If Trump tries to rip my mail-in ballot out of my hands, he’ll get a nasty paper cut

Hopefully the title of this blog post doesn't earn me a visit from the Secret Service.

Guys, this isn't a threat against the president; it's a warning to Trump that if he messes with the much-beloved universal mail-in voting we have here in Oregon for every election, this will generate bad karma for him, possibly including a well-deserved paper cut.

Trump's threat yesterday to issue an executive order banning mail-in voting is toothless, because the Constitution makes the states responsible for elections. Any changes to state election laws would have to be approved by Congress. Good luck getting that through the House and Senate, Donald.

Like just about everything Trump says, his tirade against mail-in voting was filled with blatant lies.

No, it isn't true that mail-in voting is rampant with fraud. It's a safe and effective way to vote.

No, it isn't true that the United States is the only country that uses mail-in voting. Dozens of countries do.

No, it isn't true that counting ballots by hand is faster than machine counting. It's much slower.

Since Trump lives in a fact-free fantasy world where the only reality is what transpires within his own orange head, he will ignore the truth about how elections are conducted in Oregon. 

Ballots are mailed out by county clerks several weeks before election day. When my ballot is put in the mail, I'm notified by the Marion County clerk. After I receive it, I fill it out and mail it back in a postage paid envelope. When my ballot has been received, I'm notified. The signature on every ballot is checked by election workers to make sure the person who sent it in is the registered voter.

So it's damn difficult to commit voter fraud with mail-in voting. True, recently Oregon had some invalid voter registrations through the "motor voter" process in which a person is registered to vote when they obtain or renew a driver's license. But this is a separate issue from mail-in voting.

It's hard to tell how serious Trump is about banning mail-in voting. He changes his mind all the time, as evidenced by him being strongly for a cease fire in Ukraine before he switched to being against a cease fire when Putin refused to go along with a cease fire at the summit meeting between Trump and Putin last Friday.

At that meeting, Putin, agile KGB agent that he was, appealed to Trump's ego by telling him that he would have won the 2020 election if there hadn't been fraudulent mail-in voting. Of course, Russia uses mail-in voting, so it makes no sense for Putin to complain about it — especially since every election in Russia where Putin is on the ballot is fraudulent, since he's a dictator who has zero interest in free and fair elections.

A New York Times story, "Trump Wants to End Mail-In Voting Ahead of Next Year's Midterms," illustrates the pathetic nature of this newest attempt by Trump to act like the dictator he aspires to be. Excerpts:

President Trump vowed on Monday to lead a movement to eliminate the use of mail-in ballots, continuing his legally dubious crusade against the nation’s voting rules, which he has long attacked and falsely blamed for his 2020 election loss.

Mr. Trump, who has opposed mail-in voting for years, wrote on social media that he would sign an executive order to “help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections,” though neither he nor White House officials provided any detail about what the order would entail. Later on Monday, while meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, Mr. Trump said the executive order was being written “by the best lawyers in the country” to end all mail-in ballots.

“It’s time that the Republicans get tough and stop it, because the Democrats want it,” Mr. Trump said, even as his party benefited from wider adoption of mail-in ballots in last year’s presidential election. “It’s the only way they can get elected.”

The president does not have the power to unilaterally change voting laws. The Constitution vests the power to set the “times, places and manner” of elections with states, and it gives only Congress the ability to override state laws on voting. Any executive order from the president regarding elections is likely to see immediate legal challenges.

…Last week, Mr. Trump said President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia had discussed the issue of mail-in voting during their summit on Friday in Alaska. Mr. Trump said in an interview with Fox Newsthat the Russian leader had agreed with him that the 2020 election had been rigged in favor of Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“You know, Vladimir Putin said something, one of the most interesting things,” Mr. Trump said. “He said, ‘Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting.’ He said, ‘Mail-in voting, every election.’ He said, ‘No country has mail-in voting. It’s impossible to have mail-in voting and have honest elections.’”

Mr. Putin has repeatedly extended his rule over Russia with undemocratic and heavily stage-managed presidential elections.

Mr. Trump has long been critical of mail voting, falsely decrying it as rife with fraud a decade ago, when he first ran for president in 2016. And after the 2020 election, Mr. Trump focused on conspiracy theories about voting machines, as well as mail ballots, as support for his falsehoods that the 2020 election was “rigged” against him.

…Jena Griswold, the secretary of state in Colorado, a state that votes almost universally by mail, said that the threat of another executive order was part of an “all-out power grab” by Mr. Trump to try to take over elections.

“He has no authority,” Ms. Griswold said in an interview, vowing to fight any new executive order in court. She added that voting by mail in Colorado was extremely secure. “It cannot be hacked. It is auditable, and we have a paper trail. It is the most secure way to vote.”