Daily Caller
Get Ready For Another Mail-In Ballot Fiasco
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky
Many states are now sending out mail-in ballots for the November election.
Yet at the same time that so many more voters are depending on the mail to cast their ballots, the two leading national organizations of election officials wrote the U.S. Postal Service demanding immediate action to avoid confusion and chaos with mail-in ballots.
“We implore you to take immediate and tangible corrective action to address the ongoing performance issues with USPS election mail service,” wrote the National Association of State Election Directors and the National Association of Secretaries of State. “Failure to do so will risk limiting voter participation and trust in the election process.” According to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, mail-in ballots accounted for 43% of the electorate in 2020, a 20-percentage point increase from 2016.
The letter’s list of problems should alarm anyone thinking of voting through the mail instead of going to their polling place to vote in-person. That includes USPS staff nationwide who “are uninformed about USPS policies around election mail,” resulting in “significantly delayed, or otherwise improperly processed” absentee ballots. “Timely postmarked ballots” are being received “10 or more days after postmark,” demonstrating USPS’s “inability to meet their own service delivery deadlines.”
This letter follows a July report from the USPS’s own Inspector General, which warned that its audit of primaries in 13 states found that 2.99% of mail-in ballots reached voters too late and 1.83% were returned to election offices after their legal deadlines. Its list of horror stories included the discovery that “local management at one facility stated they were not aware primary Election Day was that week.”
That means that almost 5% of voters are being disenfranchised, which amounts to hundreds of thousands of votes across the country.
There are reports of other nightmares. Kansas Secretary of State Scott Schwab is “extremely concerned” that in the August primary, 2% of ballots sent by mail were not counted “due to USPS administrative failures.”
“The Pony Express is more efficient at this point” said Schwab.
In July, Utah had a photo-finish Republican congressional primary where the victory margin was 176 votes. But nearly 1,200 mail-in ballots were not counted because they were first sent to a Las Vegas distribution center and not postmarked on time. Most of those ballots were in a county that was carried two-to-one by the candidate who ultimately lost.
The Public Interest Legal Foundation has sued Nevada officials for failure to fix obvious errors on the voter rolls. The organization has found hundreds of questionable voter addresses that include strip clubs, casinos, bars, vacant lots, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants. “Nevada’s policy of automatically mailing a ballot to every active registered voter makes it essential that election officials have accurate voter rolls and are not mailing ballots to addresses where no one lives,” PILF notes.
PILF points out that in 2022, Nevada’s U.S. Senate race was decided by 7,928 votes, which determined party control of that body. The Secretary of State, PILF noted, “published figures showing that 95,556 ballots were sent to undeliverable or ‘bad’ addresses and another 8,036 were rejected upon receipt.” Also: “Another 1.2 million ballots never came back to officials for counting.”
This year, Nevada has another competitive Senate race that could determine the Senate majority.
Nationwide, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission reports that of the almost 91 million mailed ballots sent to voters in all states in 2020, only 70 million were returned.
What happened to the others? Some weren’t filled out. But other completed ballots were probably lost by an increasingly inefficient Postal Service. And election officials complained in their letter to the USPS that election mail being “sent to voters” is being returned as “undeliverable” at a “higher than usual rate.” Some voters registered more than once got more than one ballot.
At least 1.1 million went to outdated addresses. Some may have gone to vacant lots and businesses. Some 500,000 were rejected by election officials when they were returned often due to voter errors that could have been corrected by election officials if the voters had cast their ballot in-person.
Registration lists are notoriously chock full of ineligible, duplicate, fictional and deceased voters, a fact easily exploited to commit fraud. Ballots cast by mail can become the object of intimidation and vote-buying schemes.
In 2005, a bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker pointed out that “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.” Even the New York Times admitted in 2012 that “votes cast by mail are less likely to be counted, more likely to be compromised and more likely to be contested than those cast in a voting booth.”
