Trump threatens to 'close' down social media platforms

And this is specifically on a tweet calling the validity of the election into question. It's blatantly wrong, but he needs his base to believe him when he says the election is rigged.

Mail-in ballots make it much easier to commit voter fraud, I don't see how anyone could possibly argue to the contrary.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p...

What was blatantly wrong about it?

[citation needed; editor rejected source as unreliable]

A Heritage Foundation paper from the White House website. What a reputable source....

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/26/review-tr...

Many states already do mail-in ballots and they're much more secure than the sketchy voting machines currently in use: https://qz.com/1783766/these-voting-machine-security-flaws-t...

If you actually skim that document, the vast majority are simple single-vote "pleaded guilty to the charge of knowingly voting while ineligible" scenarios. They had to go back twenty years to find a thousand of these, out of billions of votes cast during that period.

Hasn't the other side been #NotMyPresient and throwing a tantrum about the validity of the last election? Trump is not a trailblazer in this regard

It's got nothing to do with voter fraud which is another conspiracy tagline for his base to hang their propaganda on. His whole intent is to make it harder to vote and reduce voting % as much as possible in order to amplify his rabid base votes who will move heaven and earth to vote and keep their racist dear leader in power.

This isn't news to anyone, he's openly said Republicans would never be elected again if it was easier to vote.

So you're telling me that The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, set out to prove how rampant an issue voter fraud is (as this is a seeming tent-pole of Trump's push to delegitimize any election that goes against him) and they came up with a whopping 1,285 cases across the entire US?

What I see is that they've proven that voter fraud is not a problem in the United States. And, by extension, that there is no problem with mail-in-balloting leading to voter fraud. Looking at two states that only vote by mail, they have 27 cases of voter fraud in THE LAST TWENTY YEARS.

Voter fraud, whether in person or by mail, IS NOT A PROBLEM. It's simply Trump working to sow the seeds of insurrection should he lose in November.

"There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there, will get one. That will be followed up with professionals telling all of these people, many of whom have never even thought of voting before, how, and for whom, to vote. This will be a Rigged Election. No way!"

The claim is not that it's easier to commit fraud. The claim is that allowing vote-by-mail compromises the integrity of an election. That's why it's important to show that voter fraud is quite rare (your link includes cases back to 1990 at least) and has a fairly high chance of being detected. Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and Utah conduct elections entirely by mail. Trump voted by mail!

Mail-in ballots don't generally increase the instances of election fraud. All of the "what ifs" have been investigated in the states that have had general-populace mail-in for years and been found not to occur in either (a) numbers that sway the election or (b) numbers distinguishable from in-person fraud (which is usually of the form "person not eligible to vote, but voting office screwed up and granted them a card" or "person moved and failed to notify election boards of the relocation; voted in the wrong district").

(a) imagining there's one "other side" is a fallacy. There are multiple interest groups. Some more aligned with the President and his administration, some less.

(b) you'll have to be more specific about what you mean, but the "tantrum" I've heard is that the system as set up over-represents land over people, not that the result is illegitimate. A legitimate result in a badly-crafted system is materially different from claiming the process as designed is compromised.

I'm observing from the outside (read: the other side of the Atlantic), but my understanding is that people who say #NotMyPresident do it because of either a) a perceived lack of shared values between them and the president or b) in reference to him losing the popular vote, like several other presidents before him.

"The other side" has been pointing out how broken the electoral college is, not claiming that Trump is president on illegal grounds.

There's a massive difference between...

1. Questioning whether the Electoral College (and its tendency to devalue votes in some states) has a place in the modern US.

2. Questioning whether the election itself is completely rigged (via fraudulent votes).

#1 is the question many liberals have been asking. #2 is thee claim that the entire GOP has been making for years, despite their own investigations never turning up more than a few individuals voting fraudulently (but never systematic fraud perpetrated by the political left, as they claim).

Trump himself votes by mail, as does most of his family. Should we throw out their votes as well?

Every election has at least one story of rampant incompetence and/or outright fraud where one person is able to alter hundreds to thousands of votes. For elections where it can literally be 50.2% to 49.8%, it can make all the difference.

