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mail-in voting
Fear and Loathing in the Preseason: Democracy on Thursday Night
Three days. Three moves. Ballots declared scams. Registration ruled improper. Maps tilted. The point isn’t just to block opponents. It is to shred the idea that there are fair rules at all.
Aug 23, 2025
It’s preseason football. The games don’t count, but the plays do. August is when coaches test the roster, run experiments, and flash just enough of the playbook to hint at what’s coming. Starters run a series or two. Rookies play like their careers depend on it. Veterans jog through familiar routes. Preseason is rehearsal and preview, a low-stakes glimpse of how the coach plans to run the real game.
That’s also what American politics looked like this week. US President Donald Trump was the coach. His team was on the field. And nothing he called was random. These weren’t scattered plays. They were practice runs for one central move: Erase the idea of neutral rules, brand every referee a cheat, and make only one result possible.
On Monday, he declared mail ballots and voting machines a scam and promised to federalize state elections with the stroke of a pen. His Truth Social post read like a coach screaming the scoreboard itself was rigged. Mail ballots? Fraud. Voting machines? A “total disaster.” His cure-all: government-issued paper ballots with watermarks, counted by hand, supposedly faster, cheaper, flawless. But the real twist was his insistence that states are “merely agents” of the federal government, bound to obey his executive order. That isn’t just trash talk. It is a constitutional mugging. Elections have always been state-run under federal guardrails. Trump wants them president-run, with states reduced to clerks.
The deeper move is psychological. Mail voting has been around since Union soldiers cast ballots during the Civil War. Voting machines have been in use for more than a century. Neither exotic. Neither inherently insecure. Yet Trump brands them counterfeit by definition. He isn’t accusing Democrats of bending rules. He is saying the rules themselves are a scam. Once the scoreboard is declared broken, only he can decide the final score.
In American democracy, the season has already begun, the field is tilted, the scoreboard is broken, and the refs have been run off.
The next day brought a subtler drill, but the same logic. In a “Dear Colleague” letter, the Department of Education barred colleges from using federal work-study jobs for voter registration, even if the work was nonpartisan. Registration, they argued, was “political activity.” Political activity cannot be paid with federal funds. Which wipes out the kids at folding tables in student centers, the ones passing forms in dorms, the reminders before deadlines. Without them, colleges are still technically required to hand out forms, but the mandate is toothless. The memo even lets schools withhold them from students they “reasonably believe” are ineligible, like international students. In practice, discretion becomes exclusion.
This isn’t mobs storming the field. It is the authoritarianism of memos: quiet, technical, bureaucratic. A faceless letterhead does what the riot could not. Clipboards become contraband. Neutral acts—handing out a form, reminding someone of a deadline—are suddenly reclassified as dirty tricks. The players who kept the drive alive are ruled out of bounds, whistled for fouls that do not exist.
By midweek the action shifted to Austin. Texas Republicans, at Trump’s demand, rammed through a new congressional map. Democrats tried to deny a quorum by fleeing the state. They were threatened with arrest and ended up sleeping on the House floor. “I want to cry, but I am too angry,” said state Rep. Nicole Collier (D-95), exhausted and furious. The maps weren’t surprising, but they were ruthless: Communities of color carved into ribbons, cities lashed to rural strongholds, Republican dominance welded in place for years. Gerrymandering is an old sport. What’s new is how openly it is played as loyalty to Trump. Gov. Greg Abbott congratulated his party for “staying true to Texas.” Democrats called it dictatorship by district. Both were right. The field itself had been tilted until one team always played uphill.
Three days. Three moves. Ballots declared scams. Registration ruled improper. Maps tilted. The point isn’t just to block opponents. It is to shred the idea that there are fair rules at all. Once the referees are branded cheaters, every loss looks stolen and every victory feels like divine justice. That is how a system loses the ground it plays on.
We’ve seen this game before. After Reconstruction, Black political participation itself was cast as fraud. The sight of Black officeholders was derided as “Negro domination.” Literacy tests and poll taxes were marketed as neutral “integrity measures,” though their purpose was exclusion. Everyone knew the score was rigged. The trick worked anyway because neutrality had already been redefined as corruption.
The pattern repeats. In the 1960s, psychiatrists described civil rights activism as “protest psychosis.” In the Soviet Union, dissidents were diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia.” In Hungary, Viktor Orbán branded NGOs as “foreign agents.” Different fields, same tactic: Erase the baseline of neutrality so only raw power remains.
