that majorities of both Democrats and Republicans remained confident their own ballots would be counted.

This is not a one-party problem. Republicans have raised concerns about mail ballots, voter rolls, citizenship verification, ballot harvesting, and machine tabulation. Democrats, too, have raised serious concerns about election technology when the perceived threat came from foreign interference or insecure electronic systems.

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J. David Ake/Getty Images

After the 2016 election, the Clinton campaign joined recount efforts in key states, with Marc Elias writing that the campaign had examined allegations involving hacking, outside interference, and voting technology.

In the years that followed, prominent Democrats pushed aggressively for paper ballots, audits, and replacement of insecure voting machines. Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden’s PAVE Act, backed by Democratic senators, including Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Cory Booker (N.J.), Kamala Harris (Calif.), Tammy Baldwin (Wisc.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.), and others, would have mandated hand-marked paper ballots and risk-limiting audits in federal elections.

Let’s be honest: Concern about election technology was not invented in 2020. Democrats were warning about electronic voting systems, paperless machines, hacking, and public confidence long before the current fight over CVRs.

In the case of Pennsylvania, election researcher Heather Honey asked a basic question: Can the public inspect the data necessary to verify the count? The Pennsylvania Supreme Court answered yes, subject to the election code and subject to the protection of ballot secrecy. That should be an easy win for anyone who claims to care about democracy.

Instead, Democracy Docket labeled Honey a “conspiracy theorist” and portrayed the ruling as a victory for sinister forces. But the court did not adopt a conspiracy theory. It adopted a transparency principle. In fact, the court said disclosure promotes “fair, honest, and transparent elections.”

I know Heather Honey as a hard-working, dedicated patriot, a wonderful person, and a loving parent. Her biggest personal failing, as far as I can tell, is that she is a Philadelphia Eagles fan — a burden no court can remedy.

The attack on Heather Honey is totally misplaced. If Democracy Docket disagrees with the legal reasoning, it should argue the law. If it believes certain CVR formats in certain counties could threaten secrecy, then the correct response is not to smear citizens who request public records.

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Samuel Boivin/NurPhoto/Getty Images

The correct response is to demand voting systems that protect ballot secrecy by design: randomized ballot records, standardized public CVR formats, and certification standards that make it impossible to connect a ballot back to a voter.

Marc Elias, the founder of Democracy Docket, has built a platform devoted to voting rights and election litigation. He knows better than most that election legitimacy depends not only on access to the ballot, but on public confidence that lawful votes are accurately counted.

CVR transparency is one way to earn it. It does not reveal who someone voted for or publish private voter choices. Properly handled, it lets citizens, researchers, journalists, campaigns, and watchdogs compare reported totals against underlying tabulation records. It is a public audit trail.

And if any county says its CVRs cannot be disclosed because the records would allow ballots to be matched back to voters, then the public-records request is not the scandal. The voting system is.

Democracy does not become weaker when citizens can verify government math. It becomes stronger.

So Democracy Docket should correct its framing, and Marc Elias should leave Heather Honey alone. She is simply defending one of democracy’s oldest and most important rules:

Trust the voters. Protect the secret ballot. And let the people check the math.

​2020 election, Democracy, Election deniers, Election security, Pennsylvania, Voting machines, Democracy docket, Cvrs, Opinion & analysis 

Emma Morris was only 27 years old and six months into her employment at the New York Post when she got a call in late September 2020 from former Trump adviser Steve Bannon saying he had a story that would “change her life.”

“He says, ‘I have Hunter Biden’s computer,”’ Morris recounts on “The Glenn Beck Program.”

Initially, Emma was “skeptical of the source,” given that both Bannon and Rudy Giuliani (who was in possession of a copy of the hard drive) were campaigning for President Trump. Despite being a dedicated conservative who likes Trump and “wanted the story to be true,” Emma was committed to true journalism and thus determined not to be blinded by her political views.

“My capacity as an editor is to relay the truth as closely as I can, not to campaign for Trump,” she tells Glenn.

When the New York Post gave her the greenlight to pursue the story, Emma was immediately overwhelmed by the sheer volume of documents she had to sort through just to pinpoint the angle the story would take.

“I called my boss, my editor in chief, Michelle Gotthelf, … and I was like, ‘I don’t know how to make sense of all of this. It’s too much,’” she recounts.

Gotthelf’s advice was brilliant: “Find me where Joe Biden comes into this.”

“And that was when it clicked,” Emma says.

Her search narrowed in on roughly “10 documents” that involved Joe Biden, which then had to be verified for authenticity given the laptop had been through “a chain of custody.”

