Counties across the U.S. are switching to hand-counting election ballots instead of using electronic tabulation machines over concerns about the accuracy and security of the devices.

At the forefront of the transition is election integrity advocate Linda Rantz, who says her model, now being used in a Missouri county, is less expensive than critics continue to say it is.

While the security of the country's election system has always been a concern, the matter burst into the public eye in the 2020 presidential election, amid the concerns of then-President Trump and others about the reliability and transparency of voting machines.

Early this year, the board of supervisors in California’s Shasta County, with over 110,000 registered voters, decided to move to hand-counting for all of its elections, after voting in January to terminate its contract with Dominion Voting Systems over concerns about its voting machines.

Georgia prosecutors investigating Trump’s efforts to challenge the 2020 election have broadened their probe to the former president’s activities in other states, according to a leak to the Washington Post.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin sought out communist Chinese Defense Minister Li Shangfu for a handshake at the security summit in Singapore Friday. The two men spoke briefly, Shangu could be seen smiling as they shook hands.

Disney’s stock has taken a beating.

According to a report from The Washington Free Beacon, the House of Mouse stock price has been on a steady downward trajectory since feuding with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over his Parental Rights in Education Act (mislabeled the “Don’t Say Gay” bill).

From The Free Beacon:

By the numbers: Disney stock was trading at $133.65 a share when Chapek accused DeSantis of promoting legislation that would “unfairly target gay, lesbian, nonbinary, and transgender kids and families.” Disney shares opened at $89.44 and continued to fall on Wednesday ahead of DeSantis’s formal entry into the 2024 presidential campaign.

• That’s a decline of 33.1 percent in a little over 14 months.

FBI Director Chris Wray caved to Oversight Chairman James Comer on Friday.

One of the left’s favorite tactics to discount criticism of anti-American billionaire George Soros is to claim detractors are “antisemites” because Soros has Jewish ancestry. But one Jewish group has just completely blown that defense out of the water.

Authorities have launched an investigation after an LGBTQ flag was burned at Saticoy Elementary School in North Hollywood, Southern California, just before a planned Pride event. The incident is being treated as a hate crime, NBC News reported.

The top content moderation deputy to Elon Musk has abruptly departed Twitter following a fiasco involving the company’s initial decision to backtrack on a free offering of the documentary “What is a Woman?” and limit its reach among followers.

Ella Irwin, the company’s former top official for safety and content moderation, drafted her resignation Thursday in the hours following Musk’s decision to reverse the company’s position on the documentary. The CEO claimed the documentary, which explores America’s ongoing debate around transgender accommodations, does not violate the company’s hateful speech policy as previously stated. Irwin likely made the executive decision to limit the documentary’s reach based on several scenes involving “misgendering,” or the deliberate use of pronouns that do not conform to a person’s preferred gender.

Irwin did not comment on her resignation when asked by the Wall Street Journal, which first reported her ouster.

Copies of the King James Bible are to be removed from the libraries of elementary and junior high schools in Davis County, Utah after complaints by parents claiming that the Bible contains material inappropriate for young children.

A review committee for the Davis School District decided to pull the Bible after claims that it contained “vulgarity and violence.” The Bible will not be allowed in libraries of elementary and junior high schools of the district, but it will remain available in the high schools.

Davis County School District Communications Director Christopher Williams said that the committee had actually determined that the Bible “does not contain sensitive material as defined by Utah Code,” however they still removed it from 7-8 schools because of “age appropriateness.”

In 2022, Utah State Legislators passed a law, HB374, which banned sensitive material from schools. Since the law passed, dozens of books have been removed from schools around the state.

The law states that if a parent presents a formal request to the district, schools must remove books that contain “human genitals in a state of sexual stimulation or arousal, acts of human masturbation or sexual intercourse, and fondling or other erotic touching of human genitals or public regions.”

In March, an unknown parent of a Davis School District student had made a complaint to the District that the Bible contained material inappropriate for younger children, and that it contains “no serious values for minors.”

On Friday, the Department of Justice (DOJ) reportedly closed its investigation into former Vice President Mike Pence’s retention of classified documents. He will not face charges.

Multiple sources told Fox News that the investigation into the alleged improper retention of classified documents held at Pence’s Indiana residence from his time within the Trump administration has been closed.

In a shocking turn of events, the Rushingbrook Children’s Choir was interrupted and stopped while singing the National Anthem in Statuary Hall at the United States Capitol.

The children, part of the esteemed Rushingbrook Children’s Choir, had traveled to Washington, D.C. last Friday, May 26th, for a scheduled Capitol tour and had received prior approval to sing a short set of patriotic songs inside the historic Statuary Hall.

However, as their angelic voices filled the grand hall while singing The Star-Spangled Banner with pride, Capitol Police rudely intervened, insisting that the children stop singing immediately. The abrupt interruption stunned the young performers, the choir director, and the assembled audience.

The Capitol Police did not allow the young children to finish the song and sought to explain to the choir director that singing the national anthem at the nation’s Capitol is considered a form of protest.

Webmaster addition: Utterly insane!

Speaking on his weekly Friday interview on Kossuth radio, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán today warned against a Ukrainian counteroffensive in the Ukraine-Donbass border dispute, which will “lose many lives.”

