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Comment by fillskills | Hacker News Reader

This really scares the crap out of me. I dont know the potential number of people who will end up voting by mail, but given Covid, I assume that would be significant. Messing with that system will really screw Americas voice and essentially block democracy. What can we do to make sure that our government know that this is unacceptable

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I'm also terrified. I thought voting and literally the core of our democracy would be off limits to the current administration, but here we are. Our elections are being undermined to the best of the president's ability. The news over the past few months is honestly something more fit for a third world country on the verge of dictatorship, not the United States.

Considering about 20% of mail-in ballots have already been disqualified for one reason or another, a drastic change could be exactly what's needed.

If you're talking about the NY primary, it didn't have much to do with the mail, it was mostly people who were unfamiliar with the process and mixed up things like forgetting to sign it.

Here's an atlantic article about it: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/07/new-yor...

That said: I think New York is an example of why the debate about this is worth having. 20% of ballots getting tossed is catastrophic.

> It didn't have much to do with the mail

From your link

Patel said his campaign is looking at thousands of other votes that seem to be missing postmarks entirely—a post-office error... He sent me a photo of a box of 3,000 absentee ballots from just one part of the district that have been ruled invalid because they lack a postmark.

Personally I've heard a lot about the mail being an issue in NY.

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