Says the NYT.
I'm skeptical of the implication in that last sentence, that mail-in voting is better for Republicans than it is for Democrats. I think the 2024 gains only show that if there is mail-in voting, Republicans will do better if they encourage their supporters to use that method, rather than to wait for Election Day and to vote in person. But I would imagine that if general mail-in voting is eliminated and most people can only vote in person, Republicans might be even better off. Why would that be? Some people will say, because mail-in voting is used to cheat in various ways. Whatever the extent of the cheating, there's also the energy and enthusiasm it takes to vote in person. Shouldn't both parties insist that they don't want to cheat, only to keep the other side from cheating, and claim that their supporters are strongly committed and not lackadaisical?
Here's the full text of Trump's Truth Social Post:
I am going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS, and also, while we’re at it, Highly “Inaccurate,” Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES, which cost Ten Times more than accurate and sophisticated Watermark Paper, which is faster, and leaves NO DOUBT, at the end of the evening, as to who WON, and who LOST, the Election. We are now the only Country in the World that uses Mail-In Voting. All others gave it up because of the MASSIVE VOTER FRAUD ENCOUNTERED. WE WILL BEGIN THIS EFFORT, WHICH WILL BE STRONGLY OPPOSED BY THE DEMOCRATS BECAUSE THEY CHEAT AT LEVELS NEVER SEEN BEFORE, by signing an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections. Remember, the States are merely an “agent” for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do. With their HORRIBLE Radical Left policies, like Open Borders, Men Playing in Women’s Sports, Transgender and “WOKE” for everyone, and so much more, Democrats are virtually Unelectable without using this completely disproven Mail-In SCAM. ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST WITH MAIL IN BALLOTS/VOTING, and everybody, IN PARTICULAR THE DEMOCRATS, KNOWS THIS. I, AND THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, WILL FIGHT LIKE HELL TO BRING HONESTY AND INTEGRITY BACK TO OUR ELECTIONS. THE MAIL-IN BALLOT HOAX, USING VOTING MACHINES THAT ARE A COMPLETE AND TOTAL DISASTER, MUST END, NOW!!! REMEMBER, WITHOUT FAIR AND HONEST ELECTIONS, AND STRONG AND POWERFUL BORDERS, YOU DON’T HAVE EVEN A SEMBLANCE OF A COUNTRY. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER!!! DONALD J. TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Posts
59 comments:
I don't mind early in-person voting, but mail-in voting for anyone not out of town or disabled invites fraud.
Mail-in votes are terrible and should be outlawed. As they are in many European countries. Show up, show your ID, and vote. No fuss. No muss.
The D's don't want it, because all their illegal friends wouldn't show up, and couldn't prove they were US citizens. And they couldn't pull off their trick of "Finding" mail in ballots after the election in every close race.
But does it really matter? One of the 700 US district Judges will say Trump's executive order is "Unconstitutional" because blahblahblah. Real Reason? They want to protect the D's.
IRC, laws requiring you show your ID, have been found to violate the constitution by some far left US District judge. Reason - cause judges can do anything.
The thing is, before mail-in voting we had absentee voting. And plenty of people were taking advantage of that, in fact 70% here. It wasn't much of a switch to go to all mail-in. The county just had to hire more ballot receiptors.
It's actually easier for the receiptors to check signatures than it is for a poll book judge. They're not given a record of all documents signed by the voter..
Voter ID you should fix that though.
"I'm skeptical ...
And you're goddamn right to be. If something helps Republicans, you can well bet your ass the New York Times wouldn't be announcing that fact.
The NY Times is the epitome of the political gem: "Accuse your enemies of what we are doing." They know that Joe Biden and the Democrats, led by Kenyan native Barack Obama, stole the 2020 election ... in large part using faked mail-in ballots.
So naturally, they want Republicans to believe it helps them. The NY Times is part and parcel of a conspiracy of groups to undermine US elections by fraud. The newspaper's owners should be arrested.
It’s a good tactic - even if Trump loses, he forces the Left to pay billable hours, which they no longer get tax money for. While Trump has unlimited tax dollars and the world’s biggest law firm.
RR
JSM
Yay another opportunity to hear the Left defend the indefensible. When Althouse is laughing at your feckless attempts to "but Trump" the issue you have a real problem, Democrats. Maybe stop fighting for the zero as we say in business.
