- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Making it more difficult for the elderly to vote will certainly help the GOP (apparently, a sarcasm is needed, as that’s their most loyal base). This is a dog catching a car in action.
I lived in Oregon off and on from 2003 to 2015, and I was Reuters’ boots-on-the-ground guy at a county elections office in 2012 for updating tabulations via app.
For those unfamiliar with Oregon voting, there are no polling stations. Several weeks before the election, the secretary of State sent out a voter’s guide. Candidates could provide a summary (though – oddly – many chose not to) of qualifications and goals, whereas anyone could buy space for either side of an initiative, with a nonpartisan summary of both social and economic effects opening the conversation.
A few weeks later, the ballot arrived in the mail. With nearly a month to review things, it could easily be done in bite-sized pieces … city council tonight, school board tomorrow, initiatives that only got more absurd next week.
Without the need for any outside media, every single voter in Oregon could be armed with enough information to make rational decisions and seal them in so that voting itself was just an exercise of filling in the bubbles when the ballot arrived.
This sort of arrangement absolutely does not work for Trump, as he relies on bombast and making sure no one has accurate data.
The GOP is mask off and aware their policies can’t win elections. Which is a big reason that the Big Disastrous Bill pushes some of the most devastating effects past the 2026 election.
</soapbox>
Donald Trump on Monday announced that lawyers are drafting an executive order to eliminate mail-in voting, days after Vladimir Putin told him US elections were rigged because of postal ballots.
In a White House meeting alongside Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Trump said: “We’re going to start with an executive order that’s being written right now by the best lawyers in the country to end mail in ballots because they’re corrupt.”
The push follows Trump’s meeting with Putin in Alaska on Friday, when the Russian president allegedly told him that the 2020 election “was rigged because you have mail-in voting”, according to Trump’s subsequent interview with Sean Hannity.
Trump falsely claimed that late former president Jimmy Carter opposed mail-in voting, saying: “Even Jimmy Carter with this commission, they set it up. He said, the one thing about mail in voting, you will never have an honest election if you have mail in it.”
I don’t remember if Oregon used business-reply mail for the outer envelope, but I was never more than two miles from a drop box, and, well, it felt more like “voting” if I had to leave the house.
There were so many safeguards in place (as I said, I observed the tabulation one year) that fraud being more likely from mail-in voting than hackable machines is comically tone deaf.
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This would disenfranchise millions of older and disabled Americans - let alone working people who can’t get to a polling place because those are also under attack in many states.
Fascist gonna fascist
Voters are at this point just a pesky nuisance.
Dick tater in chief needs a reminder.
Freedom fries under a dick tater
EO comes out ordering congress to pass a law that ends mail-in voting. Best part is that his cult would cheer for him if he did that. Or is that the worst part?
Either way, I don’t expect the Supreme Doormat to stop whatever he does anyway.
Mike Johnson may have to confess something to his son after getting that passed. Meanwhile, couches feel unappreciated.
Washington State also has exclusively mail in voting as you describled, though I think there’s a few polling places to help if you’ve got problems on voting day or want to register. Along with what you mentioned, turnout is also pretty high in these states (just under 79% in WA in 2024) compared to ones without a universal mailed ballot and info packet, and at least in Washington, 80% of eligible people are registered to get their ballot to begin with.
To be fair, these could have nothing to do with each other, people in the PNW are fairly politically opinionated and perhaps they’re just more likely to vote.
From what I recall, Washington has one of the most secure voting systems in the country, mostly from keeping the voter registry up to date by automatically registering and updating vote information whenever anyone interacts with the state, especially the licensing office. Obviously it has nothing to do with the manner of voting, the conservatives just think mail in voting hurts their chances of winning.
It’s absurd to imagine forcing entire states to suddenly start voting in person again, and I can’t imagine the states going along with it. Which leads me to wonder what happens when the federal government throws out the results from an entire state. Do they just choose the senators and electors? Obviously it’s all illegal but that hasn’t stopped them yet. Perhaps the odd way we do elections for president wouldn’t really be impacted, since states don’t even need to do an election, just send the electors.
The first election I was eligible to vote in featured a polling place in my dorm at UW. Washington was a bit late to the party with all mail-in voting, vis-a-vis Oregon.
