Trump blocks postal funds to prevent expanded mail-in voting | Hacker News Reader

Trump blocks postal funds to prevent expanded mail-in voting

bbc.com

138 pointsmaydemir81 comments

This is so insidious and depressing. Nothing the Republican party does surprises me anymore. He outright said today that he's doing this to stymie mail-in voting, and the Republican party supports him on it. The president is outright saying "I want to hinder the vote for everyone, across the board" and the Republican party supports it. It's so sad.

This is a taste for Americans of what it must feel like for many people across the world in less fortunate countries every day, for as long as anyone can remember. I can't imagine living with this indefinitely with no hope of change.

It's only going to get more brutal -- Trump is terrified of losing the legal protection of the presidency and will not hesitate to do literally anything to hold on to it.

This election is a referendum on the survival of humanity.

I recognize that the previous sentence seems hyperbolic but I believe it to be the case. I'm terrified.

In some ways I agree, but I bet I disagree what they referendum is because a Biden/Harris Presidency Terrifies me

What exactly about a Biden/Harris presidency terrifies you? Strong language there.

Well I am a libertarian, Both Biden and Harris are known "Tough on Crime" Authoritarians,

I also oppose 99% of their platform including government run healthcare, extreme theft errr taxation, open social programs for anyone that happens to be physically located inside the boarders, their Identity / Social Justice Warrior politics, I could go on and on

I support federalism, I support individual liberty, I support meritocracy. all of which they stand against

They literally support none of those things (except maybe identity politics).

The think tanks' efforts to brand "socialism" as authoritarianism have paid off. M4A being painted as an authoritarian nightmare is a slick trick on their part.

Can you point me to a non-authoritarian socialist nation, now or at any point in the past...

Socialism fails very quickly if not backed by an Authoritarian form of government... Only with Authoritarian enforcement can it survive and then only with extreme poverty and misery for most people.

All of the things listed both have implicitly supported during the primary debates

Literally every candidate must be seen as "Tough on Crime" because the public wont vote for anyone who doesn't make this appeal. This became a big Republican stance that Clinton embraced that helped him win the election. So please show me the not "tough on crime" politician that has any shot at winning an election.

This was when the Republicans had majorities in both chambers of Congress, Newt Gingrich was Speaker of the House, and the Republican's Contract on America was passed, unfortunately. The Democrats shifted right because they thought that's what would win them elections.

Sure, Biden and Harris are terrible candidates because they're 1990s Republicans, but they're a million times better than Trump and Pence. The smear campaigns against them are an attempt to elevate Trump and Pence so he seems only as awful as Biden And Harris. Don't take the bait. Don't defend them. For a Republican to warn liberals that Biden and Harris don't deserve anyone's vote because they're those "tough on crime" types when it was Republicans who shut the government down to force through "tough on crime" legislation and codify "tough on crime" as a requisite to hold political office is some serious b.s.

This is unrelated to a presidents attempt to reduce voting, I would think you would be pro voting

Why that?

A lot of the tough on crime stuff is Dem's trying to counter the "law and order" playbook by the GOP. Criminal "justice" definitely needs to be re-examined and re-worked.

Pretty hyperbolic statement. America (the federal entity) might be in danger of survival long-term but humanity has survived much worse. You don't even need to go back 100 years to imagine what it looks like for a major nation to collapse under authoritarianism.

Climate change is coming faster than expected. It will be ignored by the Trump regime, just like the pandemic is.

It's also another disincentive for him to get the pandemic under control. Because if we got down to tens or hundreds of infections per day per state, there'd be less need for mail-in voting.

Who specifically is being disincentivized?

Trump. The pandemic works for him, because then more people want to vote by mail, which he can limit through defunding the post office. If the pandemic isn't as much of an issue, then he can't limit the supply of voters as easily.

The president is outright saying "I want to hinder the vote for everyone, across the board"

No, he isn't "outright saying" that. This is the kind of statement that Scott Alexander rightfully criticised some years ago when people started saying Trump is "openly" racist:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wo...

Here's an actual quote from him: "Mail-in ballots are very dangerous - there's tremendous fraud involved." That's what he is outright saying.

