Parties can now coordinate with candidates by using money in ways that they were previously banned from doing.
Attempts to prevent corruption with campaign finance laws has failed. We may need to rethink it. Money has found a way to affect politics even with campaign finance laws. If anything, the restrictions have made the super wealthy more powerful!
Making campaign finance more complicated with more regulation makes it harder for the smaller players to legally take part. The super wealthy have the means to figure out ways around regulation.
“The voting machine company formerly known as Dominion Voting Systems on Wednesday dropped its billion-dollar defamation lawsuit against Trump ally Mike Lindell, eight months after the company was purchased by a former Republican election official.
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A jury last year issued a $2.3 million judgment against Lindell after finding he had defamed a former Dominion Voting Systems director with claims of election fraud.
A judge last September also found that Lindell defamed the voting company Smartmatic with similar false claims, but has not yet determined a dollar amount for damages. Earlier, Lindell was ordered to pay Smartmatic more than $50,000 in sanctions as a result of a “frivolous” countersuit he filed against the company.”
Congress passed a bill designed to lower housing costs, but Trump refused to sign it, saying he won’t sign it until Congress also forces everyone to get a special ID to vote–an obviously unrelated issue mostly based on lies about the extent of voter fraud, which is practically zero.
Gerrymandering has existed for a long time. It is an act of disenfranchisement where politicians choose their voters rather than voters choosing their representatives. A few states created independent commissions to have neutrally drawn maps, but many draw them to maximize one party’s success, biasing elections against what people actually voted for.
Trump escalated gerrymandering by pushing Republicans in states they control to gerrymander shortly before an election, rather than after a census brings new data. This is Trump trying to win the midterm elections by way of changing lines on maps rather than by convincing people to vote for his party. Democrats retaliated by also gerrymandering before the mid-terms. For the midterms, Republicans are predicted to net 7 to 10 extra seats due to changing the maps, rather than convincing voters to vote for them.
Proportional representation may be a better way to elect representatives.
“the president and his political allies flooded the ordinarily sleepy state legislative primaries — where the spending is typically in the tens of thousands and primary votes cast number about 10,000 to 12,000 — with millions of dollars in advertising casting the incumbents as disloyal to Trump and blaming them for voters’ various frustrations, particularly property taxes.
Trump’s approval rating has slipped nationally, and his support among independents has evaporated. But very conservative voters — those who make up his base — are still with him. And they are the voters who decide contests like state Senate primaries in deep-red Indiana.”
The Vice President of the United States is actively campaigning for the authoritarian-leaning president of Hungary. Rather than spreading democracy, the US is actively trying to spread authoritarianism.
Orban has given himself the ability to rule by decree, restricted the media, manipulated the electoral and district system, taken over and abused with police NGOs and universities, redistributed wealth to loyalists rather than based on sound policy, and supported Russia invading its neighbor. He has bent a former democracy toward authoritarianism. The European Parliament has declared that Hungary is no longer a full democracy in a 433 to 123 vote.
The death of the West will be the end of Western values like free speech, free association, free press, and free and fair elections. Vice President Vance supports Orban’s authoritarian actions in Hungary just like he supports Trump’s, often illegal, authoritarian actions at home.
“In August 2025, President Trump vowed on social media to “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS,” claiming, without proof, that “ELECTIONS CAN NEVER BE HONEST” if Americans cast their votes by mail.
Yet when the time came for Trump to cast his own vote in Tuesday’s special election in Palm Beach County, Fla., he chose to do it … by mail.
Just like he did in 2020.
The president hasn’t abandoned his outspoken opposition to mail-in voting — at least not for other people. “Mail-in voting means mail-in cheating,” he said during an appearance in Memphis on Monday. “I call it mail-in cheating, and we got to do something about it all.””
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In the 2024 general election, about 30% of all ballots were cast by mail. That’s 48 million votes. In the 2020 election — which occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic — the number was even higher: nearly 66 million votes. Since 2000, more than 250 million votes have been cast via mailed-out ballots in all 50 states.