Rampant incompetence isn't the same as fraud, and one would still have to make the case that we lose hundreds of envelopes more often than we have an entire data-store go missing (or, for that matter, than we have a fleet of digital voting machines crash and deny access to the polls to face-to-face voters for hours).

Then the tweet wasn't 'factually incorrect' as was claimed, perhaps unsubstantiated given past performance isn't a guarantee of future performance but certainly election security is nothing to turn a blind eye to.

I'm not sure where you're getting the "factually incorrect" claim; "unsubstantiated" is the actual terminology Twitter used:

"Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud"

Please do not spead false information on HN. The tweet in question is:

> "There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent."

Twitter labeled it as unsubstantiated, and provided a link to facts on mail-in ballots. Even if they didn't, his tweet is factually incorrect.

That's not what he posted. You've invented a strawman and are now arguing against a hypothetical scenario that plays out only according to the rules your mind has made up for it.

Headline: Hillary Clinton: Trump is an ‘illegitimate president’

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum...

Well I read that document you've provided as strong evidence that mail in voting is safe. You've sourced a document that is from the "mail voting is unsafe" team, and they've only been able to find a very few number of such cases, spanning thirty years (it goes back to 1990 at least), and almost all of those cases were caught before the votes affected the outcome.

Can you maybe explain your thinking?

Have you done the math? The document you reference is absent of impact analysis, even vague on the numbers. 1,071 incidents but how many actual votes? How many votes were actually cast? How many were caught before they were counted? Let's take Alabama. 14 reports, but actually first four are all the same incident. So 11 reports. Not off to a good start there. Nine of the remaining were single instance voting. Two were a conspiracy. One conspiracy was caught, in 1994 when it occurred, but is labeled as "Disposition: 2005", which I initially assumed meant that they were caught in 2005, and had gotten away with it. But in fact they were caught at the time because they submitted 1,400 votes in a county of 7000 people. The one that got away with it was caught at the time, and earned the role of a city commissioner of a city of 68,000 people. And yet the person was elected anyway, despite the evidence. So you've got "14" incidents, that are really only 11, and only 1 that got away with in a small city election where even they were caught yet allowed to win. So with just this one state, of the 14 claimed, there was only 1. So for 1071 that's 76. Over 30 years. There are 20,000 cities in the usa. So ~600,000 elections of all sizes they found 76 instances of successful fraud, and only in non-state-wide elections. And that's just me spending thirty minutes with your primary document.

What's interesting is that the Heritage Foundation didn't publish that math. Didn't get into detail.

Mmm citation needed here.

Which part are you asserting is factually wrong, that the election that hasn't happened yet will have "substantially fraudulent" mail in ballots?

Or are you asserting that mail-in-ballots are secure or secure-enough to maintain the American democracy?

Mail-in ballots have existed for decades in elections all across the country and no one has questioned their legitimacy. If you accept the results of elections that have occurred prior to today, then there is no basis for the argument that mail-in ballots are illegitimate all of a sudden.

The problem isn't their legitimacy, it's that there have been numerous stories about one or very few persons affecting hundreds or thousands of votes, basically like an amplification attack on democracy. When mail-in ballots are only a small percentage of the overall votes it's not as large of an issue. What Trump asserted was simply that we'll see a sharp increase in the number of fraudulent votes because the attack surface is going to be exponentially larger.

Trump's assertion is based on the notion that mail-in-ballots see higher rates of fraud than in-person. It's not difficult to see why that would be the case, but I will concede I don't have first hand numbers.

The insidious thing about this situation is that there is now a lot of anger on both sides. If cooler heads had waited a bit longer, collected real data on the rates of voter fraud, actually addressed Trump's concerns about stolen/forged ballots rather than calling him a liar and linking to puff pieces from two of his biggest and unfairest outlets, we would stand a better chance at resolving this amicably.

I have provided plenty of sources in my other comment on why "Mail-in ballots don't generally increase the instances of election fraud" is 100% wrong:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23331091

I have provided plenty of sources in my other comment on why 100% factually correct:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23331091

If you were told that gerrymandering has a demonstrably larger effect on an election's legitimacy than mail-in voting, would you be as vocal against gerrymandering as you are against mail-in voting? If it is really about election legitimacy to you, isn't that what you should do?