Penna Dexter
Thankfully, the predicted long wait to learn the 2024 presidential outcome did not come to fruition last November. But results for many down-ballot races were delayed — some for weeks.
Experts warn that we have much more to do to clean up our elections.
The Daily Signal’s Fred Lucas points to Germany’s recent election in which all votes were counted on election night. We should ask ourselves why we often can’t do that here in the U.S.
Mr. Lucas cites several differences between our elections and those conducted in European democracies:

In many countries, especially parliamentary systems, the ballots are simpler. Germans voted for the party. The U.S. is a larger country with ballots which are longer and more complex.
Plus our system is decentralized. States run their own elections, creating most of their own rules.
But the most consequential cause of delays in vote counting in U.S. elections is the widespread use of mail-in ballots.

In his book, The Myth of Voter Suppression, Fred Lucas notes that nearly three fourths of countries in the European Union “don’t allow mail-in voting without specific reasons.”
According to J. Christian Adams, President of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, “These countries have in-person voting at the polling place and have results on election night.” What’s more, he says, “every European country except Britain has voter ID requirements.”  In the U.S., several states lack this fundamental protection.
Election law attorney, author and podcaster Cleta Mitchell founded the Election Integrity Network, a coalition dedicated to the security of every American vote. She recommends several commonsense protections. One that should be a no-brainer is: Do not let non-citizens participate in our elections. A federal bill requiring voter ID, the SAVE Act, awaits a vote in Congress.
Ms. Mitchell also says we should return to election-day and precinct-based, supervised voting. And paper ballots. For more, see Votefair2026.com.

Kerby Anderson
A recent educational report illustrates that our public schools are politically skewed. It concluded that the Marxist Howard Zinn’s book is used in a fourth (25%) of all American classrooms.
Educator Larry Sand explains that Zinn’s best-selling book, A People’s History of the United States, approaches history from a Marxist perspective. “Zinn maintained that the teaching of history should serve society in some way and that objectivity is impossible, and it is also undesirable.” Zinn even admitted that he wrote his book to create a revolution.
If you want to know more about Howard Zinn and his education project, you can follow the link to this commentary. Even better, you might want to obtain the book, Debunking Howard Zinn, written by Mary Grabar. I did an hour interview with her about the book a few years ago.
Larry Sand concludes that students may be becoming an experts in Marxist dogma, but they aren’t learning U.S. history. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni conducted a national survey of college students. It tested them about their basic knowledge of American history and government and found that significant numbers of college students graduate without a basic grasp of the nation’s history and political system. He also cites other surveys that come to the same discouraging conclusion.
In many cases, foreigners who come to the U.S. to become citizens learn more about our history and governmental structure than young people who attend our public schools. Why not require high school students to pass the citizenship test? Recently, the governor of Iowa announced a bill that would require high school students to pass the citizenship test to graduate. If the bill passes, Iowa will become the 14th state to adopt such a measure.
Our schools aren’t teaching history, and what they do teach is often politically skewed.

Kerby Anderson
Natasha Crain warns Christians in her new book, When Culture Hates You: Persevering for the Common Good as Christians in a Hostile Public Square. She begins by talking about the hostility Christians often face when they articulate a biblical perspective on cultural issues. We shouldn’t be surprised since Jesus warned us, “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you” (John 15:18).
One of the significant criticisms from non-Christians, and even from Christians, is the claim that Christians should not impose their views on others. We also hear that Christians should not seek power. We are told that getting involved in politics harms our witness and can disrupt unity in the church. And we are told that Christians should not be partisans.
To evaluate those objections, she proposes slavery as a test case. Here are her five key statements using those objections: (1) Christians shouldn’t have worked to end slavery because we shouldn’t have imposed our views on others. (2) Christians shouldn’t have worked to end slavery because that involved seeking power to do it. (3) Christians shouldn’t have worked to end slavery because getting involved with a political issue harmed our witness. (4) Christians shouldn’t have worked to end slavery because it disrupted unity in the church. (5) Christians shouldn’t have worked to end slavery because Christians shouldn’t have been partisans.
Would we accept those objections today? We would reject such reasoning and can see how we shouldn’t have applied such arguments two centuries ago. We were called to speak truth then and are called to speak truth today.