> Postal Service mail ballot system has catastrophic problems
Yes. That's the point. The administration doesn't care about fixing whatever hypothetical mail ballot fraud may or may not exist; they are doing this to inject chaos into the election results, giving them cover to claim any result they want or even to just throw out the results entirely. Catastrophic problems are the means to that end.
And when it all goes to shit, they can just use that as evidence that mail-in voting shouldn’t have been allowed in the first place.
It is the same tired but sadly effective Republican playbook: take a mostly functioning if imperfect system, break it beyond repair under the guise of fixing or reforming it, use the ongoing disaster to argue that it should be dismantled, rinse and repeat until it’s unsalvageable.
Exactly. It's incredible how partisan some peoples information bubbles must be to not see this for what it is.
All of these changes are based on the president making comments like the following:
> "the cheating on mail-in voting is legendary,"
Which he has attempted to prove going back years. And every time it's been found that it essentially doesn't happen. And I believe, the few instances of voter fraud that have been found have been majority republicans and not democrats as has been accused.
So to begin with, anyone arguing for these changes need to acknowledge the well established fact that there is effectively zero voter fraud at all levels throughout the country in anyway impacting elections. As has been investigated and shown time and time and time again. If they aren't beginning with the well established state of the world then they are in fact are the one entering with an extremely partisan hat.
Now if their argument is "yes it's true voter fraud has been investigated countless times, and continuously shown to effectively be smaller than a rounding error, does not impact elections, is know to not be a problem, but I still want to make sweeping changes right before an election." Then sure that's a point of discussion. Then I think the simple question then becomes "why"? But if they aren't willing to begin with an accurate discussion of the facts and state of the situation (there is no voter fraud problem), then any comment they make following that has little credibility.
Why is he pushing to outlaw mail-in voting when there is no issue with mail in voting? Is it because one party votes by mail more than the other?
Or the change in the date mail can receives a postmark? Previously mail was transported to the facility to the same day so would get postmarked that day. Now, as this year, mail won't get post-marked the day it's dropped in a mail box - so any zipcode's mail boxes can now be marked as being sent too late to count, even if they were dropped off before election day.
> While we are not changing our postmarking practices, we have made adjustments to our transportation operations that will result in some mailpieces not arriving at our originating processing facilities on the same day that they are mailed. This means that the date on the postmarks applied at our processing facilities will not necessarily match the date on which the customer’s mailpiece was collected by a letter carrier or dropped off at a retail location.
If the administration actually cared about getting an accurate vote, why aren't they opening more voting locations? Why don't they mandate one voting location per every x number of citizens? Why would the Department of Homeland Security decide who is allowed to get ballots via the mail?
If it's so bad, why has the administration failed time and time again to produce any evidence it's actually bad? If it's so horrible, and wide spread why is it impossible to find evidences that supports this? Or shows it overturning elections or anything close?
It's the same scheme. Make a bunch of baseless assertions, repeat them frequently enough and people in an information bubble will begin to believe it. And that's clearly what's happening here. Just like "we've won the war in Iran" 20 times now. And "Iran has agreed to peace deal where they surrender" 15 times now. And how every weekend for months there were claims about the work on Friday that somehow magically fell apart by Monday. And yet somehow there are still people who give these false claims, and the people claiming them, any amount of credibility.
Voter fraud is not a problem in this country. It does not rig elections, it does not sway elections. So sudden last min drastic changes in the voting process right before an election, by someone who has previously attempted a coup (not the protest on the capital but the actual coup attempt), has said they admire the leader of a country who dismantled its democracy (Orban) - and previously pushed the govt to make false claims of vote fraud to keep him in power.
> The Trump fake electors plot was an attempt by U.S. president Donald Trump and associates to have him remain in power after losing the 2020 United States presidential election. After the results of the election determined Trump had lost, he, his associates, and Republican Party officials in seven battleground states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin[1] – devised a scheme to submit fraudulent certificates of ascertainment to falsely claim Trump had won the Electoral College vote in crucial states. The plot was one of Trump and his associates' attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election.
Then, when that failed:
> Trump pressured the Justice Department to falsely announce it had found election fraud, and he attempted to install a new acting attorney general who had drafted a letter falsely asserting such election fraud had been found, in an attempt to persuade the Georgia legislature to convene and reconsider its Biden electoral votes.
Like I think there are people in such an information bubble that they aren't even aware these are well established facts. Not partisan talking points, but a recounting of facts of the lengths that have already been attempted to remain in power illegally. And now sudden sweeping changes to voting right before an election amid false claims of rigged elections.
