I was tickled when Trump came out of his little tête-à-tête with Putin and announced that Vlad agreed with him that you couldn't have an honest election with mail-in ballots. Turns out that Russian elections use mail-in ballots...
The President wants to remove - by personal fiat, not by law - mail-in voting. Apparently, he fears the votes of millions of U.S. citizens, including members of the U.S. military and their voting-eligible family members.
Why not also require voters to pay poll taxes? Pass literacy tests? Cannot this President completely overturn the 1965 Voting Rights Act by Executive Order?
Damn the Supreme Court for its infamous and unconstitutional decision on Presidential immunity.
"My" governor, Ron DeSantis, has already said plainly that the mail in voting sanction doesn't really apply to Florida. He said Trump probably only meant it applied to blue states that do a lot of frauding. He said, "He’s a Florida voter and what he means by 'vote by mail,' I think, just in my conversations, is the states like California and Nevada and others where they just send all these ballots out into the ether basically,' DeSantis told reporters Aug. 19. 'Then they do ballot harvesting where it becomes this total fraud. That absolutely should not be allowed." These clowns slay me.
I'm assuming that the mail-in ballot conspiracy scenario goes something like this:
Anyone can mail-in a ballot, even multiples, whether they're a citizen or not, and all of them get counted. 🙄
I said "assuming" since I've never really heard a reason why they want to ban these ballots.
First of all, anyone sending in a ballot must be registered first. In most states, as in mine, you have to request a mail-in ballot and they won't send you one unless they've verified you are allowed to receive one and are on the voter roll.
Secondly, as you send it back in, they verify you against that voter roll, make sure you haven't already voted in that election and mark it as such to ensure you don't also try to vote in person later on. And they verify signatures.
All of these verifications are there for "election integrity." that word they love to throw around. I wish people wouldn't be so gullible to everything felon47 throws out there.
I think they don't want folk who can't afford to take time out of work to be voting an easy, at -home, way. He's kind of missing that a lot of his voters are living paycheck-to-paycheck too. These MAGA folk have a very strange idea of what the world of people is like.
Without mail-in voting, how does that affect the military and their families and civilian employees that are living and stationed overseas? They are disenfranchising all of them,that is horrific!!
Trump doesn't care that his vendetta against mail-in voting hurts Republicans. All that matters is delegitimizing elections in the heads of his base so that he has a pretext for overturning the results when they aren't in his favor.
This. Trump does not care about mail-in voting, or if he might hurt Republicans with this vendetta. He is not trying to eliminate voter fraud or address a legitimate issue through a legally authorized and permissible process. He is trying to delegitimize the election in advance so that his base is primed to reject unfavorable results and he has created a permission structure and pretext for anything he might do to overturn an election and maintain power. Good lord, you would think this is all new and we haven't already seen this show before. He did the same thing in 2016, 2020, and 2024, and when he lost in 2020 he did everything he possibly could to reject the results and stay in office.
This is him laying the groundwork for a similar effort, yet again. I feel like I am taking crazy pills that so few people seem to recognize that for what it is.
It will be Bush/Gore hanging chads in every County and State in America all at once. That plot was flexed during the North Carolina Supreme Court race where they went full denial and attempted to throw out 60,000 mail in ballots after losing a close election to a Democrat. The ruthlessness and lack of shame during that "dispute" was shocking. The Republicans are going to go nuclear on election denial in '26 and '28. Escalating that has been working for them
I wonder if using the National Guard et al at polling places might have a larger impact on voting restrictions particularly in urban areas. Assuming no mail in voting goes any where, this could boomerang for MAGA and NonMAGA voters.
You really miss the big picture on this vote-by-mail effort. I think it's because everyone views it as a discrete action. It is not. Ask yourself: if there is going to be 'enforcement' located at polling centers and you feel threatened by that, what do you do? You vote by mail. If you can't, then you just don't vote. Who do you think will feel threatened to vote in person? So it really makes sense what is going on.
1) Of all the damage that Trump has done to our politics, I can’t think of anything worse than his constant claims of voter fraud. Elections are a democracy’s pressure relief valve and if people don’t feel that they have an honest chance to vote people out of office, only bad things will happen. Not that Trump cares about those bad things happening. As we saw on January 6, he’s more than happy as long as those bad things are being done in his name.