Cristina Laila reported Joe Biden took a horrific fall Thursday while delivering a commencement speech at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

Kennedy, the son of former US Attorney General Robert Kennedy, is polling at 20% in the Democrat Primary – and that is with nearly 100% negative coverage by the establishment media. In a recent FOX News poll Kennedy had 16% of the vote against a sitting president. That is unheard of.

Kari Lake will replace Mike Pence as the keynote speaker alongside President Trump and other MAGA conservatives at the Georgia GOP convention on June 9.

Former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot already has a new job. The far left Democrat has been hired by Harvard University to teach public health and leadership.

An ominous Ukraine war development this week was Putin’s Tuesday announcement that Russia launched a drone strike recently hitting the head of the snake, Ukraine’s intelligence command center headquarters:

We’ve been talking about the possibility of striking the ‘decision-making centers.’ Naturally, Ukraine’s military intelligence headquarters falls into such a category, and it was hit two or three days ago.

While visiting the African nation of Burundi on Tuesday May 30th, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated:

The Western claim that the weapons shipped [to Kiev] must not be used on Russian territory is yet another lie. As for the threats being uttered against Russians, we have also told our friends today how we view this situation. Threats to kill Russians have come from many official representatives of the Kiev regime, including the Security Council secretary, including [Zelensky] advisor, including several Ukrainian ambassadors abroad. Now, as you know, an American senator [Lindsey Graham] has opened up on this topic.

Putin also commented that the Ukraine launched at least eight unmanned aerial drones targeting a residential Moscow apartment buildings earlier on Tuesday is aimed “to intimidate Russian citizens,” as yet another “clear sign” of Kiev’s “terrorist activity,” unlike Russian strikes restricted to ammunition and fuel depots and specific military targets.

As we recently pointed out, the city of Chicago has approved $51 million in spending on illegal immigrants.

Joe Biden bumped his head exiting Marine One Thursday evening as he returned to the White House after a trip to Colorado.

In what can only be viewed as a massive betrayal of public trust, two days ago a Louisiana Senate Judiciary Committee defeated legislation that would have prohibited sworn adversaries of the United States from purchasing immovable property in the interior of the State.

Clothing retail store Kohl’s has joined Target and Bud Light as the latest company to be boycotted by Conservatives.

Katie Hobbs has placed multiple pride flags outside her office at the Capitol above the American flag and state flag to kick off “LGBTQI+ Pride Month.”

Webmaster addition: That is actually illegal. No flag is supposed to fly above the US flag.

4 U.S. Code § 7 - Position and manner of display

The Senate rejected an amendment to the Debt Limit bill that would have added the House-passed H.R. 2, the Secure the Border Act, to the must-pass legislation. The amendment was defeated 46-to-51 mostly along party lines with all but one Republican supporting the amendment and all the Democrats opposing the amendment.

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) offered the amendment that would have added one of the strongest immigration enforcement bills in history to the Debt Limit legislation.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) was the lone Republican to oppose the amendment. Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) did not vote. Every Democrat opposed the amendment except for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) who also didn't vote.

The Thursday Twitter debut of conservative commentator Matt Walsh's film "What Is a Woman?" was hamstrung by apparent censorship efforts. Although Elon Musk indicated these censorial efforts were a mistake made "by many people at Twitter," it was a collective mistake not quickly remedied as the Daily Wire crew continued to observe limited reach and "hateful conduct" labels well into the night.

Musk simplified matters Friday morning, posting a link to the video on his own page for the edification of his 141.8 million followers. He captioned the video post, "Every parent should watch this."

The original post shared by Musk now has over 22.7 million views, 40.1K retweets, and 99.7K likes as of the time of publication.

People who store a few hundred bucks in Venmo, PayPal, or CashApp could lose their hard-earned money, a federal government watchdog has warned.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) says those funds might not be safe in a crisis.

The apps are hugely popular and billions of dollars are at risk, the bureau warns.

The alert comes in the wake of the failures of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic Bank, when worried customers pulled out their money en masse in frantic bank runs.

Chase Bank's website is down as customers have reported their transactions are going through twice - leaving some in arrears. 

The financial giant said at 8AM eastern time that the glitches were due to a 'technical issue' and would be resolved within five hours from then, according to the US Sun.

It added it was working to reverse any duplicate charges. 

Customers will be updated about the progress via the Chase banking app or through a text message.

Data from Downdetector shows that those in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and Dallas are worst-affected by the outages.

Colonel Tucker 'Cinco' Hamilton, the force's chief of AI test and operations, made waves after describing the purported mishap in remarks at a conference in London last week.

In remarks summarized on the conference website, he described a flight simulation in which an AI drone tasked with destroying an enemy installation rejected the human operator's final command to abort the mission.

'So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective,' said Hamilton, who seemed to be describing the outcome of an actual combat simulation.

But on Friday, Hamilton said in a statement to the conference organizers that he 'mis-spoke' during the presentation and that the 'rogue AI drone simulation' was a hypothetical 'thought experiment' from outside the military.

The crowd at the Fox News Thursday night town hall featuring President Donald Trump wasn’t having it when host Sean Hannity asked him about the idea that he should “tone it down” when appealing to moderate voters.

Boos erupted before Hannity could finish his question, causing him to ask the audience to “leave me alone.”