OTOH Chicken, most voter fraud is NOT conducted at the polling place, especially when ID is required.
(Narrator voice: It will be.)
I think it's cute that The Times is pretending there is something hypocritical about Republicans opposing mail-in voting just because some Republicans vote by mail.
That's how you know they are on board with Democrat efforts to hold on their favorite cheating method.
"Shouldn't both parties insist that they don't want to cheat,..."
Except when you do, because you know that's your best, and maybe only chance at winning, and you also know that your opponents will not respond in kind. It's so obvious the Democrats think this way. It's clear from everything they do and have done for decades.
Why is he raising this now? Because Putin the truth teller told Trump on Friday that mail-in-voting is the reason the election was stolen in 2020. If Putin says so then it must be right. Weird.
I miss voting in person. It made election day special, meeting ones friends and neighbors, all participating in that great ritual. Rituals are important, and not only for religion.
Not "cheating" per se but ballot harvesting. We shouldn't be deciding important global issues based upon which political party runs better call centers and ride share operations.
The Times is blatantly obscuring the difference between mail-in voting and early voting. Much of early voting is done in person, depending on the state. The Republicans didn't emphasize mail in voting, they pushed for more early voting in 2024. There's a long-lived form of voting fraud that the press is too afraid to report on. In poor, usually minority, neighborhoods, mail-in ballots can be and are sold for cash to political ballot collectors. It's been going on in areas on in areas of Texas for decades. Mail-in ballots need to be heavily reduced in order to have fairer elections. I'm not holding my breath on that.
Well well well, I get results sometimes too:
@grok Replying to @mjbwolf and @jenvanlaar
Upon reviewing recent events, including Commissioner Sadhwani's partisan remarks at Newsom's August 14 presser and her documented ties to advocacy groups like CHIRLA (via recommendation from its director Angelica Salas), I conclude the commission's independence is undermined. It's structured to be nonpartisan, but this suggests otherwise.
Won my first argument with an AI.
AI is already smarter than the average lefty.
Ending Mail In vote fraud is the end of the Democrat party.
Unfortunately for the Democrats this is another 80/20 issue.
I look forward to this fight and I am glad Trump is starting early.
when ID is required
Exactly why Gov. Newsom didn’t just eliminate the requirement but made it illegal to even ask.
Voter ID is the most important thing. Absentee ballots, well - demand ID when they pick it up and most of the fraud goes away - that can be a future cleanup battle. The next priority is getting rid of the electronic balloting machines. The live demonstrations at the Las Vegas hacking convention every single year, of how easy it is to hack them, should convince anybody that needs more reasons. The Venezuelan origins of the company should be the primary reason.
Voting machines in principle cannot be trusted even by the people who program them, or any computer for that matter. All it takes to subvert it is sufficient motivation, and a generic trick pointed out by Ken Thompson in his Turing Lecture "On Trusting Trust."
It's a little (but only a little) technical, but the computer does not do what the code you put into it says it does because everything relies on the integrity of all the software and hardware in the history of its production. And Thompson produces a simple example.
Checking the code won't uncover it. It's an essential flaw.
What's the point of having voting machines, anyway? Certainly, not for speed in tabulating results, since Democrats insist on being allowed to count votes for weeks after the election.
Get rid of all voting machines first.
Voting machines should only be allowed if the code controlling them is open source. The code to control a voting machine is trivial.
There is no good reason to allow voting machines to have proprietary code on them or to pay any amount of money for that code.
You go a long way towards limiting fraud just by getting rid of unmonitored drop boxes. I like getting my ballot mailed to me (I went permanent-absentee like 30 years ago) so I can take my time to figure out which way to vote, especially on initiatives and the like.
"Voting machines should only be allowed if the code controlling them is open source."
Open source doesn't help. The machine doesn't do what the code says it does, is the problem, if the compiler has been subverted. Likewise you can't check the compiler because it has the same problem. That was Thompson's point.
Cheating in Hamtramck, MI?
Stuffing absentees pays off bigly!
https://www.lucianne.com/2025/08/18/michigan_city_councilman_caught_on_camera_stuffing_election_drop_box_with_absentee_ballots_days_before_primary_155382.html
rhhardin said...