“The way that we were able to do that was very simple. … We had the contact lists in his phone book, which was also on the laptop. … And we just called them and said, ‘Hey, it’s the New York Post. I’m going to read you something. Can you tell me if it sounds familiar?’” Emma says.

As she began making these calls, one thing became clear: “It wasn’t Hunter, you know, scurrying around the world himself.”

“There was business partners, and some of those partners had either been burned, some of them had gone to jail, some of them had realized that this is too much. Everyone was receptive,” Emma says.

The response to the story the New York Post broke was shocking.

“I expected conservative media to pick it up. … And that wasn’t what happened at all. As it turned out, the CIA was upset,” Emma says.

“We published at 5 a.m. By like 7 a.m. latest, it was completely blacklisted on Twitter. … Within two hours, it was classified as child porn internally,” she explains.

It later came out that the FBI had been in possession of the physical laptop since December of 2019 and was actively preparing Twitter executives to treat any breaking story about Hunter Biden as Russian disinformation.

To hear more of Emma’s insider scoop, watch the video above.

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​Blaze media, Blazetv, Emma morris, Glenn beck, Hunter biden, Hunter biden laptop, Joe biden, New york post, President trump, Rudy giuliani, Russian disinformation, Steve bannon, The glenn beck program, Twitter 

A lockdown at the White House was caused by a U.S. Secret Service officer shooting a “suspicious” armed individual who shot a juvenile, according to the Secret Service deputy director.

Reporters said they were ushered from the north lawn of the White House into the press briefing room after the lockdown was called at about 3:30 p.m. Monday.

‘Whether or not it was directed to the president or not, I don’t know, but we will find out.’

Secret Service Deputy Director Matthew Quinn held a media briefing later near the site of the shooting at the intersection of 15th and Independence Ave.

Quinn said a plainclothes officer who was patrolling the White House perimeter observed that the suspicious adult male had a “visual print” of a firearm not far from the White House complex.

Several uniformed Secret Service police officers then confronted the man, who tried to flee on foot and then fired in the direction of the officers. They fired back and struck the man.

The man was transported to a hospital, but Quinn had no comment on his condition. A juvenile was also struck by the gunfire from the individual. Quinn said the juvenile did not sustain life-threatening injuries.

A weapon was recovered by police.

He also noted that the motorcade for Vice President JD Vance had just driven by before the incident.

“Whether or not it was directed to the president or not, I don’t know, but we will find out,” Quinn said.

Quinn said there’s an active investigation into the use of force.

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He also would not say if the adult suspect said anything to the officers during the confrontation.

The shooting came only a week after an armed man allegedly tried to assassinate the president at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and was arrested.

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​White house lockdown, Jd vance motorcade, Secret service shooting, Trump assassination attempt, Politics 

The president of Cornell University is defending his actions after he was accused of recklessly driving his vehicle through a group of protesters angry about an Israel-Palestine debate hosted by the college.

The incident unfolded on Thursday when a group of people, including students, followed university president Michael Kotlikoff to his car after the debate.

‘I don’t even have the words for it. I was pretty shocked and offended.’

Kotlikoff got into his car and drove off as the people crowded around his car.

One student said the car hit him and ran over his foot, and others said they were peacefully trying to talk to the president.

“As we were still trying to talk to him, he just immediately started reversing into us,” said Aiden Vallecillo, a member of the Students for a Democratic Cornell.

Kotlikoff accused the protesters of trying to harass and intimidate him.

“These individuals are known to Cornell for their past conduct, including a long history of ongoing verbal and online abuse toward numerous members of Cornell’s administration and staff, as well as disruptive protest resulting, in the case of two individuals, in bans from campus,” the president wrote in the statement.

He said the students banged on his car windows, refused to stop yelling questions at him, and blocked the car.

“I waited until I saw space behind the car and then, using my car’s rear pedestrian alert and automatic braking system, was able to slowly maneuver my car from the parking space and exit the parking lot,” Kotlikoff added.

Another student expressed her outrage at the president’s actions.

“I don’t even have the words for it. I was pretty shocked and offended,” said Sophia Arnold, president of the Students for a Democratic Cornell. “A random pedestrian pulling out of a supermarket parking lot would probably have shown more care.”

She went on to claim the students were not intending to block his car.

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Surveillance video of the incident was published in the news video report from WSYR-TV.

“The behavior I experienced last night is not protest,” Kotlikoff concluded in his statement. “It is harassment and intimidation, with the direct motive of silencing speech. It has no place in an academic community, no place in a democracy, and can have no place at Cornell.”

It’s unclear if there’s an investigation under way or if charges will be filed over the incident.

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​Cornell university president, Harassment and intimidation, Israel palestine debate, Drive through protesters, Politics