It isn't just injecting chaos, but instead is trying to engineer an outcome. Find every mechanism and group that is likely to vote against you, and do everything possible to disenfranchise those voters. They've already gotten a ruling that ballots received after a cutoff do not count, regardless of the reason, so now they're engineering assurances that they get to choose from where ballots can be selectively delayed.
> They've already gotten a ruling that ballots received after a cutoff do not count
Watson v. Republican National Committee seems to be the opposite of what you state: ballots received after election day can be counted provided they were postmarked on or before election day.
You're right, the 5-4 SCOTUS ruling this summer reversed the appeals court ruling, preserving states' rights to set laws that permit counting postmarked ballots -- if postmarked in time.
Curiously, the USPS changed when it postmarks mail this year, resulting in postmark delays. In Washington state, the number of ballots rejected for being late is up 32% compared to 2024.
“He had told me [before the election] he was going to unleash the ‘anomaly in the matrix,’ ” St. Clair says in championed documentarist Alex Gibney’s film, Musk"
He’s just demanding the same kind of rigor he demands from Trump about rigged elections. Here you go RickWagoner the Republican Governor of famously liberal Wyoming smells something fishy too: https://www.codyenterprise.com/news/local/article_7f688e37-3...
You're replying to someone's personal interpretation and opinion asking about a source? That is the source. Do you not understand how discussions work?
So a party calling for voter id is following the will of the people, while politicians opposing the will of the people are justifying the need for a fix, right?
> politicians opposing the will of the people are justifying the need for a fix, right?
That's a funny way of saying that they support the status quo, which has never been provably linked to large-scale voter fraud.
If you want voter ID, here's the procedure: establish evidence showing that its need outweighs its disadvantages, then pass a bill in Congress, then implement the bill. Signing an Executive Order that demands illegal overreach without justification is not the American way.
Agreed, if id becomes madatory for voting then an appropriate id needs to be provided for free, otherwise it is effectively a poll tax, and poll taxes are illegal.
If they gave a crap about the will of the people then why is marijuana still illegal? When you defy the will of the people 99% of the time, claiming your motivation is the will of the people when it is convenient rings pretty hollow.
We just spent a year hearing from some asshole about how the government was spending too much money and couldn't afford frivolities, yet we're supposed to spend money on security theatre to fix a problem that doesn't actually exist, all because some other assholes are butthurt about losing an election fair and square?
Remember the people leading the charge for this are insurrectionists. They don't care about protecting voting or the concept of democracy at all.
The article you’ve provided clearly says Trumps dialogue is not to be taken literally. ( It does say there are other ways the election might be tinkered with, but these are for another discussion. )
I don’t find that article to be particularly worrying.
> I don’t find that article to be particularly worrying.
The issue is not the article, but the president's own words. Do you find it concerning that the president has expressed a desire to cancel elections? Or do you think he was joking?
Follow-up question: was/is he joking about building the wall, mass deportations, eliminating birthright citizenship, or running for a third term?
> If I take a look, through a security lens, of the existing mail in process from registration to recording votes, it’s quite shocking.
What about it is "shocking"? Please be specific.
Please note that the alleged justification these changes is widespread voter fraud, which has never been shown to exist at a level even close to significant, despite many years of effort [1].
> the only way to do anything is to shove an executive order through the post office to prevent mail fraud.
Or, ya know, make a persuasive case based on evidence of actual fraud and pass a bill in Congress, the way the country is supposed to work?
> This is a kind of comment I would expect on Reddit and not hn.
Yours is a low-effort riposte if ever there was one.
> If you took off your partisan hat, put on your red team hat
A humorous double meaning, almost like taking the hat off and putting it back on again.
But seriously I would expect a stronger argument in favor of these changes from proponents like you, something sourced, especially given the trial runs of these encroachments that've been run in a number of red states that haven't found any significant security issues and just turned out to be a waste of taxpayer dollars, time, and trust.
Do your readers a favor and bring something at least as substantive as the article you're commenting on.
From my perspective this just looks like voter suppression. Your hypothetical edge cases operate at a scale that doesn't matter in the slightest, a fundamental rookie security mistake.
You supplied nothing to back up your extraordinary claims. Your claims are extraordinary given the almost non-existent issues with mail-in voting. But if you'd like to prove otherwise, be my guest.
Which "side" has been fighting tooth and nail for unverifiable mail-in ballots and resisting all investigations of voting integrity? Though both sides are also embracing totally insecure and insane digital voting systems that have been caught doing things like duplicating votes and enabling fractional voting in general elections.
he is implying that the focus on the republican cases (the survivors) is a red herring because the system is presumably such that an actual conspiracy cannot be detected.
I don't know anything about elections, a question worth asking is what would it look like if a conspiracy set out to exploit mail ballots? could detection only originate from a defector?
