> 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.
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.
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.
“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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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...
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?
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"
Those who are apt to discard responses to what they should have been apt to discard.
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.
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.
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.
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.