Merrill Matthews, Ph.D., is a resident scholar with the Institute for Policy Innovation, a research-based, public policy “think tank.” He is a health policy expert and weekly contributor at Forbes.com. He also serves as Vice Chairman of the Texas Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Dr. Matthews is a past president of the Health Economics Roundtable for the National Association for Business Economics, the largest trade association of business economists. Dr. Matthews also served for 10 years as the medical ethicist for the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center’s Institutional Review Board for Human Experimentation, and has contributed chapters to several books, including Physician Assisted Suicide: Expanding the Debate and The 21st Century Health Care Leader and, in 2009, Stop Paying the Crooks (on Medicare fraud).

He has been published in numerous journals and newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, Investor’s Business Daily, Barron’s, USA Today, Forbes magazine and the Washington Times. He was an award-winning political analyst for the USA Radio Network.

Dr. Matthews received his Ph.D. in Humanities from the University of Texas at

Mr. Shackelford is a constitutional scholar who has argued before the United States Supreme Court, testified before the U.S. House and Senate on constitutional issues, and has won three state landmark First Amendment and religious liberty cases in the past few years alone. He was recently named one of the 25 greatest Texas lawyers of the past quarter century by Texas Lawyer, and is the recipient of the prestigious William Bentley Ball Award for Life and Religious Freedom Defense for his leadership and pioneering work protecting religious freedom.

Director for Cultural Engagement - Denison Forum on Truth and Culture
J. Nick Pitts serves as the director of cultural engagement at the Denison Forum on Truth and Culture.

He came to the Denison Forum in 2014 after a fateful conversation with its founder, Dr. Jim Denison. Pitts, a Ph.D. candidate at Dallas Baptist University (DBU), had spent the summer studying at Oxford with other students and faculty including Denison, a visiting professor.

He contributes to the Forum in the areas of geopolitics and popular culture, as well as serving as the editor of the Daily Briefing. He continues work on his doctorate and serves as an adjunct professor at DBU, teaching a master’s level course in the philosophy of leadership.

His Ph.D. research centers upon John F. Kennedy’s engagement of the religious community in the 1960 presidential campaign. He presented a paper on the topic at Calvin College’s 2015 symposium on religion and public life.

He is an editor at large for The Liberty Project, an online magazine, and his op-eds have been published by The Philadelphia Inquirer, Religion News Service and Townhall.com.

He received a bachelor’s degree in 2007 from Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, Tennessee, and a master’s degree in 2009 from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.

Presidential Election Results: Donald J. Trump Wins

Senate Election Results: G.O.P. Keeps Control

America’s limited experiment with voter-ID laws may come to an end after this election. Democrats keep claiming that voter fraud is a myth. But voter fraud has mattered in plenty of American elections. Take Lyndon Johnson’s election to the U.S. Senate in 1948, when LBJ won by manufacturing enough fake votes to turn a 20,000-vote deficit into an 87-vote win. Others point to voter fraud in Illinois and Texas during the 1960 presidential election; indeed, we may never know whether Kennedy actually “won.” Chicago was infamous for counting the votes of dead people. In 1982, U.S. Attorney Daniel Webb found that at least 100,000 fraudulent votes were cast. In 1994, Democrats obtained control of the Pennsylvania state Senate through large-scale voter fraud using absentee ballots. In 2008, illegal voting made a decisive difference in a U.S. Senate race, giving Al Franken a seat from Minnesota — one could argue that Franken’s vote allowed Obamacare to get through the Senate.