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New York Post
21 minutes ago
- New York Post
Trump's war on mail-in voting is futile — and could hurt the GOP
President Trump is threatening to wage war on mail-in ballots — and the GOP has to hope he thinks again before the 2026 mid-terms. In a Truth Social post, Trump said he is 'going to lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS,' and he'll start off with 'an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 midterm elections.' Trump likes the idea of in-person, same-day voting, which has much to recommend it. Advertisement But mail-in and early voting are so ingrained and widespread that they aren't going anywhere. Most Republicans have concluded that there's no alternative to making use of these modes of voting, and crucially, they managed — most of the time — to get Trump on board in 2024. Advertisement This aided the Republican get-out-the-vote operation in a close election. Clearly, though, Trump believes that mail-in voting is a Democratic plot, and he also hates contemporary voting machines. Old-school paper ballots don't guarantee honesty, however: In an infamous instance of voter fraud, allies of Lyndon Johnson stuffed Box 13 with enough ballots to put him over the top in the very narrow 1948 Democratic Senate primary in Texas. Today's voting machines, moreover, were a reaction to the Florida fiasco in 2000, when punch-card ballots had to be painstakingly examined by hand with a presidential election at stake. Advertisement The fact is that vote-by-mail has been steadily growing since the 1980s, and it needn't favor one side or the other. In Florida, Republicans have long made it a priority to maximize mail voting. A study by the academic Andrew Hall of pre-COVID voting patterns in California, Utah and Washington found a negligible partisan effect as those states rolled out vote-by-mail systems. Advertisement Overall, turnout went up only very slightly, and 'the Democratic share of turnout did not increase appreciably.' Mail-in voting didn't change who was voting, but how they did it — encouraging, as you might expect, voting by mail rather than in-person. Vote-by-mail did have a strong partisan tilt in the COVID election of 2020, in part because Trump inveighed against it. In 2024, Republicans made a concerted effort to make up ground — and succeeded. The GOP went from 24% of the mail vote in the must-win swing state of Pennsylvania in 2020, to 33% in 2024. And Republicans outpaced Democrats in mail-in balloting in Arizona. The advantage to a party of getting people to vote early — whether in person or by mail — is that it takes high-propensity voters off the table. Then, a turnout operation can focus on getting lower-propensity voters to the polls. Get opinions and commentary from our columnists Subscribe to our daily Post Opinion newsletter! Thanks for signing up! Enter your email address Please provide a valid email address. By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Never miss a story. Check out more newsletters If no one votes until Election Day, party operatives waste time and money right up to the cusp of the election contacting people who are going to vote no matter what. Advertisement None of this is to say that all mail-in voting is equal. So-called universal mail-in voting, or automatically sending a ballot to every registered voter and scattering live ballots around a state, is a bad practice. Every morning, the NY POSTcast offers a deep dive into the headlines with the Post's signature mix of politics, business, pop culture, true crime and everything in between. Subscribe here! The rules should be more stringent. Advertisement Georgia, for example, gets this right: You have to ask for an absentee ballot and provide your driver's license number or a copy of another form of valid ID. Ballots have to be requested at least 11 days before the election and must be returned by Election Day. The outer 'oath' envelope has to be properly completed or the ballot is subject to being rejected, although the county elections office will provide the voter a chance to 'cure' the envelope. Advertisement It's also important to count early and mail-in ballots quickly, something that too many states fail to do, with California — as usual — the worst offender. States should be expected to abide by whatever rules have been set prior to an election, rather than changing them on the fly, and they should ensure that voter rolls are regularly cleaned up. The real question about vote-by-mail isn't whether it is staying or going, but whether Republicans, too, will take advantage of it. Twitter: @RichLowry
Yahoo
23 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Baldwin unsure of Trump Administration, Wisconsin's FEMA request
(The Center Square) – Wisconsin's Democratic U.S. senator says she has little doubt that there is enough flood damage around the state to qualify for federal help. But Tuesday she said she has less confidence in President Donald Trump. 'Confident and Trump Administration are not two phrases that I don't necessarily always put in a sentence together,' Baldwin told reporters. 'The president has said very disparaging things about FEMA, before the start of his term. He even talked about abolishing FEMA.' Baldwin said the president has changed his tune. But she also said she wants to 'hold his feet to the fire.' Her comments came just hours after Wisconsin's entire Congressional delegation signed off on a letter to FEMA asking for federal assistance after last week's record flooding. 'On Aug. 9 and 10, historic rainfall caused severe flooding across the Milwaukee region, resulting in widespread damage to homes, businesses, and public infrastructure. The storm produced the second-highest 48-hour rainfall total on record in Milwaukee. Some areas saw more than 14 inches of rain in under 24 hours, overwhelming roads, basements, parking structures, and utility systems,' the letter states. 'The Milwaukee, Menomonee, and Root rivers reached record levels, flooding thousands of properties and prompting emergency crews to respond to hundreds of rescues and infrastructure problems.' Baldwin signed the letter. The letter asks for a Joint Preliminary Damage Assessment to get a sense of the damage. The congressional delegation also said it expects to make a formal request for a Presidential Major Disaster Declaration. That would not only open a pipeline for money to flow to the government's impacted by the floods but some of the 13,000 people who saw damage to their homes or businesses. "Federal assistance will be critical to repairing the damage from these severe weather events and supporting the long-term recovery of our communities," the letter states. " Solve the daily Crossword
