Yes. Republicans have long ago turned the USPS into a political football in the culture wars. And they want to sabotage mail-in votes this time, that's a new twist.
That's a huge stretch from using the USPS to rig an election. Both sides are accusing the other of trying to take advantage of the sudden surge in interest in mail-in voting.
edit reply: you can't on the one hand argue that mail is a reliable way to run an election and on the other argue that a politician is trying to use it for their advantage. Not giving up, he didn't say he was using it. He said the Democrats would use it. Either way, these arguments underscore just how hackable and exploitable mail in voting is.
He admitted it on TV. Give it up.
“If we don’t make a deal that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting. They just can’t have it. Sort of a crazy thing,”
He is explicitly trying to remove the USPS's ability to handle voting by mail.
We're talking about what trump said.
Trump said the post office needs two bills that fund it to be passed for it to be able to adequately handle universal vote by mails, and if he doesn't make a deal with the people trying to pass those bills, then the post office doesn't get the money it needs to be able to do that:
>>> “If we don’t make a deal that means they don’t get the money. That means they can’t have universal mail-in voting. They just can’t have it. Sort of a crazy thing,” Trump said on Thursday.
This is technically correct, the best kind of correct. If 100 people actually vote for Smith and 101 people actually vote for Jones, and you count 99 of the votes for Smith and 98 of the votes for Jones, you have not counted any fraudulent votes.
The test of a democracy is whether it is representative, not whether it counts only non-fraudulent votes. Avoiding fraud is a very important means to the end, but it is not the end itself.
Here is an analogy for the HN crowd: If my site is broken, and I need to do a deploy to fix it, and we have a rule that says that every commit must pass tests and tests take 4 hours to run, then great, the rule is making sure that no code that's failing tests hit prod - but the rule is certainly not helpful in bringing prod back online. The rule is a means to the goal of making sure that prod works. It's a good rule, of course. Nobody is questioning the merit of testing your code or saying that untested code is a good thing. But you cannot justify missing your SLAs by saying "All of our code needs to be tested in order for us to know that our site works."
Quite the opposite, mail in ballots create an irrefutable and unfalsifiable paper trail for each vote.
Republicans (and Trump) are against them because they know the more people vote (ie. the more democratic America is) the less chance they have at winning.