Little has changed, In 2019, a congressional race in North Carolina was thrown out over mail-in ballots gathered through illegal vote trafficking. A judge ordered a new election in the Bridgeport, Connecticut, mayor’s race last year after a video appeared to show two women stuffing suspect large numbers of absentee ballots into drop boxes.
In New York, three Rensselaer County officials are on trial this month accused of mail-in ballot fraud. A former GOP elections commissioner who has already pleaded guilty testified that looser post-COVID mail-in procedures make it much easier to commit voter fraud.
Before Election Day, Postal Service officials must address concerns about delays and mishandling of absentee ballots. Sloppy U.S. voting rules on everything from vote trafficking by third parties to lax or nonexistent ID laws in many states make it vital there be election observers watching every aspect of the voting and tabulation process.
And after the weeks of litigation and delays in counting that a tsunami of mail-in ballots will no doubt create, we should rethink the advice of those who disparage in-person voting and assure us “that the ballots are in the mail.”
After all, if you won the lottery, would you mail your ticket in or appear in person to claim your jackpot?
Hans von Spakovsky is a senior legal fellow in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation.
John Fund is National Review’s national-affairs reporter.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Megan Brock
One day into his presidency, Trump has taken significant executive action to preserve the integrity of the sexes and root out gender ideology from the federal government.
Throughout his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump promised to affirm the unique distinctions of the two sexes, male and female, and reverse the spread of gender ideology that was pushed during the Biden administration. Trump kept that promise Monday by signing an executive order (EO) titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government,” which defends the integrity of the sexes by mandating the federal government apply “clear and accurate language” that includes requiring the use of the term “sex” over “gender.”
“My Administration will defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male,” the EO states.
“When administering or enforcing sex-based distinctions, every agency and all Federal employees acting in an official capacity on behalf of their agency shall use the term ‘sex’ and not ‘gender’ in all applicable Federal policies and documents.”
Trump’s order defines male and female as “immutable biological” classifications, noting that “sex” is not synonymous with the term “gender identity.”
“‘Sex’ shall refer to an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female. ‘Sex’ is not a synonym for and does not include the concept of ‘gender identity’,” the EO states.
“Gender Identity” is a term used by transgender activists to describe an individual’s imagined sex. Transgender activists believe a person’s imagined sex is as real as their physical sex, and should hold equal weight in society and law.
For example, in April 2024 the Biden administration expanded Title IX regulations, which prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, to include “gender identity,” giving men claiming to have a female “gender identity” full legal access to women’s sports and private spaces. A federal judge recently struck down the expanded Title IX regulations in a lawsuit filed against the Biden administration by six states, including Tennessee.
Transgender activists often use the terms “gender” and “gender identity” interchangeably.
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) described how these terms are used synonymously in their gender medical guidance, called the Standards of Care version 8 (SOC 8), which is routinely used by medical associations, governments, and insurance companies in the U.S. and abroad to create policy driven by gender ideology.
“Depending on the context, gender may reference gender identity, gender expression, and/or social gender role, including understandings and expectations culturally tied to people who were assigned male or female at birth,” the SOC 8 states.
“Gender identities other than those of men and women (who can be either cisgender or transgender) include transgender, nonbinary, genderqueer, gender neutral, agender, gender fluid, and “third” gender, among others; many other genders are recognized around the world.”
This muddying of language is found throughout medical institutions including The National Institutes of Health who define gender as “A multidimensional construct that encompasses gender identity and expression, as well as social and cultural expectations about status, characteristics, and behavior as they are associated with certain sex traits.”
The Trump administration acknowledged how the corruption of language by transgender activists has had an “corrosive impact” on American society, stating: “The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system,” in the EO. “Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.”
The term “gender identity” was popularized in the 1960s by controversial sexologist John Money, whose most high-profile experiment involved advising parents of a boy whose penis was damaged in a botched circumcision to cut the rest of it off and raise him as a girl. At age 15, the boy — who was raised as “Brenda” — discovered the truth and rejected further hormone treatments. He eventually committed suicide at age 38.