I think that it’s fair to say that any honest individual (who might have had some misgivings about mail in voting or vote-counting machines) should have had those fears put to rest by the plethora of investigations done after the 2020 election. But Trump and his mindless army aren’t being honest. It’s as simple as that. They’ve got their story and they’re sticking to it, evidence (or lack thereof) be damned.
Here’s a question: suppose you were given the task of verifying the accuracy of voting machines. I can’t think of a better way to do that than to input a known batch of ballots and see if the machines arrive at the expected result. You know, like hand counting the actual ballots and then comparing that hand count with the machine count. Which, of course, is exactly what was done in Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona. And in each case, the machines worked correctly. Why that doesn’t take the machines off the table as a source of error is beyond me (OK, not really beyond me – because I understand that that can’t happen until Trump gives his blessing). The only way that doesn’t completely absolve the machines is if someone wanted to argue that the machines magically made the same number of errors that the hand count did. But that would mean that you can’t trust the hand count either which is decidedly not what they are claiming.
This is just the first bad-faith argument (I’m defining “bad-faith argument” to mean one in which one side claims to be interested in finding an answer but really is only interested in continuing the argument). As I said earlier, no rational person could not agree with my take.
The second bad-faith argument is about mail-in voting. That is not a clean cut as the voting machines argument since there is no mathematical proof possible that fraud didn’t occur (it’s just not possible to prove a negative in this case). So we’re left with the results of the many audits that were done which found no significant fraud. But it’s even worse than that for the other side. For I have yet to hear a coherent argument as to how the fraud might have occurred. By “coherent” I mean an argument that continues to make sense even after considering the safeguards that are built into the system. For example, if you want to claim that people voted multiple times you have to answer the question of how they evaded the check that is done (at least in Arizona) that verifies that you haven’t already voted when you try to vote. And if you want to claim that someone stole a whole bunch of ballots and filled them out, you have to explain how many people were involved and the time it would take to fraudulently fill out all of those ballots (it would take a long time to do that with the tens of thousands of ballots you’d have to steal to affect the outcome). Then you have to explain why the people whose ballots were stolen didn’t complain when they didn’t get one. And if you want to claim that some nefarious group just simply printed a bunch of fake ballots, you have to ask what registration information they used. And if you want to claim that same nefarious group simply added the ballots on their way to the central counting area, you have to explain how the number of ballots sent in somehow magically matched the number that were actually tabulated.
My point isn’t that fraud couldn’t happen. I assume it somehow could. My point is that those claiming fraud haven’t bothered to tell us how it happened. All they’ve done is claim that they have the evidence and we’re all going to see it any day now. Color me skeptical.
Here’s the way it works in their minds: (1) they make some claim of voter fraud, (2) no one can PROVE that it didn’t happen (see above comment that no one can prove a negative), (3) therefore it PROVES that there was voter fraud (in other words, if you can’t prove it didn’t happen then that proves that it did). No evidence required.
2) Van Orden’s and Perry’s comments remind me of a lot of the tariff comments. When Trump put the tariffs on, the Trumplicants said it was so great. Then when he took them off, it was also so great. Do these people have no scruples (or memory)?
In response to your question, they have no scruples. I believe they do have a memory: they remember how effective their disinformation campaign was last time.
Desperately hoping this will be a moment when our asymmetrical political world works to the benefit of everyone who’s not a Republican. Red State legislators and governors kowtowing before ( I know name calling is childish and correctly considered gauche in the Bulwark community, but Trump himself Mussolini gestured too many times for me not to call him out for it) Il- Douchie might lead to rural voters having to travel great distances to stand in long lines while Blue State voters enjoy the convenience of mail-in voting. Depends on the Trump-McConnell, I guess. Refuse to call it the Supreme Court. The conservative majority is definitely a Supplicant Court. This is a big part of why I have trouble sleeping lately.
Historically when Trump accuses the Democrats of cheating I believe that we usually discover that he has cheated in a similar manner.
Yes - every accusation is a confession…
I was tickled when Trump came out of his little tête-à-tête with Putin and announced that Vlad agreed with him that you couldn't have an honest election with mail-in ballots. Turns out that Russian elections use mail-in ballots...
Putin totally punked the President of the United States. No wonder he was fighting back laughter the whole time.
We truly are living in the stupidest time line. Still baffles me.
The President wants to remove - by personal fiat, not by law - mail-in voting. Apparently, he fears the votes of millions of U.S. citizens, including members of the U.S. military and their voting-eligible family members.
