As the Trump administration continues to reveal and target various forms of financial, tax, and welfare fraud, President Trump has issued an Executive Order directing a crackdown on one specific type of election fraud: the abuse of mail-in ballots.
For generations, specifically-ordered absentee ballots (sometimes known as “pull” mail-in ballots) have been available for good reasons. People who expected major surgery, or were away on business trips, or who were stationed abroad with the military, or were attending a distant college, have always been able to personally request an absentee ballot.
Such absentee ballots always posed challenges. A legitimate voter deserves his chance to vote, of course, so there needs to be a process for proving his right as a voter of the specific jurisdiction in question (this house in this state legislative district, in this congressional district, in this state), so that the ballot can be shipped to him in time for him to turn it around and send it back in time to be counted.
Those involved in the process have always known the risks; we say, “if you wouldn’t trust the mail to send your grandson a $20 bill in a birthday card, you obviously don’t want to trust the mail to send your ballot to a polling place.” It was always considered a process that was necessary, but not desirable, because of the risks of the ballot being lost or late.
You voted absentee because you had to, never because you wanted to.
…Until the modern Left began to realize the incredible potential for fraud inherent in the process.
A mailbag full of military ballots can be counted on to skew highly Republican, a fact that has long created a temptation, at least occasionally utilized, to “lose” mailbags of military ballots. But the suppression of the military vote was only a foundation, for a virtual skyscraper of potential fraud to be built upon it.
Even if care is taken – only issuing them to people who prove themselves eligible, and allowing hopefully enough time for the round trip – there is still always a risk that some or many will be lost in the mail, intercepted and changed, or intercepted and stolen. This is a risk society chooses to run, in order to give eligible voters in need an opportunity to, hopefully, play their role in the election.
But what if care is not taken? What if care is thrown out the window?
What if, in fact, the cautious determination of eligibility at the start is viewed as a Bug, not a Feature?
And what if the opportunities for loss or interception in transportation are considered Features, not Bugs?
We don’t know exactly how much vote fraud there is. In some areas, there is a great deal; in others, there is probably relatively little – though in a nation with frequent elections won and lost by a single vote, even just a little vote fraud can have a serious impact. So the motivation behind those who would distort the election process is rightly worth questioning.
In recent years, we have seen various states, starting with the west coast, though it spread quickly with Covid-19, blow out the various safety measures, in a single-minded effort to increase the number of ballots sent by mail, as opposed to being cast in person at the polling place on Election Day.
- People move; people die. It’s almost impossible to keep a voter registration list up to date, election after election. If we require a personal check-in, presenting Real ID to vote or request an absentee ballot, that protects against accidentally giving ballots to undeserving people or impersonators.
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- But if we just automatically mail out those ballots without waiting for a request, that guarantees that some percentage of undeserving ballots will flood the mails, opening the possibility for fraud.
- Proper ballots cannot be 100% trackable without compromising the institution of the secret ballot, so we do the next-best thing: we print ballots on special cardstock, with watermarks, color choices, and codes that vary from state to state and from locality to locality. We require that each ballot be initialed or otherwise noted by the issuer as proof that the person’s identity and right to vote have been confirmed by an authorized election worker.
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- But if we mail them out automatically – to everybody! – without waiting for requests (a process sometimes known as “push” mail-in ballots), that completely eliminates that ballot integrity, so that no future audit or recount can hope to segregate the legitimate votes from the illegitimate ones.
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- Even more shockingly, some jurisdictions, including the state of California in 2020, have authorized individuals to print their own ballots – at home, on their home printers (laser, inkjet, dot matrix, thermal, whatever they have), on their own normal storebought 8.5×11 white paper, completely eliminating any way to tell if a person just mailed out the one “officially authorized to him” or if he printed out a stack of them. Using his own ordinary copy paper, who could tell?
- As long as absentee ballots are kept down to a justifiable but low percentage of the whole, the vast majority of ballots are then accepted by an authorized election worker. Some of these will be corrupt, of course, but it’s difficult to imagine the majority being corrupt. The more ballots handled by careful humans trying to do a conscientious job, the lower the incidence of fraud.
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- But if we intentionally flood the mails with mail-in ballots, that vastly reduces the number of ballots handled by conscientious, identifiable election workers. Since the handlers of mail are nameless and faceless until the final delivery, tampering in the transportation process becomes infinitely easier and more likely.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. These issues are not top of mind for the average voter, but they are definitely top of mind for the advocates of mail-in voting.
The politicians who want mail-in voting want it specifically because it reduces accuracy. They want it because it reduces the certainty and increases the distrust.
If you believe in elections, you want as accurate a process as possible.
But if you don’t believe in elections – if you want an elite bureaucracy to rule the land, rather than a constitutional government consciously chosen by the citizenry – then there’s one simple path to pursue:
Undermine the legitimacy of every election, by introducing error at every stage – at the list, at the ballots, at the transportation, at the counting – until you reach the point at which recounts are meaningless and audits are impossible.
Then the apparatchiks can rule without fear of being dislodged by those pesky voters.
The Trump Administration understands the above, in a way that few Republican administrations ever have before, and they are determined to do whatever they can to serve not just the current electorate, but future electorates as well.
Copyright 2026 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer, speaker, and consultant. A President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon. His trade compliance training practice is available either in person or by webinar.
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