Hacker News

Which "side" has been fighting tooth and nail for unverifiable mail-in ballots and resisting all investigations of voting integrity? Though both sides are also embracing totally insecure and insane digital voting systems that have been caught doing things like duplicating votes and enabling fractional voting in general elections.

And when it all goes to shit, they can just use that as evidence that mail-in voting shouldn’t have been allowed in the first place.

It is the same tired but sadly effective Republican playbook: take a mostly functioning if imperfect system, break it beyond repair under the guise of fixing or reforming it, use the ongoing disaster to argue that they need to fix it further, rinse and repeat.

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.

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.

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...)

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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.

Trump supporters used to speak up on this site. Surely they still exist but all I hear is crickets

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.

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.

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.

That sample is wrong for statistics, 4% is literally not significant. It's also too much for sample controls

Trump sucks but this is more pure GOP bullshit to suppress voting and keep minority power.