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Comment by curiousgal | Hacker News Reader

> Trump himself has admitted to wanting to starve the postal service of funds so that mail-in voting will become difficult, as tens of millions of Americans are expected to vote by mail during the coronavirus pandemic.

This is why I can't help but admire Trump, the fact he remains untouched proves how cunning him and his team are. Either that or how fragile the checks and balances system truly is.

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How is anything about his hamfisted (publicly admitted) attempt to disenfranchise voters even close to cunning?

Maybe it’s because his party and half of America is also on board with it?

Be careful to not challenge people’s beliefs too much, they’ll get upset and start screaming about censorship

If someone can stand in line for the cashier at Home Depot and Whole Foods, they can also do so at the voting booth.

Mail-in voting has no tracking of the voter receiving the ballot and if a filled out ballot is counted. It also has no verification of who votes and no protection to make the vote anonymous.

Yeah, none of that is true. There was a recent article about how it works in Colorado: https://www.denverpost.com/2020/08/16/colorado-denver-mail-v...

I am talking about the "last-mile" problem of securing that the mail carrier getting the ballot into the voters hands and securing that the ballot gets from the mail box to the counting location.

At a physical voting location you know 100% a person gets a ballot and you track the ballot from it's put into the voting box.

As far as I can tell this process deals with neither of these problems.

Nothing "cunning" about this. He simply knows that his supporters are okay with it.

What he is doing, though, is setting the bar lower and other politicians will do similar in the future. His supporters will then be all up in arms when a Dem does it.

Lowering the bar also invites others to lower the bar themselves, in their own way. Say, McConnell claims SC judges shouldn't be installed in the final year of the presidential term. Why then not to add a rule that SC judges (justices) can be suspended - not removed - by an executive order? Surely additional conditions can be invented, like a controversial judge selection or change in Senate majority? Everything flies, right?

I think Republicans are ok with there being no mail-in voting.

At least 50% of the population does not trust the large-scale move to mail-in-voting, so considering that people can stand in line at Home Depot and Whole Foods the loss of election trust does not seem worth it.

> At least 50% of the population does not trust the large-scale move to mail-in-voting

Source on that?

Your argument does not take into account the systematic closing of voting locations. Not everyone can vote in person if there's only a single voting location.

I agree that all voting locations should be open, and I see now reason to close voting locations because of Covid when Home Depot and Whole Foods can be open. I actually don't see why we can't utilize government resources to open more voting locations to facilitate social distancing.

I don't see why we can't utilize the USPS resources to mail in a ballot. I just did it for the local elections being held tomorrow and I was able to track my ballot online. Easy and Simple.

I think checks and balances system was built for different condition, and sort of past due to get updated.

It's like the Web... which was built for academic document exchange, and now we're in a hurry to bolt on zero-trust features on top.

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