> I don't know anything about elections, a question worth asking is what would it look like if a conspiracy set out to exploit mail ballots? could detection only originate from a defector?
Why don't you start with some research of your own and outline how such a conspiracy would work and how large it would have to be.
Don't throw out a hypothetical "could it even be caught?" to try to bias people without doing any sort of even cursory glance at how things work.
Hell, while you're at it, please outline other possible conspiracies, and think about if there are potential vulnerabilities that could very require less major coordination than mail-in ballots. (Not even including the 'have a president who constantly tells everyone that if he loses it will be due to fraud to stoke the flames in advance' strategy!)
> he is implying that the focus on the republican cases (the survivors) is a red herring because the system is presumably such that an actual conspiracy cannot be detected.
Maybe GP is implying that, but that's not what they said, because what you describe is not survivorship bias.
> I don't know anything about elections, a question worth asking is what would it look like if a conspiracy set out to exploit mail ballots? could detection only originate from a defector?
You are asking the wrong question. The correct question is: If mail-in voter fraud cannot be detected, then why do people claim that mail-in voter fraud exists? If there isn't evidence that it exists, then the people who claim that it exists are making statements not based on evidence. In other words, their opinions are either not informed by facts, in which case we should disregard their opinions; or their statements are not sincere expressions of belief, in which case they are liars and we should not trust them.
at some point how much more money do you want to burn on investigations w/o any particular new cause?
"unverifiable" ain't exactly true either where i live. you might think there should be more or different verification, sure, start some discussions in your local area. don't bring the federal government into everyone else's after the administration shows a long history of crying wolf and pre-seeding conspiracy theories with "i can't possibly lose" stuff. if you're convinced the states and local municipalities can't run stuff, it should be easy to prove.
> Which "side" has been fighting tooth and nail for unverifiable mail-in ballots
Mail-in ballots are currently accepted in 23 states [1], including Utah, Kansas, and Florida. Which "side" is that? Please note Donald Trump personally uses the terribly unsecure and unverifiable method of mail-in ballot, so either he thinks it's secure enough, or, uh, is not being totally honest with us.
> resisting all investigations of voting integrity?
Which investigations, specifically, are you referring to? As far as I know, Trump formed a voter integrity commission in his first term which was unable to find any evidence of voter fraud and was therefore subsequently disbanded [2]. Since then, the only source of information on the allegedly widespread voter fraud is from Donald Trump's own mouth.
> The United States Postal Service has spent months developing a U.S. Federal Ballot Mail Portal to provide election officials with a simple, secure, and efficient way to share lists of individuals receiving ballots by mail in their respective states.
Why? Your job is to transfer pieces of mail from one place to another. Just continue that. Everything else is manufacturing a problem where there was none.
Regardless what anyone thinks about the security of voting in the US. I'd hope that they could see how massively upending multiple states' voting systems 2 months before the midterms is a really bad idea. Even with the best intentions, implementing such a sweeping untested change so rapidly is a horrible idea.
(No, I don't support it regardless, but surely even if you do you could recognize that the timeframe is way too short).
To go beyond the understatement of "bad idea" (and likely make the subtext into text): This thing is unmistakable malice, not mere incompetence.
There's no "oops I didn't know" or "oops I timed the project wrong" or "oops I forgot about the election deadline" or "oops nobody told me about the court-order prohibiting it", etc.
There's a voted-into-oblivion reply to this from someone trying to both-sides things "I don't want to hear about it when it was changed quickly for Covid too".
but it doesn't work...anything then was done under literally the same President we have today?
That's pretty damn hilarious: *don't complain to me about the Trump admin fucking with the voting system on short notice in 2026 since the Trump admin also fucked with the voting system on short notice in 2020!"
(At least there was a major national emergency going on that time...)
---
It's a point in favor of the "malicious" theory, though. Here's arguably the person who would have the most reason to not fuck with things last-minute, who complained at no end about the results, is now making his own last minute changes... hmmmm.... must still believe he got cheated, and is intentionally trying to cheat instead.
"I can't believe Obama did this to us while we were in the middle of fighting Joe Bidens war in Iran! It's almost as bad as Bill Clinton's darn Tariffs!" - Future Trump, probably
There is something incredibly cancerous when a certain party abhors democracy, and does everything they can to undermine the voting rights or access to groups they think won't vote for them.
I would expect most Americans would see this as grotesquely anti-American, and absolutely against the principals of the country. Instead it barely makes news and is just another "get whatever advantage you can" tactic.
"Abhors democracy" isn't necessarily the right phrase for the on-the-ground majority. The leadership, sure. But not the average folk.
"Has such a small imagination that they can't imagine they wouldn't be the majority" is more like it.