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For decades, mail-in voting wasn’t seen as controversial — let alone partisan. In fact, Republicans were even more enthusiastic about the practice than Democrats.
Why? Because they saw it as a safe and efficient way to make voting easier for rural and older voters — a key part of their base.
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As polls began to show Trump trailing his Democratic challenger Joe Biden by a sizable margin, the incumbent seized on mail-in voting as a preemptive explanation for any unfavorable election outcome. “2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history,” Trump wrote online that July. “Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???” He described mail-in voting as the “biggest risk” to his reelection, and both his campaign and the GOP unsuccessfully sued to stop it.
Trump’s rhetoric effectively polarized the practice. Democrats (who were already more prone to avoid pandemic-era gatherings) embraced it; Republicans resisted. As a result, 58% of Democrats wound up voting by mail that year; only 29% of Republicans did the same.
Trump lost to Biden by more than 7 million votes, but he’s been blaming election “fraud” — including supposedly fraudulent mail ballots — ever since.
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In 2020, the president was particularly upset when he seemed to be “winning” early on election night — only to see Biden catch up and surpass him as the evening wore on. But that effect — known as a “red mirage” or a “blue shift” — is easily explained by the fact that if Republicans tend to vote in person and Democrats tend to vote by mail, Republican votes will tend to be counted before Democratic votes.
At times, Trump has also tried to distinguish between absentee voting and universal vote-by-mail. But the same multistep security and verification methods apply to both processes, and states that rely on universal vote-by-mail haven’t experienced more misconduct because of it. One election expert dismissed as “nonsensical” any “distinction” between the two forms of voting “in terms of the potential for fraud.”
In truth, fraudulent mail voting is vanishingly rare. According to a Nov. 2025 analysis by the Brookings Institution — which relied on an election fraud database compiled by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative group — there were only between six and 46 cases of mail voting fraud in each general election from 2016 to 2022.
That means just 0.000043% of mail ballots — four out of every 10 million cast — have been found to be fraudulent during the Trump era.
In general, all of Trump’s allegations of widespread, result-altering election fraud — claims he has been making since he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016 — have been conclusively debunked, both in court and by GOP election officials.
Trump falsely claimed the 2020 election was stolen, and then he tried to steal that election himself, and is now trying to steal future elections. US democracy is under threat.
If you are disenfranchising millions of Americans to stop a few dozen potential illegal voters, then your goals are to make it harder to vote, rather than to secure the election, unless you are just ignorant of the facts.
Kansas tried a documentary proof of citizenship law in 2011 and it blocked 31,000 citizens from voting–12% of first time registrants.
The founders intentionally did not give the president the power to regulate elections because they feared something like a king or a dictator. Yet, Trump is claiming such powers.
‘Many disinformation posts on social media originated from a small town in central Macedonia called Veles. The epicenter of the viral phenomenon was Mirko Ceselkoski, who posts fake news and mentors others in it. The creators were mostly young people in their 20s with little English fluency. They said they were too poor to do anything and had no future, so work hard creating fake news to make money. They did this by exploiting conservative Americans’ hunger for negative stories about Hillary Clinton’
“In every form, the SAVE Act would require American citizens to show documents like a passport or birth certificate to register to vote. Our research shows that more than 21 million Americans lack ready access to those documents. Roughly half of Americans don’t even have a passport. Millions lack access to a paper copy of their birth certificate. The SAVE Act would disenfranchise Americans of all ages and races, but younger voters and voters of color would suffer disproportionately. Likewise, millions of women whose married names aren’t on their birth certificates or passports would face extra steps just to make their voices heard.
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The SAVE Act solves nothing. All available evidence, including from the Trump administration itself, indicates that only American citizens vote and the exceptions are vanishingly rare. States that have combed through their voter rolls looking for illegally cast votes — like Louisiana and Utah did recently — have repeatedly confirmed that fact.”