Mail fraud is not a US specific problem. UK elections have had the same problems. In one case someone who had previously been jailed for mail voting fraud took an Instagram selfie of himself in the counting room. An MP has written an article about mail voting fraud here:

https://www.politicshome.com/thehouse/article/there-is-wides...

Florida introduced absentee ballots just after the 2000 election. Since then it's been extensively used by deployed military along with anyone else who wants it. Dozens of general and primary elections later, we can see it didn't put those elections at risk.

As a side note, effectively crippling mail-in voting would prohibit many FL elderly (mostly R) from voting.

The executive branch is obviously trying to get in our heads and create as much chaos and turmoil as humanly possible. Possibly with funding from other nations. We're being CIA'd right now.

Absentee ballots making up a small part of the total vote count is alot different than the majority of voting taking place via mail in on my levels not just security but logistics, and several other factors

It would be one thing if it rolled out with a defined planned over the course of a few years. it is something else when it is an emergency measure rolled out with no plan in an ad hoc manner

FL's extensive and lengthy trial of absentee voting was a success from every angle. The thing one does after completing a wildly successful trial is to roll out the actual program in the manner and degree that it's needed.

The miami herald seems to disagree that is was a "success from every angle"

https://www.miamiherald.com/latest-news/article224873455.htm...

President Trump has explicitly said he's okay with the system in Florida.

Universal mail-in voting is different in that every registered voter gets a mail-in ballot without even requesting one.

He's said he's okay with Florida because of Florida's Republican governor. That's not my because, it's his.

Also, he votes by mail-in ballot to Florida.

Absentee ballots are very different from the systems states are putting in place to mail ballots to everyone.

absentee ballots are different to the mass mail-in ones. Trump said he supports absentee ballots because they have to be requested

This is a very strong case for a general public strike. The only way for this administration and the Republicans to back off is for the financial market to crash.

Up until a few years ago, such news only came from distant third world countries. How much have we regressed!

American democracy hangs in the balance. It's time for some very loud civil disobedience, folks.

I like Trump in general, but the USPS is also basically my favorite government organization, so this irks me.

USPS has always provided superior service for us compared to UPS or Fedex.

I am hopeful they'll be able to fix their budget issues by fixing their cost structure.

It seems completely asinine to block their ability to make sound financial decisions and force them into providing an inferior service instead.

You can fix their budget issues by removing the burden placed on them in 2006 that they fund their pension obligations for 75 years. No other entity, government or private, labors under this burden, providing for the retirement of employees who are not yet born. They were profitable for the six years before this law was passed, by Bush and the Republicans, and they would have been profitable for the last 6 years had it not been for this law.

Looking from outside the country: how? How can you like him? I know I will probably not start a good discussion by my question. But I hope to do so.

What could someone like in this man? I struggle to find any redeeming qualities.

Not from the US, but looking from the outside, it seems your country is collapsing on itself and people are cheering on this word little individual that shows little abilities. Just puzzling to me.

> How can you like him?

Consider that all major US media outlets are driven by ad-spend, which is in term driven by views. Views are driven by outrage. Trump is a great target for outrage. The media love to hate him. He loves to let them hate him.

If you turn off the news, the country is in general humming along just fine. Stock market is doing great. No new wars. Finally doing something to address major trade imbalances with China.

If you listen to the news, everyone and their mother is dying in the streets of coronavirus. In reality, roughly 1-3% of the population has even caught the virus. Deaths are way down from March/April.

For a country and a president that are supposedly incompetent to the point of collapse, things are going pretty damn great.

COVID deaths are trending up, with 1,499 deaths reported for August 12. We're at 166,023 deaths total. Schools forced to open. Terrible quarterly GDP. COVID relief going to Trump's friends. A looming housing market collapse with evictions on the way. Massive unemployment. Probably a second quarantine in the fall due to the awful way that the response has been handled by the federal government. USPS fiasco by trump and his buddy having a conflict of interest with being a post master for the USPS and his investments + ties to XPO. trump's tweet that suggests postponing the election. trump and co's promotion of goya. trump's "It is what it is" response to 160,000 American deaths from COVID. trump's attacks on protesters and response with federal agents in Portland.