For all the old fears of "we need the senate so big cities don't run the country" they have a massive blind spot of there being less diversity of thought, and more of a monoculture, in suburban and rural areas. And they don't realize that because of this they shouldn't be surprised if not everyone agrees with them.
There's a sizable part of the group that truly believe that cities get more representation than they do, that there are more rural Americans than urban.
Given that they are dedicated to causing chaos in the midterms, how is it best countered? Whisper campaigns to tell all your friends to vote in person? When he loses, what stops him from putting troops in the streets? Is the recourse just wait until he goes? We all see what's happening, how do we meet the moment?
I'm wondering how easy the USPS is to route around.
In California's last election, there were 2,758 drop-box locations and 3,546 polling locations. In cities, these are often within walking distance. In rural areas, they might not be so convenient.
So it seems like, at least for returning ballots, any USPS snafus would affect rural voters (which skew Republican) more than urban?
Delivering is another question. I wonder if local governments could drop off ballots if they needed to?
No, the procedures are designed to reject more votes in blue areas, just like the procedures that somehow conclude that people named Williams, John, or Washington should be dropped from the rolls for being similarly named as other people named Williams, John, or Washington.
good thing it's completely illegal for the federal government to interfere with state voting proceedure
> For instance, the Postal Service has what the whistleblower claims is a "zero percent failure rate."
> Mail workers would scan a sample of a batch of mail ballots — about 400 out of a batch of 10,000 or more — to verify it matches what is in the federal mail ballot portal.
> Under the policy, if even one barcode on a single ballot in the batch doesn't scan properly or the information does not match, the entire batch would be rejected and returned to state election officials so the problem ballot could be addressed, and then the verification process would have to be started again.
This is not the job of the postal service, but of the government. There is zero reason to outsource verification, and the postal service ought to vehemently reject this attempt to shift responsibility. Though I guess they won't, seeing as they are gleichgeschaltet.
The wrong government! Voter rolls etc. are state responsibilities, not a federal ones.
And please, don't spend a second entertaining any crocodile-tears and pearl-clutching from Republicans about how "maybe states don't have rights and need consistent standards" all of a sudden. Nobody with any good-intentions for reform would wait until right before a major election to do something crazy that could disenfranchise millions.
Ex: "Stop being so mean to Bob, he just wanted to help out with platform stability when he stole that SSH key to push an un-reviewed hotfix to prod while betting the company stock would crash on a gambling site."
Fallacy of composition. It would be factual to say that the USPS is part of the federal government, but then the statement becomes completely irrelevant.
And no, the USPS is not in the Constitution. Article I Section 8 gives Congress the power "To establish Post Offices and post Roads". They executed that power via legislation. The USPS didn't come into being until 1970, replacing the United States Post Office Department, a branch of the cabinet. The legislation creating the USPS says that it "shall not make any undue or unreasonable discrimination among users of the mails" -- what Trump has tasked it to do is in direct violation of that law.
Assuming they check 400 out of 10k, and assuming someone would want to cause any meaningful discrepancies >= 1% of the ballots, meaning 100 problematic ballots per 10k batch.
This system would catch it 98,3% of the time. Pretty good, I'd say.
1 million ballots at 10,000 per batch means 100 batches. It seems they will use 400 ballots from each batch as a sample, and if anything is wrong for one of those 400 sample ballots, then the entire batch of 10,000 is sent back. Some nefarious actor could find 100 messed up ballots and include one in each sample of 400, and viola! 100 ballots invalidates 1 million votes. That's quite a system they got there.
Everyone wants a winner on the day, and if the votes are pushed back it goes into 'hanging chad' time, which some appointed judge can just decide if the votes are included / the winner.
I'd wager most of us are OK with it taking a few days. There's a (relative) few weirdos that get upset if they see the numbers change as votes continue to be tallied.
The entire state of Oregon has done vote-by-mail for the past ~30 years and it seems to have gone fine for them for decades. Then again, their voting by mail wasn't being challenged by an actively hostile Federal government for much of that time.
No, Election Day is not a paid holiday, or even a recognized holiday. Public schools are generally out (at least the ones used as voting precints) but folks have work, and typically most "in person" votes are cast after 5pm (after folks traditionally leave work).
Mail in voting has been something that the elderly, infirmed, workers, and folks in the military have done for decades. It's remarkably secure and quite auditable. The issue the right has with it is that the folks that vote by mail (the military notwithstanding) are typically democrats.
It is not a paid holiday. It isn't an unpaid holiday either. And if you work a minimum wage job, you probably need to work as many hours as you can. And if you don't show up to work on Tuesday, don't bother showing up on Wednesday because you don't have that job anymore.