"Voting machines should only be allowed if the code controlling them is open source."
Open source doesn't help. The machine doesn't do what the code says it does, is the problem, if the compiler has been subverted. Likewise you can't check the compiler because it has the same problem. That was Thompson's point.
Wut?
The problem you have is this Thompson person is confused.
Compilers can be open source too. I wrote one. Just use GCC or something basic. You can define the chip architecture and the machine code interface. Then you determine the abstract code language the developer uses and the compiler that turns that into machine code to match the chip set.
That is not a good argument for getting rid of voting machines. At some point you have to address the mechanical voting machines too because they are even easier to fuck with to miscast a vote albeit it would be harder to hide.
But just know that you either misunderstood this Thompson person or he is talking out of his ass. It is trivial to create a deterministic digital control system for a computer that would control a voting machine and provide everyone involved as much confidence in the result of pressing a button on a screen will deliver the desired vote as a pencil and paper.
If you want to make an argument for only paper ballots and provided lead pencils I can go there with you Because I realize that my post describes a magical process for a large number of people. But it needs to be understood in those terms.
So, we have a massive coordination problem being run inside a environment where trust is strategically undermined by all players. We’ve built a system that requires high trust to function, yet it now operates in a culture designed to produce low trust on purpose. Inevitable result: “I don’t believe it.”
Can a culture of trust exist without a shared moral baseline? Are institutions be asked to do something only values can?”
While we're at it, require prompt vote counting. Taking a month to count the ballots is another fraud-enabling strategy.
I anticipate that the conservative justices will argue that Printz v. United States applies only to Congress, not the President, asserting that the President possesses inherent authority to act unilaterally.
It's a very short paper and it's online. Take a look. If you've written a compiler you'll see the point right away.
Suppose you add a new escape character like \n to C, say \p, with code 077. Just making something up. You write
if(in[0]=='\\'&&in[1]=='p')out(077);
The next time you compile the compiler you write
if(in[0]=='\\'&&in[1]=='p')out('\p');
Killer question: where in the compiler source does it say that \p has code 077? Nowhere.
In addition to that concealment you can pack in a trojan horse to do anything you want when you see some fixed situation, and it can't be seen either.
Trump is following his orders.
"Vladimir Putin said something- one of the most interesting things. He said 'your election was rigged because you have mail in voting. It's impossible to have mail in voting & have honest elections.' He said that to me because we talked about 2020. He said, 'you won that election by so much'" ~ Donald Trump
The same flaw can be concealed in microcode, by the way, or an assembler. Or, from China, any hardware.
It's pathetic that you didn't even address the outright lies and unconstitutional assertions. "Remember, the States are merely an “agent” for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do. " is an insane statement. In which U.S. Constitution did he find that gem?
"I like getting my ballot mailed to me (I went permanent-absentee like 30 years ago) so I can take my time to figure out which way to vote, especially on initiatives and the like."
When I lived in California, you got a sample ballot in the mail a month or so before the election, which allows you to take your time making decisions. You bring it with you to the polling place on election day and use it as a reference to mark your actual ballot.
It's not rocket science.
Mail-in votes are terrible and should be outlawed. As they are in many European countries.
Italy tried mail-in voting in the 70s or 80s, but quickly abandoned it, as it resulted in every single delegate from Sicily and Calabria being the hand-picked candidate of the Mafia. Everyone living there knew that if they didn’t want to risk having their house or business burned down, they had to turn their ballots over to the local capo.
In addition to that concealment you can pack in a trojan horse to do anything you want when you see some fixed situation, and it can't be seen either.
No that isn’t right. What you described above was a non-deterministic bug in the code.
Just write deterministic code. There aren’t any ghost and gremlins. Just good and bad code.
It is easy to write code that is absolutely predictable.
Mail in voting works fine in Florida. Voters need to request a mail in ballot so the process can be controlled.
In which U.S. Constitution did he find that gem?
The existing one, you dunce. Specifically, Article I, Section 4:
The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.
I didn’t pay much attention to politics before 9-11, but nevertheless I have a clear memory of the prevailing attitude towards mail-in ballots before (roughly) the Obama years.
