> 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.
He's spent years telling his supporters not to vote by mail. So during the election when there are problems with the mail, those will primarily affect the other party. That's enough to steal an election without more steps.
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.
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"
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.
Another reason is that if people only have one day to vote, it’s much easier to disenfranchise their vote just by delaying or inconveniencing them. Texas recently tried this by changing where people were allowed to vote, causing mass confusion.
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?
> 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.
> 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!)
> 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.
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.
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.
You'd be surprised what hate is capable of. Once you paint a side as the enemy and convince half of the population of that, it becomes easy to carryout acts even if they're detrimental to the your side too. Look at the US economy and inflation caused by the tariffs and wars for instance. It's the 'our side is winning' mentality shortsightedness that destroys nations and institutions. By the time people realize this, it's often too late.
"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.
If you genuinely don't understand what's happening - it's the same reason that political discussion on Reddit became completely detached from reality. On these sort of topics you have a relatively small number of hyper partisans that aim to censor discussion through the abuse of flagging, and they're mostly successful. So all that's left is a circle jerk which has no meaningful connection to views in the actual world, or even on e.g. Hacker News. I'm not really sure why anybody would want this outcome; I suppose that in their mind it's some sort of attempt at manufacturing consent.
Anyhow, there's plenty of rich discussion to be had, but you increasingly need to do it in the real world, or on smaller forums/channels. This will likely be an even bigger issue in the future as LLMs will enable full automation of this sort of abuse that will ultimately probably be impossible to stop. In the grand scheme of things we're likely at the tail end of the era where having genuine political discussion online was possible, if not already slightly beyond it.
> So all that's left is a circle jerk which has no meaningful connection to views in the actual world,
I don't see that at all. I am engaging with many voices on the other side [1] [2]. Those comments are voted down, yes, but not because "HN hates freedom" or some such, but rather because (a) those opinions are not well informed and (b) HN is broadly upper-class and educated, and therefore not tolerant of uninformed opinions. The only widespread bias I see here is towards constructive and intelligent commenting; and in the current political atmosphere, it's simply not possible to be both intelligent and Republican.
> I suppose that in their mind it's some sort of attempt at manufacturing consent.
What I see in your comment is your upset that you are on the losing side of an argument and so you're accusing the other side of cheating. Hey, that sounds familiar!
> In the grand scheme of things we're likely at the tail end of the era where having genuine political discussion online was possible, if not already slightly beyond it.
You are probably right, but for reasons entirely unrelated to dumb comments getting downvoted on HN.
> 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.
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.
Voting doesn't work in a low-trust society.
You can't trust the custodian of the digital system who tallies the votes. The problem is intractable.
The president, who is ultimately decided by the custodians of the voting system, is not going to order an audit of the voting system which made them president in the first place as that would paradoxically cast doubt on the president's own legitimacy. The incentives are firmly against this.
And look at the primaries; absolutely rigged. Nobody with power is asking for any audit...
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.
Our elections are beyond broken and untrustworthy. The fix is easy, but nobody will go for it:
Nothing but in-person paper ballots, except for demonstrated necessity, and in those cases they must be hand-delivered by a relative or caretaker. Ballots can be optical scan, but we MUST audit 0.1% of all ballots (by random selection after the election) by hand. If ANY discrepancy exists, a full hand recount must be done.
Here's the skinny: voting should have a barrier to entry. Your freedoms are important - people died for them. If you can't be bothered to fight a little for them with something as basic as putting on a pair of pants to head the the polls in person, you don't deserve your freedom, and you certainly shouldn't be voting on my freedoms.
> Our elections are beyond broken and untrustworthy.
You assert this without evidence. People have spent years looking for evidence of widespread voter fraud without success [1].
> voting should have a barrier to entry. Your freedoms are important - people died for them.
That's not how rights work. Would you say that there should be a "barrier to entry" for freedom of speech or gun rights? They added a "barrier to entry" for voting after the civil war and it didn't go so well. [2]
Right, like you should have to wait in line for a huge amount of time. People hate holidays and time off work otherwise we should do like a national holiday but oh wait the point is the barrier right? Lets make it so the words are extremely tiny and only printed in latin and at alternating angles, cause if its easy to read then people might be able to express their opinions which we worked so hard to make sure people could buy
> 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.
He's spent years telling his supporters not to vote by mail. So during the election when there are problems with the mail, those will primarily affect the other party. That's enough to steal an election without more steps.
Meanwhile, the piece of excrement votes by mail himself.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/08/17/trump-vote-by-mail-...
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.
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.
Speaking of engineering outcomes, today I read:
“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"
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.
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.
Another reason is that if people only have one day to vote, it’s much easier to disenfranchise their vote just by delaying or inconveniencing them. Texas recently tried this by changing where people were allowed to vote, causing mass confusion.
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/politics/el...
Those who are apt to discard responses to what they should have been apt to discard.
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.
The republicans, they keep claiming that voter fraud is always in favor for democrats but most of the discovered cases are republican voters.
Survivorship bias
> Survivorship bias
Huh? Survival of what? Are you claiming that Democrat fraud was not found only because the perpetrators are all dead?
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?
> 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.
> 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!)
> 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.
[1] https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/table-18-states...
[2] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/disb...
there have been MANY investigations
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.