What makes this moment distinct is the speed and coordination. In 72 hours, Trump called the game crooked, the Department enforced it on paper, and Texas locked it into law. History shows that once neutrality is redefined as fraud, procedure alone cannot fix it. Reconstruction faltered not only because of violence but because federal enforcement was itself declared illegitimate. Jim Crow endured not only because of poll taxes but because Black citizenship itself was rebranded as a scam. Once the field is said to be broken, every call looks rigged.
And the breakdown isn’t just on the field. It is in the stands. Pew finds nearly half of Republicans now say mail ballots are fraudulent by definition. Trust in voting machines has cratered. Gallup reports confidence in federal institutions at record lows. Even basic registration drives—students handing out forms, neighbors reminding each other of deadlines—are increasingly seen as partisan cons. Some call this polarization. It is worse. Polarization assumes the same field, however bitterly contested. What is dissolving now is belief in the field itself.
Trump’s conditioning drill is simple: Teach the fans to boo the refs before kickoff, and every call looks crooked. A loss feels stolen. A win feels ordained. That isn’t healthy mistrust. It is training people to believe the scoreboard only works when their side is ahead.
And that is the whole horror of preseason. You think it is rehearsal. You think the game has not started yet. You think this is just your team practicing, that things will get better once the season starts, that you will pull it together. But in American democracy, the season has already begun, the field is tilted, the scoreboard is broken, and the refs have been run off. The loudest man on the sideline is calling the score, daring anyone to say otherwise.
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Trump Is Mounting an Authoritarian Takeover of Our Election System
Attempting to implement policies limiting mail voting or voting machines via executive order would be flagrantly illegal and flatly unconstitutional—a power grab.
Aug 21, 2025
After his Friday meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump bragged that the dictator had backed one of his conspiracy theories. According to Trump, Putin said, “You can’t have an honest election with mail-in voting.” (You don’t need to be a former KGB agent to know how to woo our chief executive.)
Then on Monday, perhaps emboldened by his encounter with a real-life autocrat, Trump announced a major effort to seize control of American elections.
In a Truth Social post, he declared that he would sign “an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections” and “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS.”
We’ve all grown used to the president’s wild claims about elections. We might be tempted to roll our eyes now, but we shouldn’t. It’s appalling.
If we do not act against these threats, free and fair elections in 2026 could be at stake. So, what can be done?
The order would likely purport to ban or seriously limit mail voting, a focus of Trump’s since 2020. To be clear, mail voting is a widely popular and long-standing practice used by about a third of citizens. Every state has well-tested security measures in place to ensure that the process is safe and secure.
Trump claimed in his post that we are the only country in the world that uses mail voting. Putin, whom he called a “smart guy,” allegedly told him that, but it is blatantly false. Dozens of countries use mail voting, including Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom. (And of course, Trump himself regularly votes by mail in Florida.)
The order could also target voting machines. “While we’re at it,” he said in the post, we should get rid of “Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES.” That’s nutty. Machines with a paper record (used by 98% of voters) are far more accurate and secure than, say, counting ballots by hand. Ironically, Trump’s blast came the same day that Newsmax paid $67 million to a voting machine company in a defamation suit arising from the last round of false claims about the 2020 election.
Attempting to implement any of these policies via executive order would be flagrantly illegal and flatly unconstitutional—a power grab. Already, earlier this year, Trump tried to seize control of elections with an executive order requiring Americans to produce a passport or another citizenship document to register to vote using the federal form. The Brennan Center and others sued, and judges blocked the worst part of that move. The new threatened executive order, too, could turn out to be vapor, essentially a malevolent press release.
But Trump’s post contained a chilling claim: “Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”
This statement plainly repudiates the Constitution—the Elections Clause gives states and Congress the power to run elections. Presidents have no authority to rewrite election rules. In a democracy, the states are not personal agents of the president.
If successful, this executive order would be nothing short of an authoritarian takeover of our election system. Imagine the man who demanded that a state election official “find” him 11,780 votes in charge of “counting and tabulating the votes.”
This threat comes as federalized troops and masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents patrol the streets of Washington, DC. Last week, ICE agents massed outside a Democratic event on redistricting in California.
Again, Trump’s threatened executive order would be blatantly illegal and blocked by a court. But it’s still important to listen to what he’s saying. He’s making his goal—a federal takeover of elections—explicit. And while this particular tactic won’t work, it’s just one piece of the administration’s emerging, unmistakable campaign to undermine our elections, a drive that ranges from defunding election security programs to trying to gain access to state voter rolls.
Voters must have the final say in a democracy. If we do not act against these threats, free and fair elections in 2026 could be at stake. So, what can be done?
The courts must uphold the Constitution when it comes to elections, as they did with Trump’s earlier executive order.
