On the eve of Election Day, North Carolina’s outstanding absentee vote count stood at nearly 200,000 requested ballots. Given how close races up and down the ballot are expected to be in the state, election integrity advocates there are concerned about last-minute delays that could flip results in the days after the election.

One of the biggest concerns comes from Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) voters, citizens stationed abroad like diplomats or members of the military, whose overall vote total is in the tens of thousands, but trends Democrat. The catch in North Carolina is that state law for UOCAVA voters have little-to-no security measures for this kind of absentee voter.

“The way they’re going to steal it is they’re going to drag in a bunch of UOCAVA voters, whatever Delta they need to make up,” Jay DeLancy, executive director of the Voter Integrity Project of North Carolina, told The Federalist. “With this number of ballots, it looks like they’ve got a built-in bank of ballots they can dump in anytime they want to after they know the results, to customize the turnout.”

As of Nov. 4, there are 197,319 overall absentee ballots in North Carolina that have been requested, but not returned, according to the ticker on the Democrat-run North Carolina State Board of Elections (NCSBE). DeLancy says part of the problem is that there is no way of knowing how many of those outstanding absentee ballots are UOCAVA and how many are in-state North Carolinians.

Republicans in the battleground Badger State say they’ve got an army of election observers ready for duty this Election Day. But one volunteer who will be observing at Milwaukee polls is raising concerns about what he sees as the GOP’s timid approach to checking threats on election integrity. 

The source, who asked to remain anonymous, attended a recent Zoom training session for attorney observers led by the Republican National Lawyers Association. The session was off the record and closed to the press, but the source sent the video recording of the Zoom meeting to The Federalist because he said he was concerned that the people serving as frontline guardians of election integrity may be going much too gently into that good Election Night. 

“This is the first time I had not heard, ‘Don’t be afraid to assert your rights’ in some form,” the veteran elections observer told me in a phone interview from Wisconsin.  

RNLA trainers leading the session stressed that the job of the monitoring attorneys is to be the association’s “eyes and ears,” to serve as a deterrent for misconduct and election fraud, but to do so without being “confrontational.” That’s understandable advice from Milwaukee election veterans who lived through 2020, when poll watchers were blocked from viewing and some were threatened with removal under the cover of Covid distance restrictions. 

With the phony narrative pushed by corporate media that election workers are under constant threat from “election deniers,” power-tripping chief inspectors might be on hair-trigger edge

This past February, President Biden referred to the tsunami of current migrants as “newcomers.” A euphemism that normalizes illegal migration, it was a cue for Catholic voters. The word was the brainchild of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB). It appeared in the 2024 USCCB document “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship: A Call to Political Responsibility.”

The Gospel mandate to “welcome the stranger” requires Catholics to care for and stand with newcomers, authorized and unauthorized, including unaccompanied immigrant children, refugees and asylum-seekers, those unnecessarily detained, and victims of human trafficking.

Under the heading “Global Solidarity,” the USCCB conflates immigration with migration. The first is a legal process, in effect a contract between arrivals and the state. In current context, the latter term refers to illegal entry by the brute force of overwhelming numbers. Moralistic disdain for distinction between “authorized and unauthorized” entry is the core of open borders dogma.

In August, Pope Francis used the bully pulpit of St. Peter’s Square to pressure nations of the West to keep their borders open, no matter the consequence to their native populations. He presented prudent immigration restriction as a moral crime and dismissed legality. The USCCB reported:

“It needs to be said clearly: There are those who systematically work by all means to drive away migrants, and this, when done knowingly and deliberately, is a grave sin,” he said during his general audience Aug. 28.

Without irony — and short on historical sense — the USCCB