Why not also require voters to pay poll taxes? Pass literacy tests? Cannot this President completely overturn the 1965 Voting Rights Act by Executive Order?
Damn the Supreme Court for its infamous and unconstitutional decision on Presidential immunity.
Why the seesawing among Republicans concerning mail in ballots? Because that is what cults do. The leader can do no wrong.
"My" governor, Ron DeSantis, has already said plainly that the mail in voting sanction doesn't really apply to Florida. He said Trump probably only meant it applied to blue states that do a lot of frauding. He said, "He’s a Florida voter and what he means by 'vote by mail,' I think, just in my conversations, is the states like California and Nevada and others where they just send all these ballots out into the ether basically,' DeSantis told reporters Aug. 19. 'Then they do ballot harvesting where it becomes this total fraud. That absolutely should not be allowed." These clowns slay me.
Jesus. I'd almost forgotten how dumb Desantis was. Thanks a lot!
Sorry.
I'm assuming that the mail-in ballot conspiracy scenario goes something like this:
Anyone can mail-in a ballot, even multiples, whether they're a citizen or not, and all of them get counted. 🙄
I said "assuming" since I've never really heard a reason why they want to ban these ballots.
First of all, anyone sending in a ballot must be registered first. In most states, as in mine, you have to request a mail-in ballot and they won't send you one unless they've verified you are allowed to receive one and are on the voter roll.
Secondly, as you send it back in, they verify you against that voter roll, make sure you haven't already voted in that election and mark it as such to ensure you don't also try to vote in person later on. And they verify signatures.
All of these verifications are there for "election integrity." that word they love to throw around. I wish people wouldn't be so gullible to everything felon47 throws out there.
I think they don't want folk who can't afford to take time out of work to be voting an easy, at -home, way. He's kind of missing that a lot of his voters are living paycheck-to-paycheck too. These MAGA folk have a very strange idea of what the world of people is like.
Yes, he really misses a LOT.
Wasn’t Trump a mail-in ballot voter at a point in time?
A reporter remarked on that inconsistency to Trump, asking why he himself voted by mail, and he replied, “because I can”.
What a stupid reply! Clearly he also wanted to vote by mail.
Actually, I'm kind of surprised he even voted. It's a civic duty. What does he get out of it?
🤦♀️
I seem to remember that, too!
Without mail-in voting, how does that affect the military and their families and civilian employees that are living and stationed overseas? They are disenfranchising all of them,that is horrific!!
It also affects people who are not stationed where they are registered to vote, so CONUS as well as OCONUS.
Trump doesn't care that his vendetta against mail-in voting hurts Republicans. All that matters is delegitimizing elections in the heads of his base so that he has a pretext for overturning the results when they aren't in his favor.
This. Trump does not care about mail-in voting, or if he might hurt Republicans with this vendetta. He is not trying to eliminate voter fraud or address a legitimate issue through a legally authorized and permissible process. He is trying to delegitimize the election in advance so that his base is primed to reject unfavorable results and he has created a permission structure and pretext for anything he might do to overturn an election and maintain power. Good lord, you would think this is all new and we haven't already seen this show before. He did the same thing in 2016, 2020, and 2024, and when he lost in 2020 he did everything he possibly could to reject the results and stay in office.
This is him laying the groundwork for a similar effort, yet again. I feel like I am taking crazy pills that so few people seem to recognize that for what it is.
I wish it weren't so, but I fear you are right.
yes, here's the big picture
It will be Bush/Gore hanging chads in every County and State in America all at once. That plot was flexed during the North Carolina Supreme Court race where they went full denial and attempted to throw out 60,000 mail in ballots after losing a close election to a Democrat. The ruthlessness and lack of shame during that "dispute" was shocking. The Republicans are going to go nuclear on election denial in '26 and '28. Escalating that has been working for them
I wonder if using the National Guard et al at polling places might have a larger impact on voting restrictions particularly in urban areas. Assuming no mail in voting goes any where, this could boomerang for MAGA and NonMAGA voters.
Hmmm. Are we sure it won't end up being "mail-in ballots for me, but not for thee...."?
It’s worth remembering that not having Mail in ballots only hurts Republicans if they face elections.
You really miss the big picture on this vote-by-mail effort. I think it's because everyone views it as a discrete action. It is not. Ask yourself: if there is going to be 'enforcement' located at polling centers and you feel threatened by that, what do you do? You vote by mail. If you can't, then you just don't vote. Who do you think will feel threatened to vote in person? So it really makes sense what is going on.