I can literally go on and on. This is just what I had the effort to type out. How are these things pretty damn great? Just one or two of these should have a massive negative impact on any politician.

> For a country and a president that are supposedly incompetent to the point of collapse, things are going pretty damn great.

Even _assuming_ everything is great, would it _really_ be his merit? I mean, everything that man did has been counter-productive for your country. He is a bumbling idiot. He really is. What merit does he have? I just can not see it. The fact that "well, we're not all dead yet" is hardly a criteria for success.

And no, my bad opinion of him is not because "the media" - my bad opinion stems from reading his book "The art of the deal" about a decade ago (that was highly recommended by friends - they said it's great!) - and in there he came off, to me, as a corrupt scumbag. All his behavior since only reinforced this.

It looks to me like the slow motion fall of an empire. And empires fall all the time, think about Great Britain, a bit over a hundred years ago they were the "the empire on which the sun never sets" - wonder if in another century people will look the same at the US.

You didn't ask why you would like him. You asked why I would like him. Obviously we disagree. What's it really matter?

Still, you did not say why you did like him. You just said "it's not that bad". Hardly the same thing. Will admit, you said that you feel that the trade balances with China are being addressed, and, well, that's _something_.

And the stock market is doing great.

And we haven't gotten into any new wars.

And we have significantly scaled back our existing wars in the Middle East.

And, whether its to his credit or not, health insurance prices have stopped spiking 10-20% per year.

And he's nominated two conservative justices to the Supreme Court.

And he moved the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

And he just brokered a peace deal between Israel and the UAE

And tensions with North Korea have been de-escalated, even if that effort didn't go very far.

And he addressed funding imbalances in the UN

And my taxes went way down

And he's not a Democrat, so the media is actually critical of him, instead of fawning over how dreamy he is at every turn.

Immigration isn't a big issue for me, but I prefer his stance over open borders.

So I guess there's a random list that you may also tell me isn't actually a list.

Because the bar has been set so low at this point, "we're not all dead yet" (except for the over 160k people who have died so far from COVID) is actually a talking point I think

> If you turn off the news, the country is in general humming along just fine. Stock market is doing great. No new wars. Finally doing something to address major trade imbalances with China.

The country is doing 'just fine' if you are a person who has expendable income to invest and job security (and health insurance) because you have the ability to work remotely. The unemployment rate is very high, and most of those laid off are not knowledge workers - which is correlated with lower pay. Those who can least afford it are losing the most jobs. The wealth gap, already at an all time high, is undoubtedly going to increase significantly.

Obviously the country is not at the point of collapse, but do you not think the problems I just listed are cause for serious concern?

> How can you like him?

war1025 is a religious white guy in Iowa who has argued that Proposition 8 in California wasn't a ban on same sex marriage. I'd actually be surprised if someone like this wasn't a Trump supporter.

Accurate. At least someone pays attention.

Believing that scientists, teachers, economists, ethicists have been deceiving you all these years, while a POS reality TV star with decades of lying, bigotry, cheating people, dozens of credible accusations of sexual assault, cheating on his wives is somehow your beacon of truth and honesty. You are a bad person.

Believing that you know me based on a few sentences you read online is pretty naive, to be honest.

Edit:

My email is in my profile. Feel free to reach out if you'd like to have an actual conversation instead of just name calling.

As another outsider looking in I've been shocked lately by the state governors. I thought Trump was aberration, but seeing how many mini trumps are running states shows that he is more of the norm than I ever realized. If I was in one of the saner parts of the country I'd be joining secessionist movements, they country just seems ungovernable as is.

Since Iowa is pretty high up on that list of "states that are run by mini-Trumps", I'll just throw in my two cents that for a state that is supposedly doing "everything wrong", life is basically normal here. We wear masks when going into stores now. That's literally the only major change to an otherwise normal life.

> Democrats denounced Mr Trump's comment, saying his position is an attempt to prevent Americans from voting him out.

I mean, his comment was openly admitting that...

The Republican party wants to be a dictatorship. They are putting party over country. They don't want to lose and win at all costs. I wish Obama had done something like this to make sure Trump didn't get elected (this statement is intended to trigger Republicans and force them to defend Trump's actions)

Indeed. We have fallen to a fascist coup. The question is whether or not they can hold on to it.