State leaders and election officials must also fight back. They must stand firm in their right to oversee elections, continue to provide voters with options such as mail and early voting, resist illegal orders, and keep control over voting machines. The Brennan Center has published information about how to respond to requests to access sensitive data and machinery.
Ultimately, the integrity of the next election will be up to voters. We must all speak out against these moves to meddle with the vote. It’s harder to take over an election when everyone is watching.
Think again about Trump’s claim that states are his “agents” in tabulating the votes. Vladimir Putin’s great hero had something to say about that: “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how,” Joseph Stalin said, “but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.”
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Trump’s War on Mail-In Voting Threatens the Foundations of Democracy Itself
Instead of trying to make elections more secure, Trump’s laying the groundwork for election theft in plain sight.
Aug 19, 2025
On Monday, US President Donald Trump crossed another line that no president in our history has ever dared to touch. With the echo of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s whisper in his ear, in front of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and seven other European leaders, Trump announced he’s preparing an executive order to ban mail-in ballots and even outlaw voting machines across America ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
Sitting in front of the chancellor of Germany and the prime minister of Great Britain—both nations that allow and even encourage mail-in voting—Trump said:
Mail-in ballots are corrupt mail-in ballots. You can never have a real democracy with mail-in ballots, and we as a Republican Party are gonna do everything possible that we get rid of mail-in ballots. We're gonna 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. And, you know that we’re the only country in the world, I believe, I may be wrong, but just about the only country in the world that uses it because of what’s happened.
This is not just a partisan maneuver. It’s an open assault on the Constitution, a grotesque power grab, and a direct threat to the foundation of democracy itself. And it’s happening in real time, in broad daylight, with a criminally compliant Republican Party cheering him on.
Republicans hate mail-in voting for multiple reasons.
First, for people who’re paid by the hour, mail-in voting increases participation because they can fill out their ballots at the kitchen table after work. Republicans don’t want people to vote, and have introduced over 400 pieces of legislation in the past three years nationwide to make voting more difficult.
Second, mail-in voting makes voters better informed and less vulnerable to sound-bite TV ads because, while perusing that ballot at the kitchen table, they can look up candidates on their laptops and get more detail and information. Republicans hate informed voters and rely heavily on often-dishonest advertisements to swing voters.
Third, mail-in ballots—because they arrive in the mail weeks before the election—give voters an early chance to discover if they’ve been the victim of Republican voter-roll purges, one of their favorite tactics to pre-rig elections.
Fourth, mail-in ballots end the GOP trick of understaffing and underresourcing polling places in minority neighborhoods, leading to hours-long lines. Hispanic voters generally wait 150% longer than white voters, and Black voters must endure a 200% longer wait; mail-in ballots put an end to this favorite of the GOP’s voter suppression efforts.
Trump, knowing all this, couldn’t help himself Monday, finally blurting out his real reason for wanting to end mail-in voting in America:
“We got to stop mail-in voting, and the Republicans have to lead the charge. The Democrats want it because they have horrible policy,” Trump proclaimed. “If you [don’t] have mail-in voting, you’re not gonna have many Democrats get elected. That’s bigger than anything having to do with redistricting, believe me.”
Once again, Trump is ignoring the law and the Constitution, which explicitly delegates the administration of elections to the states and Congress, not presidential executive orders.
That’s not some vague norm or debatable tradition: It’s written into the very DNA of our system of government. States set the rules, unless Congress—not the president—overrides them. States decide how their citizens vote, as the Constitution’s Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 dictates:
The Times, Places, and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.
Yet here we have a president declaring that he alone will dictate the terms of elections nationwide, in direct violation of two centuries of law and precedent. This is not only unconstitutional, it’s tyrannical.
When a president asserts powers he does not have, with the full knowledge that they aren’t his to wield, he’s announcing to the country that the rule of law no longer constrains him. That’s the definition of dictatorship.
And what makes this even more obscene is the source of Trump’s inspiration. According to multiple reports, Trump’s sudden rant on mail-in ballots followed a private conversation with Vladimir Putin, who reportedly told him that mail-in voting was the reason he lost in 2020.
The man occupying the Oval Office is now taking advice about how to rig American elections from the very dictator who has spent his career poisoning journalists, jailing opponents, and staging sham referendums to annex entire countries.
It’s bad enough that Trump has always been Putin’s toady, but now we see the Kremlin effectively writing US election law. If Jefferson, Madison, or Lincoln were alive to hear this, they would spit.
Mail-in voting is not a scam. It’s not a trick. It’s how tens of millions of Americans—Republicans, Democrats, independents—exercise their right to vote.
But never—not once in 250 years—has a president openly declared that he will strip states of their constitutional right to run elections, end mail-in voting, and ban voting machines altogether.