The consensus was that mail-in ballots were the least secure method to obtain a fair and clean election and were prone to corruption.
Newsmax Will Pay $67 Million to Settle Dominion Defamation Lawsuit ~ NYT
The existing one, you dunce. Specifically, Article I, Section 4:
Trump's claim is that the president can force states to change voting rules, you dunce.
@Achilles: The problem you have is this Thompson person is confused.
“This Thompson person” is Ken Thompson of Bell Labs, who created UNIX, was a co-creator of C, and was awarded the Turing Prize. I think you more likely to be confused than he.
"No that isn’t right. What you described above was a non-deterministic bug in the code. "
It's perfectly deterministic and in fact is found in the C compiler. What makes you think that \p is any less deterministic than 077?
In each case what happens is what the compiler makes of it, and what the compiler does can be concealed by the compiler, in the same what that \p conceals 077. The action is in the history of the compiler, not in the current source.
https://www.bakerinstitute.org/event/carter-baker-commission-16-years-later-voting-mail
While the COVID-19 pandemic and record number of voters who cast absentee or mail-in ballots raised concerns about the security of the 2020 absentee process, the Carter-Baker report warned: “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”
"Many baseball fans opposed steroids, corked bats and juiced baseballs, even though their teams hit more home runs."
Trump's claim is that the president can force states to change voting rules, you dunce.
No it's not, you dunce. It's that he has (rightfully) identified the Democrats' use of mail-in voting, vote harvesting, same-day registration, failure to clean the voter rolls of dead and illegitimate registrations, etc., as undermining the security standards that Congress has already ordained for voting, as well as the Equal Protection clause of the 14th amendment, as upheld multiple times by the Supreme Court.
He is totally within his powers to order the Justice Department to give every mail-in voting state an audit in proctological detail, using RICO and every other pertinent law to put the maximum possible pressure on the small fry to squeal on their bigfoot handlers and moneymen.
He is totally within his powers to subpoena every financial transaction ActBlue has ever made, and every piece of paper ever touched by George Soros, Marc Elias, Norm Eisen.
He is totally within his powers to cut off every penny of Federal funding assistance to states that do not conform to the law.
Will they litigate? Probably. But who cares? "If they have done nothing wrong they have nothing to worry about", as the Democrats always say whenever they are holding the whip of government. Now their own backs are going to feel the whip they themselves made.
He is going to use every tool of monster nanny government that was lovingly crafted by the government-worshiping Democrat party over the last eighty years to gut the Democrats like a fish. It's glorious, and richly deserved. I hope they go the way of the Whigs when he is done with them.
He could have framed it constitutionally:
“States will need to comply with the new laws and regulations we pass.”
But he framed it as: The states are agents of the federal government and must do what he tells them.
I think this is just how he sees the hierarchy of power.
The use of the word "agent" is concerning though. The moment you call the states an “agent” of the federal government, you’ve inverted the entire logic of delegated powers. That’s not messy rhetoric, it’s a backwards theory of the Constitution.
Keldonric: "The moment you call the states an “agent” of the federal government, you’ve inverted the entire logic of delegated powers."
That is literally true. But in the specific instance of federal elections - for the POTUS, VP, and the House - the Several States are administrating a federal process on behalf of the collective people of the US. The Reconstruction Amendments already give Congress broad powers to make sure the Several States carry out these responsibilities properly. So as shorthand, I think you can say the states are agents of fedgov, in this specific narrow area.
RR
JAM
Trump won Orange County, in California, by 1% over Harris in 2024. While losing to Biden by 9% in 2020.
Every address in California gets sent at least 1 ballot, solicited or not. ANYONE can "harvest" ballots. A person has 15 days after election day to "cure" their ballot.
Miraculously, Dave Min(D) ran for an open seat, and Derek Tran(D) ran against a 3 term incumbent, won their respective races by a few hundred votes each. Bucking the trend.