This is absolutely discriminatory against the poor. That's why the republicans fight for these types of restrictions and democrats fight against them.
We have a designated Election Day. It is (as you correctly imply) not a federal holiday. My own perspective is that that is indeed clearly discriminatory, and that some people like it that way.
While I think that making it a national holiday would be a good idea because it would maximize the number of eligible voters, it would still disenfranchise some people. There are jobs that have to be done 24/7/365 (mostly safety jobs), therefor there will be someone who is stuck at work that day. There are people who work at power companies on Christmas Day just to make sure the lights on Christmas trees light up.
I think the best approach is what Georgia has done. No-excuse mail-in for those who want that. And 3 weeks of early voting including Saturdays. And for those who just enjoy standing in lines, there is the official Election Day. If a redneck state can get it done without issues, then we all can do it.
Functionally, a literal handful per season which are typically caught and prosecuted.
The right leaning Brookings and Heritage foundations dug into the numbers and found this
"Across the entire country, and utilizing a maximally inclusive estimate, between six and 46 cases of mail voting fraud were identified in each general election"
Table:
Year Total mail voting fraud percentage (out of total mail ballots cast)
2016 0.000089%
2018 0.000024%
2020 0.000051%
2022 0.000010%
Average 0.000043%
That's just fear mongering. Absentee voting by mail has been a thing for centuries. Attempting to limit it to people who are unable to vote in person doesn't do anything to make it more secure, and is a very weak control. It's not like they're going to check up on every single person who claims to have a specific reason they can't get to the polls. Beyond that, no-excuse absentee ballots have been a thing in many states for decades. Three states have been mailing absentee ballots to every voter automatically for a decade or more. Despite this long history, there is no evidence of widespread fraud or other problems resulting from it.
Agreed. I can't even recall any point in my life when an allegation of fraud was made before Trump came on the scene. I've seen requests for recounts when the margins were close, but never an allegation of malicious intent.
Over and over and over and over again it has been shown that there is no meaningful voter fraud whatsoever. Stop watching Fox News or as I see below reading yahoo news lol
Saying a thing over and over doesn't make it true. Put differently, a lie repeated often enough is not therefore the truth. If you want to go believe in lies, fine, that is your prerogative. If you want to doubt one source, ten sources, or a thousand, nobody can stop you there either. Nonetheless, the truth will remain.
Right, except voter fraud is a true thing. That you don't know that isn't my problem as such, but it will become one for the entire country because of people like you.
Why are you lying about what the other person said? They said "no meaningful fraud" as in there's not an amount of fraud that can actually change the results.
It's actually very specific. Look up the previous abuses of the US Postal Inspections Bureau and you will see exactly what I mean and why I've said it the way I've said it.
"Specific" would involve some sort of detail about what these abuses were, or when they happened, or something beyond just "previous abuses of the US Postal Inspections Bureau."
I figured you were clever enough to do your own searching, but since you didn't take the minimum effort to punch it in a search engine, I gave one example in an above post.
The fun thing about being extremely vague is that it's inherently unsearchable. I can do a search and find reports of USPIS abuses, but I have no idea if they're the ones you're referring to or not, because you didn't say what you were referring to. And I'm not about to spend a bunch of time trying to work out which ones you meant and how they might connect to voting by mail when you can't be bothered to give even the slightest bit of information.
>And I'm not about to spend a bunch of time trying to work out which ones you meant and how they might connect to voting by mail when you can't be bothered to give even the slightest bit of information
But even with being supplied that information, your modus operandi didn't change. You just went right back to speaking to me about how "right" you were to not consider my point to begin with and how "wrong" I was not to supply you with the thing you required. What difference did it make in my giving you a crumb of what you asked for? Zero. You know why? You aren't really interested in my point of view. You are captivated by your own.
We don't have holidays here, but employers are required to provide us with a certain amount of consecutive free hours (which specific number I can't remember) inside voting hours.
That’s fine, except for places in the US (particularly poor urban areas) where you have to wait in line for hours and hours to vote - it would need to accommodate for that
Yes. That's the point. The administration doesn't care about fixing whatever hypothetical mail ballot fraud may or may not exist; they are doing this to inject chaos into the election results, giving them cover to claim any result they want or even to just throw out the results entirely. Catastrophic problems are the means to that end.
It is the same tired but sadly effective Republican playbook: take a mostly functioning if imperfect system, break it beyond repair under the guise of fixing or reforming it, use the ongoing disaster to argue that it should be dismantled, rinse and repeat until it’s unsalvageable.
All of these changes are based on the president making comments like the following:
> "the cheating on mail-in voting is legendary,"
Which he has attempted to prove going back years. And every time it's been found that it essentially doesn't happen. And I believe, the few instances of voter fraud that have been found have been majority republicans and not democrats as has been accused.