Gender ideology believes a person’s sex can differ from their “gender identity,” rejecting the long-established scientific understanding of biology that there are only two sexes based on the fact there are only two types of reproductive cells — sperm and ova.
The very concept of “gender identity” creates the possibility of changing one’s sex — a biological impossibility — through medical interventions, therefore creating a demand for medical sex reassignment interventions.
WPATH defines “gender identity” in the SOC 8 as “a person’s deeply felt, internal, intrinsic sense of their own gender,” whereas the Trump administration defines it as “A fully internal and subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality.”
The EO further explains that because “gender identity” is wholly subjective to the individual, it cannot be used to replace the objective reality of sex.
“‘Gender identity’ reflects a fully internal and subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality and sex and existing on an infinite continuum, that does not provide a meaningful basis for identification and cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex,” Trump’s EO states.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Thomas English
President Donald Trump’s Monday executive order establishing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) presents a more modest scope for the initiative, focusing primarily on “modernizing federal technology and software.”
The executive order refashions the Obama-era United States Digital Service (USDS) into the United States DOGE Service. Then-President Barack Obama created USDS in 2014 to enhance the reliability and usability of online federal services after the disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov, an insurance exchange website created through the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Trump’s USDS will now prioritize “modernizing federal technology and software to maximize efficiency and productivity” under the order, which makes no mention of slashing the federal budget, workforce or regulations — DOGE’s originally advertised purpose.
“I am pleased to announce that the Great Elon Musk, working in conjunction with American Patriot Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead the Department of Government Efficiency (‘DOGE’),” Trump said in his official announcement of the initiative in November. “Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess government regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies.”
The order’s focus on streamlining federal technology and software stands in contrast to some of DOGE’s previously more expansive aims, including Elon Musk’s claim that “we can [cut the federal budget] by at least $2 trillion” at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in November. Musk now leads DOGE alone after Vivek Ramaswamy stepped down from the initiative Monday, apparently eying a 2026 gubernatorial run in Ohio.
The order says it serves to “advance the President’s 18-month DOGE agenda,” but omits many of the budget-cutting and workforce-slashing proposals during Trump’s campaign. Rather, the order positions DOGE as a technology modernization entity rather than an organization with direct authority to enact sweeping fiscal reforms. There is no mention, for instance, of trillions in budget cuts or a significant reduction in the federal workforce, though the president did separately enact a hiring freeze throughout the executive branch Monday.
“I can’t help but think that there’s more coming, that maybe more responsibilities will be added to it,” Susan Dudley, a public policy professor at George Washington University, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. Dudley, who was also the top regulatory official in former President George W. Bush’s administration, said the structure of the new USDS could impact the recent lawsuits against the DOGE effort.
“I think it maybe moots the lawsuit that’s been brought for it not being FACA,” Dudley said. “So if this is how it’s organized — that it’s people in the government who bring in these special government employees on a temporary basis, that might mean that the lawsuit doesn’t really have any ground.”
Three organizations — the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), National Security Counselors (NSC) and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) — separately filed lawsuits against DOGE within minutes of Trump signing the executive order. The suits primarily challenge DOGE’s compliance with the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), alleging the department operates without the required transparency, balanced representation and public accountability.
The order also emphasizes not “be construed to impair or otherwise affect … the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.”
“And the only mention of OMB [Office of Management and Budget] is some kind of boilerplate at the end — that it doesn’t affect that. But that’s kind of general stuff you often see in executive orders,” Dudley continued, adding she doesn’t “have an inside track” on whether further DOGE-related executive orders will follow.
“It’s certainly, certainly more modest than I think Musk was anticipating,” Dudley said.
Trump’s order also establishes “DOGE Teams” consisting of at least four employees: a team lead, a human resources specialist, an engineer and an attorney. Each team will be assigned an executive agency with which it will implement the president’s “DOGE agenda.”
It remains unclear whether Monday’s executive order comprehensively defines DOGE, or if additional orders will be forthcoming to broaden its mandate.
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