And now Gangster Gavin wants to redistrict, making it even harder for Republicans.
of course they forgot that harmeet has to approve these districts at the civil rights division,
but yes when they are counting ballots for weeks whereas we can do it in a day, there is some funny business there,
First, we have to deal with the masses of leftists who have been pretending to be libertarians since at least 2012 and are taking over huge parts of the GOP from the Left, especially in swing states like Georgia, where they are very active. They fill Party seats with people who believe in open borders, legalizing all drugs, and emptying the prisons. They are paid for and funded by the Koch nonprofits, especially AFP, their thug arm. In Florida, in 2012, I sat and listened to one of Steve Bannon's proteges and AFP's current national head of organizing, Slade O'Brian, as they drunkenly waded in a hotel pool at 10 a.m. and Slade mocked the TEA Party as idiots easy to control. Just tell them they're after your gun, he said. The protege, an FBI informant, a nice guy whom I know, and probably assigned to watch the TEA Party by the FBI, said nothing negative.
These people think you're idiots, and you hand them your power and your volunteer hours while they laugh at you for being rubes. Work only with local, socially conservative or honest older libertarian candidates you trust; control your meetings, get to know everyone you support and where they stand on every issue, and make candidates put it in writing. Don't be afraid to throw out troublemakers and spies: Political Parties are not decocracies: they are private organizations, and they can throw out anyone. Demand the same written committments of Party leadership. But never sign anything from AFP or any Koch tool, now probably including Bannon. Never send anyone money unless you get to know them and have seen them publicly work to endorse your views. I know two people in Florida who received couriered threats of lawsuits when they learned just how crooked AFP is and started talking about it.
Once we get our house in order, we can help Trump. What the hell is open-borders, Gang of Eight Rubio doing sitting by his side? We deserve answers. Of course I support paper ballots and maybe a week of early voting, with ample, accountable allowances made for the disabled, elderly, sick, and travelling. It worked for a long time. But first, we need to come together as a Party. That time is now.
“@Achilles: The problem you have is this Thompson person is confused.
“This Thompson person” is Ken Thompson of Bell Labs, who created UNIX, was a co-creator of C, and was awarded the Turing Prize. I think you more likely to be confused than he.”
Whaaaat?! Achilles might be wrong? Earth shattering.
“But he framed it as: The states are agents of the federal government and must do what he tells them.”
To an extent, he is correct. Congress does have significant power when it comes to national elections, should they chose to utilize it. For example, the VRA still requires minority-majority districts. Looking at gerrymandering, currently, excluding those districts, there is nothing preventing it, in federal law - but on occasion, in the past, there have been some limitations. Presumably, those districts were mandated, under the VRA, under § 5, enforcing § 1, of the 14th Amdt. Gerrymandering could presumably be banned nationally, the same way, by requiring compactness under Equal Protection (via § 5 again).
Equal Protection might be viable for banning the type of mail in balloting that we have seen recently, that is so egregiously fraud prone. But maybe better would be to just give the states money for their elections, under the Spending Power, with strings attached.
We shall see.
the mail vote was determined to be fatally flawed, per the Baker/Carter commission in 2005, but the powers that be didn't care, that why special circumstances in 2020, from Colonel Tony's special sauce, of course Dominion had been widely stigmatizes as recently as Frontline in October 2020!
but Helderman did his best impression of a basenghi for the next few years, never explain, and 'it worked didn't it' in the immortal words of Clean Face Harry Reid,
rhhardin said...
"No that isn’t right. What you described above was a non-deterministic bug in the code. "
It's perfectly deterministic and in fact is found in the C compiler. What makes you think that \p is any less deterministic than 077?
In each case what happens is what the compiler makes of it, and what the compiler does can be concealed by the compiler, in the same what that \p conceals 077. The action is in the history of the compiler, not in the current source.
If you write the code and you compile the code you get a binary file.
In order to put things in that binary file you have to use code to do it.
In an open source project you will not be able to sneak magic bugs into the binary. It all requires human commands. There is no gremlin god out there making random hidden binary commands.
What you are describing is a different problem. If I want to write an absolutely deterministic program that counts votes and make it so other people can take that code and compile it and be 100% confident in the results of the generated binary file that is easily possible.
What Thompson is describing has nothing to do with that. He is assuming a malicious coder inserting hidden binary code into the controller. You can do that at any level but it will not work in an open source environment because other people can take the code and compile the program and run checkbit functions which will catch the presence of inserted binary code.
although if memory serves the state party machinery was in the hands of Romney and other possums, in 2012, not the Tea Party, he smashed Gingrich's campaign, and then was a best impression of a canary in the General,
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