So to begin with, anyone arguing for these changes need to acknowledge the well established fact that there is effectively zero voter fraud at all levels throughout the country in anyway impacting elections. As has been investigated and shown time and time and time again. If they aren't beginning with the well established state of the world then they are in fact are the one entering with an extremely partisan hat.
Now if their argument is "yes it's true voter fraud has been investigated countless times, and continuously shown to effectively be smaller than a rounding error, does not impact elections, is know to not be a problem, but I still want to make sweeping changes right before an election." Then sure that's a point of discussion. Then I think the simple question then becomes "why"? But if they aren't willing to begin with an accurate discussion of the facts and state of the situation (there is no voter fraud problem), then any comment they make following that has little credibility.
Why is he pushing to outlaw mail-in voting when there is no issue with mail in voting? Is it because one party votes by mail more than the other?
Or the change in the date mail can receives a postmark? Previously mail was transported to the facility to the same day so would get postmarked that day. Now, as this year, mail won't get post-marked the day it's dropped in a mail box - so any zipcode's mail boxes can now be marked as being sent too late to count, even if they were dropped off before election day.
> While we are not changing our postmarking practices, we have made adjustments to our transportation operations that will result in some mailpieces not arriving at our originating processing facilities on the same day that they are mailed. This means that the date on the postmarks applied at our processing facilities will not necessarily match the date on which the customer’s mailpiece was collected by a letter carrier or dropped off at a retail location.
If the administration actually cared about getting an accurate vote, why aren't they opening more voting locations? Why don't they mandate one voting location per every x number of citizens? Why would the Department of Homeland Security decide who is allowed to get ballots via the mail?
If it's so bad, why has the administration failed time and time again to produce any evidence it's actually bad? If it's so horrible, and wide spread why is it impossible to find evidences that supports this? Or shows it overturning elections or anything close?
It's the same scheme. Make a bunch of baseless assertions, repeat them frequently enough and people in an information bubble will begin to believe it. And that's clearly what's happening here. Just like "we've won the war in Iran" 20 times now. And "Iran has agreed to peace deal where they surrender" 15 times now. And how every weekend for months there were claims about the work on Friday that somehow magically fell apart by Monday. And yet somehow there are still people who give these false claims, and the people claiming them, any amount of credibility.
Voter fraud is not a problem in this country. It does not rig elections, it does not sway elections. So sudden last min drastic changes in the voting process right before an election, by someone who has previously attempted a coup (not the protest on the capital but the actual coup attempt), has said they admire the leader of a country who dismantled its democracy (Orban) - and previously pushed the govt to make false claims of vote fraud to keep him in power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
> The Trump fake electors plot was an attempt by U.S. president Donald Trump and associates to have him remain in power after losing the 2020 United States presidential election. After the results of the election determined Trump had lost, he, his associates, and Republican Party officials in seven battleground states – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin[1] – devised a scheme to submit fraudulent certificates of ascertainment to falsely claim Trump had won the Electoral College vote in crucial states. The plot was one of Trump and his associates' attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election.
Then, when that failed:
> Trump pressured the Justice Department to falsely announce it had found election fraud, and he attempted to install a new acting attorney general who had drafted a letter falsely asserting such election fraud had been found, in an attempt to persuade the Georgia legislature to convene and reconsider its Biden electoral votes.
Like I think there are people in such an information bubble that they aren't even aware these are well established facts. Not partisan talking points, but a recounting of facts of the lengths that have already been attempted to remain in power illegally. And now sudden sweeping changes to voting right before an election amid false claims of rigged elections.
Watson v. Republican National Committee seems to be the opposite of what you state: ballots received after election day can be counted provided they were postmarked on or before election day.
Curiously, the USPS changed when it postmarks mail this year, resulting in postmark delays. In Washington state, the number of ballots rejected for being late is up 32% compared to 2024.
“He had told me [before the election] he was going to unleash the ‘anomaly in the matrix,’ ” St. Clair says in championed documentarist Alex Gibney’s film, Musk"
Bullshit is produced for the effect saying it will have.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/28/politics/video/the-odds-voter...
So a party calling for voter id is following the will of the people, while politicians opposing the will of the people are justifying the need for a fix, right?
That's a funny way of saying that they support the status quo, which has never been provably linked to large-scale voter fraud.
If you want voter ID, here's the procedure: establish evidence showing that its need outweighs its disadvantages, then pass a bill in Congress, then implement the bill. Signing an Executive Order that demands illegal overreach without justification is not the American way.
Remember the people leading the charge for this are insurrectionists. They don't care about protecting voting or the concept of democracy at all.