Yes, I'm pretty sure it helps the Repubs when combined with everything else those cheaters are cooking up.
A few comments...
1) Of all the damage that Trump has done to our politics, I can’t think of anything worse than his constant claims of voter fraud. Elections are a democracy’s pressure relief valve and if people don’t feel that they have an honest chance to vote people out of office, only bad things will happen. Not that Trump cares about those bad things happening. As we saw on January 6, he’s more than happy as long as those bad things are being done in his name.
I think that it’s fair to say that any honest individual (who might have had some misgivings about mail in voting or vote-counting machines) should have had those fears put to rest by the plethora of investigations done after the 2020 election. But Trump and his mindless army aren’t being honest. It’s as simple as that. They’ve got their story and they’re sticking to it, evidence (or lack thereof) be damned.
Here’s a question: suppose you were given the task of verifying the accuracy of voting machines. I can’t think of a better way to do that than to input a known batch of ballots and see if the machines arrive at the expected result. You know, like hand counting the actual ballots and then comparing that hand count with the machine count. Which, of course, is exactly what was done in Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona. And in each case, the machines worked correctly. Why that doesn’t take the machines off the table as a source of error is beyond me (OK, not really beyond me – because I understand that that can’t happen until Trump gives his blessing). The only way that doesn’t completely absolve the machines is if someone wanted to argue that the machines magically made the same number of errors that the hand count did. But that would mean that you can’t trust the hand count either which is decidedly not what they are claiming.
This is just the first bad-faith argument (I’m defining “bad-faith argument” to mean one in which one side claims to be interested in finding an answer but really is only interested in continuing the argument). As I said earlier, no rational person could not agree with my take.
The second bad-faith argument is about mail-in voting. That is not a clean cut as the voting machines argument since there is no mathematical proof possible that fraud didn’t occur (it’s just not possible to prove a negative in this case). So we’re left with the results of the many audits that were done which found no significant fraud. But it’s even worse than that for the other side. For I have yet to hear a coherent argument as to how the fraud might have occurred. By “coherent” I mean an argument that continues to make sense even after considering the safeguards that are built into the system. For example, if you want to claim that people voted multiple times you have to answer the question of how they evaded the check that is done (at least in Arizona) that verifies that you haven’t already voted when you try to vote. And if you want to claim that someone stole a whole bunch of ballots and filled them out, you have to explain how many people were involved and the time it would take to fraudulently fill out all of those ballots (it would take a long time to do that with the tens of thousands of ballots you’d have to steal to affect the outcome). Then you have to explain why the people whose ballots were stolen didn’t complain when they didn’t get one. And if you want to claim that some nefarious group just simply printed a bunch of fake ballots, you have to ask what registration information they used. And if you want to claim that same nefarious group simply added the ballots on their way to the central counting area, you have to explain how the number of ballots sent in somehow magically matched the number that were actually tabulated.
My point isn’t that fraud couldn’t happen. I assume it somehow could. My point is that those claiming fraud haven’t bothered to tell us how it happened. All they’ve done is claim that they have the evidence and we’re all going to see it any day now. Color me skeptical.
Here’s the way it works in their minds: (1) they make some claim of voter fraud, (2) no one can PROVE that it didn’t happen (see above comment that no one can prove a negative), (3) therefore it PROVES that there was voter fraud (in other words, if you can’t prove it didn’t happen then that proves that it did). No evidence required.
2) Van Orden’s and Perry’s comments remind me of a lot of the tariff comments. When Trump put the tariffs on, the Trumplicants said it was so great. Then when he took them off, it was also so great. Do these people have no scruples (or memory)?
In response to your question, they have no scruples. I believe they do have a memory: they remember how effective their disinformation campaign was last time.
It was something of a rhetorical question.
Desperately hoping this will be a moment when our asymmetrical political world works to the benefit of everyone who’s not a Republican. Red State legislators and governors kowtowing before ( I know name calling is childish and correctly considered gauche in the Bulwark community, but Trump himself Mussolini gestured too many times for me not to call him out for it) Il- Douchie might lead to rural voters having to travel great distances to stand in long lines while Blue State voters enjoy the convenience of mail-in voting. Depends on the Trump-McConnell, I guess. Refuse to call it the Supreme Court. The conservative majority is definitely a Supplicant Court. This is a big part of why I have trouble sleeping lately.