> 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.
llm_nerd 48 minutes ago [-]
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.
RickJWagner 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Geeek 2 hours ago [-]
One can observe and accuse based on that observation. What 'sources' do you expect to see?
LastTrain 26 minutes ago [-]
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...
doc_ick 6 minutes ago [-]
Don’t worry, rickwagoner will find a way not to believe this source. Maybe because it uses https instead of http.
RickJWagner 48 minutes ago [-]
I’d like to see a real source, not something somebody made up in their head. An article from any reliable news source will suffice.
NegativeLatency 2 hours ago [-]
They’d said as much explicitly and implicitly with their actions.
RickJWagner 48 minutes ago [-]
Source, please.
margalabargala 13 minutes ago [-]
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?
MithrilTuxedo 2 hours ago [-]
The fact that reputable sources were not provided to justify the need for fixes has been reputable source enough.
Bullshit is produced for the effect saying it will have.
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?
hackyhacky 18 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
AngryData 18 minutes ago [-]
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.
toomuchtodo 2 hours ago [-]
You mean where the sitting president said they were going to try to rig the midterms?
> Provide reputable sources, we can discuss it.
His Truth Social account is public. Do we agree that is a reputable source?
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.
hackyhacky 14 minutes ago [-]
> 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?
mcmcmc 2 hours ago [-]
Project 2025
2 hours ago [-]
MithrilTuxedo 1 hours ago [-]
Those who are apt to discard responses to what they should have been apt to discard.
cogman10 1 hours ago [-]
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).
Terr_ 1 hours ago [-]
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.
llm_nerd 51 minutes ago [-]
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.
dplgk 14 minutes ago [-]
Trump supporters used to speak up on this site. Surely they still exist but all I hear is crickets
sieabahlpark 44 minutes ago [-]
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MithrilTuxedo 1 hours ago [-]
What business is it of the USPS except to transmit all mail regardless of purpose?
The fact that the USPS would notice elections were being conducted is perverse.
skybrian 26 minutes ago [-]
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?
hyperhello 7 minutes ago [-]
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.
Trump sucks but this is more pure GOP bullshit to suppress voting and keep minority power.
UltraSane 18 minutes ago [-]
They are all working together. Trump has absolutely no respect for voting and is terrified of Democrats getting majorities in the midterms.
voidfunc 13 minutes ago [-]
Unfortunately they are going to succeed.
ck2 1 days ago [-]
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.
mafuy 2 hours ago [-]
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.
mcmcmc 2 hours ago [-]
You realize USPS is the government right? It’s literally in the Constitution
Terr_ 1 hours ago [-]
> USPS is the government
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."
jibal 12 minutes ago [-]
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.
Jordan-117 2 hours ago [-]
They don't care if it's illegal. They'll do it anyway and trust in the tainted result being a fait accompli that the courts can't (or won't) resolve.
BigTTYGothGF 2 hours ago [-]
> good thing it's completely illegal for the federal government to interfere with state voting proceedure
Oh yeah that'll stop them.
grim_io 2 hours ago [-]
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.
tenuousemphasis 1 hours ago [-]
Ok now what's the potential false positive rate?
peterleiser 38 minutes ago [-]
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.
grim_io 19 minutes ago [-]
Maybe I'm stupid, but why would sending back mean invalid?
It gets sent back, it gets investigated and fixed, and back it goes.
Am I missing something?
snypher 5 minutes ago [-]
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.
gWPVhyxPHqvk 2 hours ago [-]
It's still funny thinking that there's people out there in 2026 who think that "it's illegal" will stop the Trump administration.
downrightmike 1 days ago [-]
That sample is wrong for statistics, 4% is literally not significant. It's also too much for sample controls
daveguy 2 hours ago [-]
No one ever accused this administration of being competent.
emeril 2 hours ago [-]
maybe so, but it is very vocal about they are the most modest
nedo_var 2 hours ago [-]
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s5300 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
SoftTalker 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ZekeSulastin 2 hours ago [-]
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.
torben-friis 2 hours ago [-]
I'm not American, but if I'm not mistaken, you don't have election day off like in other countries, right?
If so, how is that not clearly discriminatory for those who can't afford the time to go.
gortok 2 hours ago [-]
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.
mcmcmc 1 hours ago [-]
> Mail in voting has been something that the elderly, infirmed, workers, and folks in the military have done for decades.
Very common for college students who go to school out of state as well. A conspicuously blue voting bloc.
Arubis 2 hours ago [-]
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.
fhdkweig 2 hours ago [-]
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.
NDlurker 2 hours ago [-]
Everywhere I've lived has early voting too. I usually vote a few days before election day because it's not so busy.
Then voting needs to be a national holiday with plenty of polling locations.
fhdkweig 1 hours ago [-]
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.
sieabahlpark 40 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
wpm 2 hours ago [-]
How much fraud is proven to be occurring due to mail-in ballots?
uncSoft 47 minutes ago [-]
Statistically 0
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.
fhdkweig 1 hours ago [-]
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.
1shooner 2 hours ago [-]
Perhaps every state should just have one very well-monitored polling place.
lukas099 1 hours ago [-]
So that the election is decided by the people who live near the one place?
thataccount 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
none2585 1 hours ago [-]
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
thataccount 1 hours ago [-]
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.
jibal 26 minutes ago [-]
> Saying a thing over and over doesn't make it true.
Even saying it once doesn't make it true. Apply that to everything you have said.
none2585 1 hours ago [-]
Amen my white brother. When is senior hour at the buffet? You know how we get in our age
thataccount 1 hours ago [-]
White, black, yellow, red, or brown. 10 or 90. The truth remains.
wat10000 1 hours ago [-]
Your vague handwavey manner of writing sounds very presidential.
thataccount 1 hours ago [-]
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.
solid_fuel 1 hours ago [-]
“It’s very specific”
“Just look up vague abuses that I’m claiming happened with no evidence”
What does that have to do with anything discussed here?
Wait'll you hear about the Comstock Act and what the USPS has done to enforce that.
thataccount 56 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
wat10000 1 hours ago [-]
"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."
thataccount 1 hours ago [-]
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.
muwtyhg 24 seconds ago [-]
How does the article you linked support your point that mail-in voting is abused or rife with fraud?
wat10000 57 minutes ago [-]
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.
thataccount 50 minutes ago [-]
>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.
doc_ick 3 minutes ago [-]
All right Mike Lindell calm down
gradus_ad 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
sethherr 1 hours ago [-]
Then it’s necessary to make voting a federal holiday. Like it is in other countries.
folkrav 46 minutes ago [-]
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.
sethherr 37 minutes ago [-]
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
trimethylpurine 34 minutes ago [-]
I don't think there is any federal law. Could be a law in your state.
jibal 6 minutes ago [-]
Sure, but it's also important to reject gradus_ad's "should", which is completely baseless.
Rendered at 02:56:02 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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.
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.
> 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?
(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.
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.
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?
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.