Seniors rely on it. People with disabilities rely on it. Military service members overseas rely on it. Hourly workers who can’t take a day off rely on it. Parents with young children rely on it. Rural voters, who often live miles from polling places, rely on it.
And every study, every audit, every bipartisan commission has found mail-in voting to be secure, safe, and reliable. Five states do it exclusively; we’ve had it more than two decades here in Oregon with nary a single scandal or problem. To call it fraudulent is a lie. To ban it is voter suppression on a scale this country has never seen.
And voting machines? Trump is openly declaring that he’ll return us to mind-numbingly slow hand-counting of ballots, a tactic straight from the authoritarian playbook designed to create chaos, delays, and endless opportunities to dispute the results in 2026 and 2028.
I’ve had concerns about voting machines and Windows-based tabulators for decades, but my solution isn’t to end them. Instead, we should use machines owned by the government itself, generating paper ballots and operating transparently on open-source software with every election subject to sample audits.
Instead of trying to make elections more secure, Trump’s laying the groundwork for election theft in plain sight. This isn’t subtle: It’s the loud declaration of a man preparing to overturn the will of the voters, with the blessing of a foreign adversary, and with a Republican Party too craven to object.
If Trump succeeds in outlawing mail-in ballots and voting machines, millions of Americans will simply not be able to vote. Seniors in nursing homes, service members abroad, people with disabilities, single parents, rural citizens: They will all be disenfranchised overnight. And make no mistake: That’s the point.
This is not about integrity. This is not about security. This is about shrinking the electorate to a size that Republicans believe will guarantee them victory forever.
Republicans know they can’t win free and fair elections in much of America. They know their policies are unpopular. They know their agenda is toxic.
So they cheat. They gerrymander districts into grotesque shapes that make a mockery of representative government. They purge voters from the rolls. They criminalize voter registration drives. They intimidate voters at the polls.
And now, at Trump’s command and Putin’s urging, they want to ban the very methods by which millions of Americans vote. This is not politics as usual. This is the slow-motion strangulation of democracy.
Trump’s promised executive order is not just a legal maneuver. It’s a declaration of war against the American people.
Every American who believes in self-government must rise up against this. Governors must prepare to defy such an executive order in court and in practice. State legislatures must assert their constitutional authority.
Attorneys general must be ready to sue. And ordinary citizens must take to the streets, the phones, the ballot box, and every civic space available to declare that this will not stand. Because if it does, we’ll have surrendered the very essence of the American experiment.
We’ve been here before in spirit if not in form.
Ronald Reagan’s campaign cut a deal with the Iranian Ayatollahs to hang onto the hostages until after the election. Richard Nixon tried to sabotage our democracy by killing LBJ’s peace negotiations with Vietnam and followed-up with burglaries and cover-ups when he thought Democrats were onto him. He was forced to resign. George W. Bush and the GOP stopped the counting of votes in Florida and handed the presidency to themselves. That assault has scarred our politics for decades.
But never—not once in 250 years—has a president openly declared that he will strip states of their constitutional right to run elections, end mail-in voting, and ban voting machines altogether. This is unprecedented, authoritarian, and it must be stopped.
It’s also just one in a broad spectrum of attacks Republicans have launched against your right to vote, with the SAVE Act—which will prevent women from voting if their birth certificate and drivers’ license have different names on them and they’ve never had an official change-of-name in the courts—teed up in the US Senate. All while millions are being purged from the voting rolls as you read these words.
This is the moment when the American people must decide whether they still believe in democracy. If we shrug, if we accept this as just more noise from a corrupt and broken con man, we will lose it. If we wait for someone else to act, we will lose it. If we tell ourselves the courts will save us, we may be bitterly disappointed.
The survival of democracy has never been guaranteed. It has always required vigilance, courage, and action. Now it requires all three from each of us.
Trump’s promised executive order is not just a legal maneuver. It’s a declaration of war against the American people. It’s the dream of every tyrant: to control who votes and who does not, to dictate the rules of elections so that the outcome is predetermined.
What Putin and Trump are proposing is not democracy. It’s not freedom. It’s not America.
And the Republicans who are enabling this treachery are as guilty as Trump himself. They’re betraying their oaths, their constituents, and our country. History will remember them not as conservatives or patriots, but as the gravediggers of our Republic.
This is the line. This is the moment. We cannot let Trump and his cronies bulldoze democracy into the ground at Putin’s command. Every patriot, every progressive, every independent, every honest conservative who still believes in the Constitution must join together and say no.
No to dictatorship. No to disenfranchisement. No to treason.
If we fail now, there may not be another chance.
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