> 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.

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.

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"

One can observe and accuse based on that observation. What 'sources' do you expect to see?

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...

Don’t worry, rickwagoner will find a way not to believe this source. Maybe because it uses https instead of http.

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.

They’d said as much explicitly and implicitly with their actions.

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?

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.

A good majority of Americans want voter id.

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?

> 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.

If voter ID was accompanied by mandatory free ID services at the polls, it could be a net good. Short of that, it's definitely more harm than good.

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.

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?

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/trum...

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?

That's not what the article says. It says Trump needs the appearance of winning elections, so cancelling is an empty threat.

Manufacturing the appearance of winning is the not-empty threat, rather is what TFA is chronicling.

Project 2025

Those who are apt to discard responses to what they should have been apt to discard.

This is a kind of comment I would expect on Reddit and not hn.

If you took off your partisan hat, put on your red team hat, and wanted to hack the election, what kind of problems would you find. And be honest.

If I take a look, through a security lens, of the existing mail in process from registration to recording votes, it’s quite shocking.

Yes, it’s a mad scrambling process so close to an election to plug the holes. It also seems like many people have a vested interest in keeping it bad, with little to no profess over the years. With my non-partisan hat on, it looks like the only way to do anything is to shove an executive order through the post office to prevent mail fraud. This is not unlike how people patch security holes in big tech because they can’t get the 12 other directors and interests to cooperate and make security a priority.

> 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.

[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/disb...

> 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.

> If I take a look, through a security lens, of the existing mail in process from registration to recording votes, it’s quite shocking.

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.

Either your head is 6 feet deep in the sand or you aren't really so non partisan

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?

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.

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.

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.

Hopefully they're embarrassed.

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.

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...

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.

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.

No one ever accused this administration of being competent.

maybe so, but it is very vocal about they are the most modest

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

Everywhere I've lived has early voting too. I usually vote a few days before election day because it's not so busy.

It seems to be nearly a third (short read): https://electionlab.mit.edu/research/voting-mail-and-absente...

Then voting needs to be a national holiday with plenty of polling locations.

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.

I think it's roughly the same in Ohio

How much fraud is proven to be occurring due to mail-in ballots?

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%

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/mail-voting-in-the-us-dat...

How much fraud happens because of mail-in or early voting?

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.

Perhaps every state should just have one very well-monitored polling place.

So that the election is decided by the people who live near the one place?

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.

Amen my white brother. When is senior hour at the buffet? You know how we get in our age

White, black, yellow, red, or brown. 10 or 90. The truth remains.

> 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.

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.

“It’s very specific”

“Just look up vague abuses that I’m claiming happened with no evidence”

>https://www.yahoo.com/news/the-postal-service-is-running-a-r...

Here is one instance among many.

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.

"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.

How does the article you linked support your point that mail-in voting is abused or rife with fraud?

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.

All right Mike Lindell calm down

Then it’s necessary to make voting a federal holiday. Like it is in other countries.

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

I don't think there is any federal law. Could be a law in your state.

Sure, but it's also important to reject gradus_ad's "should", which is completely baseless.