> Provide reputable sources, we can discuss it.
His Truth Social account is public. Do we agree that is a reputable source?
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/trum...
I don’t find that article to be particularly worrying.
The issue is not the article, but the president's own words. Do you find it concerning that the president has expressed a desire to cancel elections? Or do you think he was joking?
Follow-up question: was/is he joking about building the wall, mass deportations, eliminating birthright citizenship, or running for a third term?
Manufacturing the appearance of winning is the not-empty threat, rather is what TFA is chronicling.
What about it is "shocking"? Please be specific.
Please note that the alleged justification these changes is widespread voter fraud, which has never been shown to exist at a level even close to significant, despite many years of effort [1].
> the only way to do anything is to shove an executive order through the post office to prevent mail fraud.
Or, ya know, make a persuasive case based on evidence of actual fraud and pass a bill in Congress, the way the country is supposed to work?
> This is a kind of comment I would expect on Reddit and not hn.
Yours is a low-effort riposte if ever there was one.
[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/disb...
A humorous double meaning, almost like taking the hat off and putting it back on again.
But seriously I would expect a stronger argument in favor of these changes from proponents like you, something sourced, especially given the trial runs of these encroachments that've been run in a number of red states that haven't found any significant security issues and just turned out to be a waste of taxpayer dollars, time, and trust.
Do your readers a favor and bring something at least as substantive as the article you're commenting on.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
You supplied nothing to back up your extraordinary claims. Your claims are extraordinary given the almost non-existent issues with mail-in voting. But if you'd like to prove otherwise, be my guest.
We have had secure elections for a long time, how is it that the only 2 that Trump has presided over are the ones that are a security concern?
Huh? Survival of what? Are you claiming that Democrat fraud was not found only because the perpetrators are all dead?
I don't know anything about elections, a question worth asking is what would it look like if a conspiracy set out to exploit mail ballots? could detection only originate from a defector?
Why don't you start with some research of your own and outline how such a conspiracy would work and how large it would have to be.
Don't throw out a hypothetical "could it even be caught?" to try to bias people without doing any sort of even cursory glance at how things work.
Hell, while you're at it, please outline other possible conspiracies, and think about if there are potential vulnerabilities that could very require less major coordination than mail-in ballots. (Not even including the 'have a president who constantly tells everyone that if he loses it will be due to fraud to stoke the flames in advance' strategy!)
Maybe GP is implying that, but that's not what they said, because what you describe is not survivorship bias.
> I don't know anything about elections, a question worth asking is what would it look like if a conspiracy set out to exploit mail ballots? could detection only originate from a defector?
You are asking the wrong question. The correct question is: If mail-in voter fraud cannot be detected, then why do people claim that mail-in voter fraud exists? If there isn't evidence that it exists, then the people who claim that it exists are making statements not based on evidence. In other words, their opinions are either not informed by facts, in which case we should disregard their opinions; or their statements are not sincere expressions of belief, in which case they are liars and we should not trust them.
what have they found, exactly?
at some point how much more money do you want to burn on investigations w/o any particular new cause?
"unverifiable" ain't exactly true either where i live. you might think there should be more or different verification, sure, start some discussions in your local area. don't bring the federal government into everyone else's after the administration shows a long history of crying wolf and pre-seeding conspiracy theories with "i can't possibly lose" stuff. if you're convinced the states and local municipalities can't run stuff, it should be easy to prove.
and yet. you haven't yet.
Mail-in ballots are currently accepted in 23 states [1], including Utah, Kansas, and Florida. Which "side" is that? Please note Donald Trump personally uses the terribly unsecure and unverifiable method of mail-in ballot, so either he thinks it's secure enough, or, uh, is not being totally honest with us.
> resisting all investigations of voting integrity?
Which investigations, specifically, are you referring to? As far as I know, Trump formed a voter integrity commission in his first term which was unable to find any evidence of voter fraud and was therefore subsequently disbanded [2]. Since then, the only source of information on the allegedly widespread voter fraud is from Donald Trump's own mouth.
[1] https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/table-18-states...
[2] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/disb...
Why? Your job is to transfer pieces of mail from one place to another. Just continue that. Everything else is manufacturing a problem where there was none.
Edit: Spelling.
(No, I don't support it regardless, but surely even if you do you could recognize that the timeframe is way too short).
There's no "oops I didn't know" or "oops I timed the project wrong" or "oops I forgot about the election deadline" or "oops nobody told me about the court-order prohibiting it", etc.
but it doesn't work...anything then was done under literally the same President we have today?
That's pretty damn hilarious: *don't complain to me about the Trump admin fucking with the voting system on short notice in 2026 since the Trump admin also fucked with the voting system on short notice in 2020!"