Los Angeles Times
an hour ago
- Los Angeles Times
Veterans' voices shape a report on the Afghanistan War's lessons and impact
COLUMBUS, Ohio — U.S. veterans of the war in Afghanistan are telling a commission reviewing decisions on the 20-year conflict that their experience was not only hell, but also confounding, demoralizing and at times humiliating. The bipartisan Afghanistan War Commission aims to reflect such veterans' experiences in a report due to Congress next year, which will analyze key strategic, diplomatic, military and operational decisions made between June 2001 and the chaotic withdrawal in August 2021. The group released its second interim report on Tuesday, drawing no conclusions yet but identifying themes emerging from thousands of pages of government documents; some 160 interviews with cabinet-level officials, military commanders, diplomats, Afghan and Pakistani leaders and others; and forums with veterans like one recently held at a national Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Columbus, Ohio. 'What can we learn from the Afghanistan War?' asked an Aug. 12 discussion session with four of the commission's 16 members. What they got was two straight hours of dozens of veterans' personal stories — not one glowingly positive, and most saturated in frustration and disappointment. 'I think the best way to describe that experience was awful,' said Marine veteran Brittany Dymond, who served in Afghanistan in 2012. Navy veteran Florence Welch said the 2021 withdrawal made her ashamed she ever served there. 'It turned us into a Vietnam, a Vietnam that none of us worked for,' she said. Members of Congress, some driven by having served in the war, created the independent commission several months after the withdrawal, after an assessment by the Democratic administration of then-President Biden faulted the actions of President Trump's first administration for constraining U.S. options. A Republican review, in turn, blamed Biden. Views of the events remain divided, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered yet another review this spring. The commission wants to understand the bigger picture of a conflict that spanned four presidential administrations and cost more than 2,400 American lives, said Co-Chair Dr. Colin Jackson. 'So we're interested in looking hard at the end of U.S. engagement in Afghanistan, but we're equally interested in understanding the beginning, the middle and the end,' he said in an interview in Columbus. Co-chair Shamila Chaudhary said the panel is also exploring more sweeping questions. 'So our work is not just about what the U.S. did in Afghanistan but what the U.S. should be doing in any country where it deems it has a national security interest,' she said. 'And not just should it be there, but how it should behave, what values does it guide itself by, and how does it engage with individuals who are very different from themselves.' Jackson said one of the commission's priorities is making sure the final report, due in August 2026, isn't 'unrecognizable to any veteran of the Afghanistan conflict.' 'The nature of the report should be representative of every soldier, sailor, airman, Marine experience,' he said. Dymond told commissioners a big problem was the mission. 'You cannot exert a democratic agenda, which is our foreign policy, you cannot do that on a culture of people who are not bought into your ideology,' she said. 'What else do we expect the outcome to be? And so we had two decades of service members lost and maimed because we're trying to change an ideology that they didn't ask for.' The experience left eight-year Army veteran Steve Orf demoralized. He said he didn't go there 'to beat a bad guy.' 'Those of us who served generally wanted to believe that we were helping to improve the world, and we carried with us the hopes, values, and principles of the United States — values and principles that also seem to have been casualties of this war,' he told commissioners. 'For many of us, faith with our leaders is broken and trust in our country is broken.' Tuesday's report identifies emerging themes of the review to include strategic drift, interagency incoherence, and whether the war inside Afghanistan and the counterterrorism war beyond were pursuing the same aims or at cross purposes. It also details difficulties the commission has encountered getting key documents. According to the report, the Biden administration initially denied the commission's requests for White House materials on the implementation of the February 2020 peace agreement Trump signed with the Taliban, called the Doha Agreement, and on the handling of the withdrawal, citing executive confidentiality concerns. The transition to Trump's second term brought further delays and complications, but since the commission has pressed the urgency of its mission with the new administration, critical intelligence and documents have now begun to flow, the report says. Smyth and Aftoora-Orsagos write for the Associated Press.