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.
You're giving them too much credit. There is zero critical thinking happening.
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.
The current administration will just blame it on someone else, like they always do.
"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
And who complains will get their funding withdrawn.
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.
You'd be surprised what hate is capable of. Once you paint a side as the enemy and convince half of the population of that, it becomes easy to carryout acts even if they're detrimental to the your side too. Look at the US economy and inflation caused by the tariffs and wars for instance. It's the 'our side is winning' mentality shortsightedness that destroys nations and institutions. By the time people realize this, it's often too late.
"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.
Even the house is unfairly tilted towards smaller states because of the 538 limit
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.
Trump supporters used to speak up on this site. Surely they still exist but all I hear is crickets
Hopefully they're embarrassed.
If you genuinely don't understand what's happening - it's the same reason that political discussion on Reddit became completely detached from reality. On these sort of topics you have a relatively small number of hyper partisans that aim to censor discussion through the abuse of flagging, and they're mostly successful. So all that's left is a circle jerk which has no meaningful connection to views in the actual world, or even on e.g. Hacker News. I'm not really sure why anybody would want this outcome; I suppose that in their mind it's some sort of attempt at manufacturing consent.
Anyhow, there's plenty of rich discussion to be had, but you increasingly need to do it in the real world, or on smaller forums/channels. This will likely be an even bigger issue in the future as LLMs will enable full automation of this sort of abuse that will ultimately probably be impossible to stop. In the grand scheme of things we're likely at the tail end of the era where having genuine political discussion online was possible, if not already slightly beyond it.
> So all that's left is a circle jerk which has no meaningful connection to views in the actual world,
I don't see that at all. I am engaging with many voices on the other side [1] [2]. Those comments are voted down, yes, but not because "HN hates freedom" or some such, but rather because (a) those opinions are not well informed and (b) HN is broadly upper-class and educated, and therefore not tolerant of uninformed opinions. The only widespread bias I see here is towards constructive and intelligent commenting; and in the current political atmosphere, it's simply not possible to be both intelligent and Republican.
> I suppose that in their mind it's some sort of attempt at manufacturing consent.
What I see in your comment is your upset that you are on the losing side of an argument and so you're accusing the other side of cheating. Hey, that sounds familiar!
> In the grand scheme of things we're likely at the tail end of the era where having genuine political discussion online was possible, if not already slightly beyond it.
You are probably right, but for reasons entirely unrelated to dumb comments getting downvoted on HN.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49545694
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49545156
> 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.
Edit: Spelling.
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.
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.
But suppose there are states that don't cooperate with that?
voting by mail is pretty popular these days
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...
Voting doesn't work in a low-trust society. You can't trust the custodian of the digital system who tallies the votes. The problem is intractable.
The president, who is ultimately decided by the custodians of the voting system, is not going to order an audit of the voting system which made them president in the first place as that would paradoxically cast doubt on the president's own legitimacy. The incentives are firmly against this.
And look at the primaries; absolutely rigged. Nobody with power is asking for any audit...
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.
You realize USPS is the government right? It’s literally in the Constitution
> 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."
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.
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.
> good thing it's completely illegal for the federal government to interfere with state voting proceedure
Oh yeah that'll stop them.
It's still funny thinking that there's people out there in 2026 who think that "it's illegal" will stop the Trump administration.
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.
Ok now what's the potential false positive rate?
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.
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?
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.
That sample is wrong for statistics, 4% is literally not significant. It's also too much for sample controls
No one ever accused this administration of being competent.
maybe so, but it is very vocal about they are the most modest
Trump wrecks everything he touches.
Trump sucks but this is more pure GOP bullshit to suppress voting and keep minority power.
They are all working together. Trump has absolutely no respect for voting and is terrified of Democrats getting majorities in the midterms.
Unfortunately they are going to succeed.
Since everybody voted for Trump again, he just won't have a choice but to take a third term. It's what the people want! /s
Cue civil war?
Our elections are beyond broken and untrustworthy. The fix is easy, but nobody will go for it:
Nothing but in-person paper ballots, except for demonstrated necessity, and in those cases they must be hand-delivered by a relative or caretaker. Ballots can be optical scan, but we MUST audit 0.1% of all ballots (by random selection after the election) by hand. If ANY discrepancy exists, a full hand recount must be done.
Here's the skinny: voting should have a barrier to entry. Your freedoms are important - people died for them. If you can't be bothered to fight a little for them with something as basic as putting on a pair of pants to head the the polls in person, you don't deserve your freedom, and you certainly shouldn't be voting on my freedoms.
> Our elections are beyond broken and untrustworthy.
You assert this without evidence. People have spent years looking for evidence of widespread voter fraud without success [1].
> voting should have a barrier to entry. Your freedoms are important - people died for them.
That's not how rights work. Would you say that there should be a "barrier to entry" for freedom of speech or gun rights? They added a "barrier to entry" for voting after the civil war and it didn't go so well. [2]
[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/disb...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test
Right, like you should have to wait in line for a huge amount of time. People hate holidays and time off work otherwise we should do like a national holiday but oh wait the point is the barrier right? Lets make it so the words are extremely tiny and only printed in latin and at alternating angles, cause if its easy to read then people might be able to express their opinions which we worked so hard to make sure people could buy
Disgusting