(At least there was a major national emergency going on that time...)
---
It's a point in favor of the "malicious" theory, though. Here's arguably the person who would have the most reason to not fuck with things last-minute, who complained at no end about the results, is now making his own last minute changes... hmmmm.... must still believe he got cheated, and is intentionally trying to cheat instead.
I would expect most Americans would see this as grotesquely anti-American, and absolutely against the principals of the country. Instead it barely makes news and is just another "get whatever advantage you can" tactic.
"Has such a small imagination that they can't imagine they wouldn't be the majority" is more like it.
For all the old fears of "we need the senate so big cities don't run the country" they have a massive blind spot of there being less diversity of thought, and more of a monoculture, in suburban and rural areas. And they don't realize that because of this they shouldn't be surprised if not everyone agrees with them.
The fact that the USPS would notice elections were being conducted is perverse.
In California's last election, there were 2,758 drop-box locations and 3,546 polling locations. In cities, these are often within walking distance. In rural areas, they might not be so convenient.
So it seems like, at least for returning ballots, any USPS snafus would affect rural voters (which skew Republican) more than urban?
Delivering is another question. I wonder if local governments could drop off ballots if they needed to?
https://electionlab.mit.edu/research/voting-mail-and-absente...
more controversy:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/25/us/mail-in-voting-states....
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/31/us/politics/postal-servic...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/02/us/politics/postal-servic...
> For instance, the Postal Service has what the whistleblower claims is a "zero percent failure rate."
> Mail workers would scan a sample of a batch of mail ballots — about 400 out of a batch of 10,000 or more — to verify it matches what is in the federal mail ballot portal.
> Under the policy, if even one barcode on a single ballot in the batch doesn't scan properly or the information does not match, the entire batch would be rejected and returned to state election officials so the problem ballot could be addressed, and then the verification process would have to be started again.
The wrong government! Voter rolls etc. are state responsibilities, not a federal ones.
And please, don't spend a second entertaining any crocodile-tears and pearl-clutching from Republicans about how "maybe states don't have rights and need consistent standards" all of a sudden. Nobody with any good-intentions for reform would wait until right before a major election to do something crazy that could disenfranchise millions.
Ex: "Stop being so mean to Bob, he just wanted to help out with platform stability when he stole that SSH key to push an un-reviewed hotfix to prod while betting the company stock would crash on a gambling site."
And no, the USPS is not in the Constitution. Article I Section 8 gives Congress the power "To establish Post Offices and post Roads". They executed that power via legislation. The USPS didn't come into being until 1970, replacing the United States Post Office Department, a branch of the cabinet. The legislation creating the USPS says that it "shall not make any undue or unreasonable discrimination among users of the mails" -- what Trump has tasked it to do is in direct violation of that law.
Oh yeah that'll stop them.
This system would catch it 98,3% of the time. Pretty good, I'd say.
It gets sent back, it gets investigated and fixed, and back it goes.
Am I missing something?
Cue civil war?
If so, how is that not clearly discriminatory for those who can't afford the time to go.
Mail in voting has been something that the elderly, infirmed, workers, and folks in the military have done for decades. It's remarkably secure and quite auditable. The issue the right has with it is that the folks that vote by mail (the military notwithstanding) are typically democrats.
Very common for college students who go to school out of state as well. A conspicuously blue voting bloc.
This is absolutely discriminatory against the poor. That's why the republicans fight for these types of restrictions and democrats fight against them.
I think the best approach is what Georgia has done. No-excuse mail-in for those who want that. And 3 weeks of early voting including Saturdays. And for those who just enjoy standing in lines, there is the official Election Day. If a redneck state can get it done without issues, then we all can do it.
Functionally, a literal handful per season which are typically caught and prosecuted.
The right leaning Brookings and Heritage foundations dug into the numbers and found this
"Across the entire country, and utilizing a maximally inclusive estimate, between six and 46 cases of mail voting fraud were identified in each general election"
Table:
Year Total mail voting fraud percentage (out of total mail ballots cast) 2016 0.000089% 2018 0.000024% 2020 0.000051% 2022 0.000010% Average 0.000043%
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/mail-voting-in-the-us-dat...
Even saying it once doesn't make it true. Apply that to everything you have said.
“Just look up vague abuses that I’m claiming happened with no evidence”
Here is one instance among many.
Wait'll you hear about the Comstock Act and what the USPS has done to enforce that.
But even with being supplied that information, your modus operandi didn't change. You just went right back to speaking to me about how "right" you were to not consider my point to begin with and how "wrong" I was not to supply you with the thing you required. What difference did it make in my giving you a crumb of what you asked for? Zero. You know why? You aren't really interested in my point of view. You are captivated by your own.