Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Floridian aligned with Trump's campaign charged with faking registrations

Voter fraud warning
JimVallee/Getty Images

At least 119 forged voter registration applications have recently been filed in one central Florida county, and an employee of an organization promoting President Trump's re-election has been charged for allegedly submitting 10 of them.

The case is a rare instance of readily apparent voter fraud, a problem that Republicans across the country maintain is widespread but that Democrats disregard as vastly overstated.

Officials in Lake County, a reliably Republicans suburb west of Orlando, said that Cheryl Hall had been charged with 10 felonies — at least six alleging she switched Democratic and independent voters to be registered Republicans without their consent — but that sheriff's investigators had linked her to all 119 of the falsified forms.


Hall was a part-time employee of Florida First, a voter registration group funded mainly by the pro-Trump America First Policies, which has vowed to spend $20 million signing up conservatives to vote in Florida, the nation's most populous purple state, and three other potential November battlegrounds: Georgia, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

The fraud came to the county's attention last month when voters started complaining they had been notified their party affiliation had changed — even though they had never made such a switch. Several were Democrats planning to vote early in the presidential primary.

Many of the larger group of forms, which were all stamped with Florida First's return address, had incorrect addresses, birth dates, and Social Security and drivers' license numbers that were flagged as wrong by the county election database.

"It has absolutely nothing to do with party politics," Alan Hays, a Republican who is the county supervisor of elections, said in announcing the charges Thursday. "If you're misbehaving, I'm going to call you on it."

Meanwhile, in the Southwest

The Republican-led Arizona Senate, meanwhile, is expected to clear legislation this week to create an election fraud hotline, allow police into polling places and give GOP Attorney General Mark Brnovich more authority to investigate alleged election crimes. The measure could become law before the state presidential primary, which like Florida's is March 17, but if not by the time the state's 11 electoral votes are hard fought this fall. Democrats say there's no evidence of fraud in the state and that police in polling places will scare voters away.

And in Texas, Republicans are arching their eyebrows at a report from a conservative news site, The Texan: Hervis Johnson, the Houston man who gained global notoriety for waiting six hours to vote on Super Tuesday, was not supposed to have a registration card for another four months, when his probation ends for a 25-year-old second-degree burglary conviction.

Read More

Trump-Era Budget Cuts Suspend UCLA Professor’s Mental Health Research Grant

Professor Carrie Bearden (on the left) at a Stand Up for Science rally in spring 2025.

Photo Provided

Trump-Era Budget Cuts Suspend UCLA Professor’s Mental Health Research Grant

UC Los Angeles Psychology professor Carrie Bearden is among many whose work has been stalled due to the Trump administration’s grant suspensions to universities across the country.

“I just feel this constant whiplash every single day,” Bearden said. “The bedrock, the foundation of everything that we're doing, is really being shaken on a daily basis … To see that at an institutional level is really shocking. Yes, we saw it coming with these other institutions, but I think everybody's still sort of in a state of shock.”

Keep ReadingShow less
La Ventanita: Uniting Conservative Mothers and Liberal Daughters

Steph Martinez and Rachel Ramirez with their mothers after their last performance

Photo Provided

La Ventanita: Uniting Conservative Mothers and Liberal Daughters

When Northwestern theater and creative writing junior Lux Vargas wrote and brought to life La Ventanita, she created a space of rest and home for those who live in the grief of not belonging anywhere, yet still yearn for a sense of belonging together. By closing night, Vargas had mothers and daughters, once splintered by politics, in each other's arms. In a small, sold-out theater in Evanston, the story on stage became a mirror: centering on mothers who fled the country and daughters who left again for college.

Performed four times on May 9 and 10, La Ventanita unfolds in a fictional cafecito window inspired by the walk-up restaurant counters found throughout Miami. “The ventanita breeds conversations and political exchange,” said Vargas.

Keep ReadingShow less
Border Patrol in Texas
"Our communities fear that the police and deportation agents are one and the same," the authors write.
John Moore/Getty Images

Who deported more migrants? Obama or Trump? We checked the numbers

We received a question through our Instagram account asking "if it's true what people say" that President Barack Obama deported more immigrants than Donald Trump. To answer our follower, Factchequeado reviewed the public deportation data available from 1993 to June 2025, to compare the policies of both presidents and other administrations.

Deportation statistics ("removals") are not available in a single repository, updated information is lacking, and there are limitations that we note at the end of this text in the methodology section.

Keep ReadingShow less