There were so many things which aren't horrible for our democracy which could have been done to change how 2016 turned out. Not taking a shit on the progressive wing of the party at every step may have helped some, actually campaigning in some of the states she assumed to have in the bag and then lost may have helped too.

Obama doing something anti-democratic, illegal, etc to ensure Trump wasn't elected is not a step I would ever support.

Since the election of the president by law has a fixed date. All votes cast on time, but that arrive late or get lost don't count.

As a citizen, you can do everything right, vote and your vote will still not count.

Whats wrong with pencil and ballot dropped into clear acrylic box, simple and works 100%.

Run out of pencils, voter makes mark on both candidates (check on one, x on other), counter decides to drop a bunch of additional ballots in, your vote is visible to the outside so the person who paid you to vote a certain way can verify.

Voting is a hard problem.

This is why you have representatives from both parties next to the ballot box, and third party observers, to make sure this doesn't happen.

1. Covid

2. That's also being fucked with.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/09/12/report...

https://www.governing.com/topics/politics/sl-polling-place-c...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-locations/so...

Ballot box stuffing has occurred numerous times in American History. Even ids are not a panacea.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/fake-id-seizures-on-the-rise-m...

Plato's critique of a Democracy is it's the son of Oligarchy & degenerates into Tyranny...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato%27s_five_regimes

Paywall'd right-wing source was the best you could do?

Ad hominem is the best you can do? No paywall btw. Just submit an email address.

No, I could do much better than ad hominem, but why bother? You pointed out a vanishingly small type of crime against mail-in ballots - with no numbers about how much crime occurs against real "voting booths", at that - and that was supposed to justify an intentional dismantling of a constitutionally guaranteed service for political gain by one party. This is clearly disingenuous on the face of it, and if it's not, and you really believe what you're saying, that's even worse and equally unlikely to have you yield from your position.

The epoch times is a propaganda site and shouldn't be used as a legitimate source.

I have the feeling that any site that reports against your narrative will be deemed "a propaganda site and shouldn't be used as a legitimate source". Good luck speaking to your echo chamber. At least I can see what your what your ideological opponents are focused on. The silence of some news organizations re: the seizure of these fake ids is deafening, btw...

https://www.foxnews.com/us/authorities-seize-thousands-of-fa...

No, this isn't a ideology thing, the epoch times is literally the news paper of the Falun Gong religious movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Epoch_Times It's not "secretly" propaganda, it's explicitly and openly a propaganda site.

Yes, this article, unlike many of the news sources you probably use, links to it's original sources. Your ideological point re: Falun Gong is irrelevant.

https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/local-media-release/cbp-louisvi...

https://twitter.com/CBPChicago/status/1291057732825513984

Fallacies in this post: 1) Ad hominem on parent 2) Cherry Picking - linking to original sources does not mean something is not propaganda

Regarding absentee ballots, all 50 states combined yielded 143 fraud convictions over 20 years. Those numbers are so low that there's not any way to massage them into an actual risk to elections.

Source Heritage Foundation https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud

Absentee ballots != mail in ballots

Oregon has distributed 100 million ballots over the past 20 years in its vote by mail system. In that time there have been just 12 cases of voter fraud.

According to organized crime syndicates, there is almost no organized crime.

It is in Florida. Fill out the ballot and mail it in.

Pretty much, absentee ballots = mail-in ballots.

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/06/trumps-absentee-vs-mail-in...

Like most Rockefeller & Gates sponsored rags, factcheck.org's post is muddying the waters with opinion, circular & contradictory reasoning, & deceptive headlines. This piece you sent me were mainly partisan opinions of the same people who advocate for mail in ballots, masquerading as some voice of authority that the audience is supposed to obey by fiat. There was no discussion, other than a sentence of an opinion, about the process.

Unlike the article above I posted, there are no links to source documents of procedures or any source data other than partisan opinions.

Dude. This isn't complicated. We call them mail-in ballots and absentee ballots, interchangeably. Absentee is an older term and may be falling out of use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com