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Comment by ck2 | Hacker News Reader

hacked, copied and distributed to countries that are trying to harm us in 3, 2, 1

remember Heritage Foundation spent a small fortune to try to find illegal voting over the past decades and they only found a handful of cases, most accidental and not willful and far too few to cause any effect at all

if the Dems get the Senate somehow and don't immediately pass laws to protect voting against actions of the Executive, well then they deserve to lose 2028

of course he'll veto everything but there might be enough will to override

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Even if the Democrats take the House and the Senate this year, and pass a new Voting Rights Act, there's no reason to believe it will have any effect, since it will be immediately vetoed by the President. So I'm not sure your expectations are in line with reality here.

26 - 28 I expect the Democrats to investigate, write reports, block nominees, and occasionally pass legislation they know will be vetoed but otherwise have no effect. I hope everyone is ready for reality here.

I expect the most relevant action to most people's lives will be some nasty budget showdowns (likely not affecting ICE, since they're funded for years already and attempting to touch that will not go well) and the really interesting thing to see will be whether Trump's administration attempts to reverse the executive-created (and rather arbitrary and silly) modern idea of what a "shutdown" is, or will attempt to significantly adjust the (again, kinda arbitrary anyway) traditionally categories for what does and doesn't continue to be funded.

AFAIK it's never been argued in court, it's just what someone in the executive branch in the late '70s decided should happen, and before that in the event of failure to pass a budget it was assumed that spending should continue as-is, until another budget is passed, more-or-less. It's not even clear it'd be illegal if he just went on like nothing had happened.

I think given the past history it is reasonable to assume the executive branch will ignore the budget and spend and raise money how it wants.

> find illegal voting over the past decades and they only found a handful of cases

They found hundreds of cases this year in Pennsylvania, from the 2020 election alone, with a lot more left to look at.

Trump effectively poisoned the well against any meaningful bipartisan interest in election fraud through repeated endorsement of bad faith and ludicrous "investigative journalism" by his supporters in 2020.

So it basically does not matter what the heritage foundation did or did not find, or what other groups will find in 2026 and beyond. The entire country has made up their mind already. Thus is the price paid for Trump's first-order winner-take-all approach to everything.

>hundreds of cases this year in Pennsylvania

This something like an order of magnitude lower than the error margin.

Florida elected George W by 437 votes in 2000.

Al Franken won a senate seat by 312 votes in 2008

A Maine House seat was won by 1 vote in 2024

1 illegal vote is too many.

Again, it is the states who administer elections. Full stop. The administration is trying to undermine that. Trump and his allies have already said the Democrats can't be allowed to win.

To say the feds don't have any say in federal elections just is not really true.

Every political party and their allies say their opponents can't be allowed to win, at least the last few election cycles. It's a tired trope that "Trump is going to do xyz thing to stay in power." It's a hysteria cycle, and none of it ever comes true.

No, this isn't what is being said at all.

Yes, people are saying "Trump is trying to stay in power"

That's my best guess at what you're refuting, since I had it in quotes. Otherwise you're just vagueposting on a 4-day old thread. Try being more specific, make a point.

so, counter-example, one murder of a child by a gun is too many

except there now have been hundreds if not thousands of those murders

the gun argument against regulation is "it's a right and it would bother too many legit rights"

so same energy, "voting is a right and would bother too many legit rights"

there you go

let me know when guns are harder to get than voting

and when child murders by gun are fewer than "illegal votes"

then we can talk

DOJ just ordered teenagers can buy handguns, soon by US mail, good luck with that

do you understand how many billions are being spent on this voter blocking effort?

how many dollars per voter do you want to spend? it's currently hundreds per voter

so find each accidental "illegal vote" is literally costing MILLIONS to find

and there is NOTHING stopping an audit AFTER a close election and reversing the result in courts

but can't undo the child murder, ever

Why not link it here so we can all read their report

New Jersey, my bad: https://newjerseymonitor.com/2026/07/21/governor-software-er...

Pennsylvania also has people getting charged: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/four-aliens-charged-election-...

>They found hundreds of cases this year in Pennsylvania, from the 2020 election alone, with a lot more left to look at.

1. Source?

2. How much effort did they put into each case? Is it just "we did a join between the voter rolls and some other database, and got 200 people that didn't match", or did they actually do the fieldwork to confirm those cases can't possibly correspond to real people?

the way you know there weren't actually "hundreds of cases" is that by now there would have been DOJ prosecutions to prison of each and every one and thousands of hours of coverage on FOX et al

also if they weren't citizens they would have been deported by now

that's how we know none of the claims are true

I mean think about what's gone down the past year, citizens grabbed and disappeared by ICE for weeks, people deported to third countries they've never been to and have US travel warning for extreme danger

you think a single voting fraud wouldn't be on FOX every single night and the front page of whitehouse .gov?

it's all noise

and the irony is it's the 50% of citizen latino voters that put them in power in the first place, it's why the total panic now to scare them off from the polls when they change their minds

New Jersey, my bad: https://newjerseymonitor.com/2026/07/21/governor-software-er...

Pennsylvania also has people getting charged: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/four-aliens-charged-election-...

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-charges-16...

I responded several places with some links. Source: the government.

Even assuming the found "hundreds" there's over seven million votes in Pennsylvania.

show it to us bud

New Jersey, my bad: https://newjerseymonitor.com/2026/07/21/governor-software-er...

Pennsylvania also has people getting charged: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/four-aliens-charged-election-...

4 people charged with election fraud in PA and 400 votes in NJ due to software error that was ultimately caught.

Basically what every election fraud expert has been saying. There's always a dozen or so cases per year and the occasional glitch that gets caught.

that's the best Trump can muster to justify a "stolen election"?

No idea about a stolen election, that's not what I said. I said hundreds of illegal voters, and you said "show it to us bud" and I showed it to you

You said hundreds and found a handful that were ... already caught? That didn't affect the election??

Hundreds of illegal voters that were already caught, exactly.

While everyone says that's not happening.

Over 6,000 illegals registered to vote in a couple of years, and 400 of them actually voted. So not a handful, try reading comprehension.

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